interviews
The Compton Pledge
by Nika Soon-Shiong
November 18, 2020
This interview with Nika Soon-Shiong, Co-director of the Compton Pledge, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Nika | My name is Nika Soon-Shiong. I'm the Executive Director of The Fund for Guaranteed Income, as well as Co-director of the Compton Pledge.
frank | And what are both of those things?
The Fund for Guaranteed Income is an organization that I have been working towards for the past five years. My initial plan was to launch it after I finished my PhD on cash transfer implementation systems, but it really feels like now is an unprecedented time for more radical political visions and policies to take root.
The Compton Pledge is the fastest-launched and most robust city-led guaranteed income initiative in the United States. It is implemented by the Compton Community Development Corporation and The Fund for Guaranteed Income, in partnership with the Jain Family Institute. A Community Advisory Board is guiding the design and implementation
In what ways is the city of Compton involved?
Mayor Brown is a founding member of the Mayors for Guaranteed Income led by Stockton’s Mayor Tubbs. Mayor Brown’s leadership and commitment to healing justice is incredibly important to the Compton Pledge.
Aja Brown (Los Angeles News Group)
Our goal is to make the case for new government policies at a municipal, state, and federal level, so the city's involvement is crucial. The Pledge itself, however, is not financed by the city. It is funded philanthropically.
How do you decide who is qualified to be a recipient? How many people are you looking to include and what are you budgeting per person?
We are using a combination of public government and community-based organizations data to select 800 low-income residents to receive the cash transfers. The exact amount received by each participant will vary based on household size. Each participant will receive at least several hundred dollars, and parents with children will receive greater amounts. The frequency of distribution will also vary, but participants will be informed at the outset about the timing of their expected payments so that they can plan accordingly.
And how long does this go on for?
It's a two-year program.
800 people is a large number for a pilot program, but obviously a fraction of the city of Compton itself. How are you choosing who gets to participate?
We have an independent research team that is selecting the participants in order to have an inclusive subset of the city of Compton. So, for example, if there are x percent of formerly incarcerated people in Compton, then there would also be x percentage of the 800 that are formerly incarcerated. The reason for choosing 800 people as the sample number has to do with statistical power. We want to ensure that this is really representative of what a future city policy could and should look like.
Why Compton?
It is a city that is 30% black, and 68% Latinx. In many ways, it's the cultural capital of the world. At the same time, white flight, intentional divestment, and the looming threat of gentrification pose acute financial challenges. Unemployment rates have risen to 22% this year. There is an increasing number of Compton families relying on food pantries regularly for food. More than 23% of its 95,000 residents live below the federal poverty line. Compton is a city where racial and economic injustices intersect.
Other parts of the country or world face these systemic issues, but a motivating factor for The Fund for Guaranteed Income's first initiative being the Compton Pledge is the leadership of Mayor Brown, who has boldly linked the COVID public health crisis to the pervasive PTSD following decades of police brutality and mass incarceration of communities of color. She is standing with movements in the national rallying cry to defund the police and reinvest in communities. We are unapologetically trying new approaches to that second part of the equation: investing in communities.
What is the long-term political vision for The Fund for Guaranteed Income as it relates to the future of cash transfers in America? And do you think you ensure its success?
The long-term vision is to re-imagine social policy through a people-led process that crosses class, industry, and race. The aim is to redistribute wealth at scale and realize individuals’ inherent right to share in the nation's socially produced and inherited wealth.
We need to set a standard that organizers and people with the lived experience of harm from today's existing systems are the experts in the policymaking arena.
What will make or break this ambitious vision for society and its institutions is an ability to coordinate with national movements and organizers, academics, policymakers, and politicians. A coalition of organizations like Black Lives Matter, One Fair Wage, National Council Essie Justice Group, A New Way of Life, Brotherhood Crusade have taken the pledge.
I was talking to Andrea James, the founder of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and she said this incredible phrase that I can't get out of my mind. She said, "Whether we win, lose, or draw, it’s a win for us. It's going to change things."
The conversation of what the government owes people has really shifted. In the 60’s Nixon was talking about wealth transfers. Clinton initiated welfare reform. Now, bills to provide families with relief during the largest pandemic we have ever seen are stuck in the Senate. How do we move forward? How do you sell this idea in such a politicized climate?
What has persisted throughout welfare reforms is the power dynamics that rationalize and perpetuate a system of rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.
75% of Black Americans were excluded from Social Security when it began. There has been this continuous legal exclusion of Black people from the wealth-building apparatuses whether under the New Deal tax laws that relegate fewer resources to communities of color, or white flight and suburbanization under the name of urban renewal.
Pres. Clinton signing Social Security Independent Agency Act
We have this obsession with individualism and the myth of meritocracy. Universal access to education and health was once seen as an unsustainable dream, perhaps, and in America healthcare still might fall into that category. But now, largely, these things are seen as a right. And I think it's time to invest in guaranteed income as a right of all people. It's an investment in humanity.
How do you think politicians should be advocating for UBI? And do you think the CARES Act has made the idea more palatable?
The CARES Act has proved that when politicians believe we need to fund something, we find the money to fund it. On one hand, the CARES Act has strengthened the case for direct cash transfers. Still, it was a one-time transfer of $1,200 for adults and $500 for a child that left out millions of undocumented and formerly incarcerated people.
It exposed the frailty of the social safety net and the racial fault lines along which it cracks. I think that politicians should frame guaranteed income as a universal income floor for all residents of America, regardless of legal citizenship status, regardless of whether or not an individual has been formerly incarcerated.
As an organization, do you have any investment or interest in what people do with the capital they are given?
So much of this space has been focused on how people are spending the money. There have been lots of studies to empirically prove that people don't spend it on temptation goods and drugs and alcohol, and they don’t quit their jobs. And I think that question reifies the welfare stereotypes and racist tropes that have persisted throughout American perspectives on who is and is not deserving. For me, the real question is not how people spend the money, but how a system could justify denying people the breathing room that a guaranteed income would afford. Especially as massive amounts of public dollars fund a criminal legal system that drains government budgets and perpetuates the criminalization of poverty.
We're starting from the basis that the real question isn't: how do people spend the money, or: is this the right policy to pursue?
Our question is not if we should implement guaranteed income, but how.
How can citizens in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas participate?
How can you pledge Compton? There are a number of ways. We have a donation page on our website, since we are raising for the cash disbursements, which will go directly to the individuals. You can show us love or share your story on Instagram and Twitter. But, really, you can reach out to your elected officials and pay attention to our policy agenda. The Compton Pledge plans to be passed as a local resolution of the BREATHE Act.
Right now the model is philanthropically funded. Are you hoping to move away from the philanthropy model as this broadens?
Yes. We have a team of people looking into the long-term financing of guaranteed income for the city of Compton, and they are coming out with a report on our plans to do so. It is a cross-institutional working group and there's a bigger conversation to be had about how it can be financed at the state level at the federal level.
It's interesting. The whole idea of philanthropy as a solution — it’s a starting point but feels like that model is also inherently part of the problem you are trying to address. The idea that redistribution is left up to the interest and will of people or institutions that have a lot of capital.
I completely take your point. I think the Fund for Guaranteed Income is challenging the assumptions of philanthropy itself. Like the notion that wealthy individuals are the natural experts when it comes to designing a more equitable future. It is certainly time for more sore winners in today’s economic system. If an individual decides that they want to redistribute all of their wealth to every single low-income individual in a city, well, we want to build a platform for them to do that and a coalition that will stand behind them.
interviews
How Change Happens
by Duncan Green
September 25, 2018
Duncan Green is Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB and author of How Change Happens and From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World. He also authors the From Poverty to Power blog.
frank: I want to talk to you about what you've written about a lot, which is how to be an effective activist.
Duncan: Malcolm Gladwell wrote some really interesting stuff off the back of the Arab Spring a few years ago. He was saying, look, the people who really bring about change have deep bonds of trust. They go into scary situations together and face them. Those bonds tend to be built face-to-face, having gone to school with people or having been in organizations with people. More than the quite thin bond you create on Instagram. One thing is that you need to build up that personal network of people you trust, and who you're willing to work with and occasionally take risks with. And that means getting out of the house.
frank: Once you establish that sort of personal connection, how do you scale from there?
Duncan: The book talks a lot about the idea of power. How do you understand power? I find it really helpful when I look at that sort of process that you just described to think, "well, there's a process of power within." People feeling effective, thinking that they have rights, a light bulb moment's come on in the heads of people who are often quite downtrodden, when they suddenly stand up and say,
Where they're going to scale is to unify, to find people who have similar views to yours, or are in similar situations to yours, and learn to work with them, which is not easy. But what you get by working together is irreplaceable.
frank: Do you think there's a way to cross over from NGO work to policy and government?
Duncan: A couple of points on that. The book argues that activism is not just about being a protestor on the streets. It includes that, but it's actually anybody who's trying to bring about change in their context, in the institution they work in, in the situation they find themselves in. That's because I started to find repeat patterns in terms of how people bring about change.
If you're trying to change the world through a private company, through an NGO, through a mass organization, you're actually looking at similar rhythms, similar tactics, you're asking yourself the same questions about, "Who are my allies? Who are my opponents? What tactics might help strengthen the allies, weaken the opponents?" It's the same.
frank: You mention activists need to become reflectivists. Can you explain that term?
Duncan: This is part autobiography [laughter]. I started off as an angry activist. Lots of things to be angry about. When I was starting, it was what was going on in Central America, it was the U.S. funding a really nasty war in Nicaragua. A lot of the activism was about protest! It was about saying, "this is wrong." And, in a way, that's cathartic, and it might make a difference, but I never really thought about how this protest was likely or unlikely to bring about any kind of change. It was much more of an expression of outrage. Over time, I got more impatient.
When you're trying to do more insider influencing, you tend to work in different ways. It's not all about numbers on the street. It's about contacts, and language, and ways of doing things. People try and change the system from the inside, and from the outside.
Outsiders will be numbers on the street. Protest movements in civil society is a big part of the work I've looked at. I've worked with a lot of those organizations, I've been in those organizations. Then there's an insider track of people who are trying to get meetings with ministers, or trying to get meetings with officials, trying to come up with the kind of evidence that might persuade them doing pieces of research. There's an uneasy relationship between the insiders and the outsiders. If you're an insider, if you're trying to get a company to worry more about the labor standards in its supply chain, in the factories that produce its goods, it's great to have protests. It's great to have outsiders putting pressure on the company, so the company talks to you.
My rule of thumb is that insiders, if they're sensible, love outsiders. Outsiders have a much more ambivalent attitude to insiders, because if you're an outsider, and you're doing a protest, and you want to keep things clear, you don't want to have all these people messing up, coming up with compromises, making things halfway okay. That really messes with your campaign. The outsiders are sometimes more hostile to insiders. Insiders are usually quite happy about the outsiders. It's kind of asymmetric.
frank: Do you think it's a mistake for outsiders to be hostile towards insiders?
Duncan: It depends what your purpose is. If your purpose is to bring about change, I would say yes it is a mistake, because that combination of insider and outsider is ultimately very effective. If your actual purpose is to mobilize as many people, and make them really angry and get them to join your party, or whatever it is you're trying to do, then it does mess things up. So it's a sign, really, of what's actually motivating people.
There is also a political difference, sometimes, which is that the outsiders are kind of maximalists. They want really transformational, big change. They want to get rid of capitalism. If you've got an insider who is making capitalism a bit nicer, that actually makes it harder to get a big change. So, there are political reasons for the differences, as well as motivational ones.
frank: Are there any movements at the moment that you think are really successful, that are doing a good job at not only provoking more thought, but also enacting real change?
Duncan: There's loads. But, I'll talk about one which is really close to home, which is an organization in London, in the U.K. called Citizen's U.K. I love it because it's really different from Oxfam, and the kind of NGOs that were. It is a community-based organization based on the same principles that Obama applied when he was learning his trade in Chicago all those years ago. It's got the same kind of intellectual gurus. And, they work. They basically go around to poor communities working in particular with faith institutions (mosques, churches, synagogues), and with schools. And, they ask people what their problems are. You know, "What's pissing you off?"
But, the reason I know about this is partly because my son works for them, so...
frank: Amazing!
Duncan: Just full disclosure there. He's set up something in one part of London, and they were working with local groups to clean up parks, and to get changes in planning, and to get social housing, and all sorts of things. I love that approach because it's so different from online activism, and it respects the institutions that poor people trust, which is faith organizations and things that matter to them as families, like schools, and starts from there, and I think that's really interesting.
frank: Community based that goes macro from the micro, it seems.
Would you expand more on the kinds of power you define in your work?
Duncan: When people talk about power, they often mean the formal political power who is actually in the government, or who has got the guns and runs the army. That leads you to think that power is a bad thing. I think far too many people go with that line that power corrupts...Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In order to actually change anything, you need power. That's why the book argues that we need to be a bit more nuanced and thoughtful about power. One way of thinking about it is there is formal power. The people who are sitting in the government making decisions. Then, there's hidden power, which is old boy networks, the backrooms, the lobbyists, the people you don't see who sort of seem to influence events. Then there's invisible power, which is actually the power in people's heads, it's close to that "power within" idea. Why do some people think that they're entitled to run the country, and, loads of us, think, "Oh, no, what do we know?" And that kind of thing.
You need to confront those less obvious forms of power if you're actually going to create change. There's lots of different ways of looking at power, but overall I've found, say to people, "Look, power is like this force field, which permeates society. And, most processes of change involve a change in that force field whereby some people get more power, some people get less." The nature of power shifts, so if you're going to become serious about change, you have to make power visible and then try and act upon it.
I think there's lots of different tools for making power visible, and that invisible-hidden-visible is one way.
frank: We're at a particular moment now where more and more people feel an urge towards activism. How do you push people who have no history of activism to participate beyond a march, beyond a like...?
Duncan: There's really interesting studies over centuries about social movements. How do these movements come? They suddenly spike, and then they disappear again. We've got one of those at the moment. We've got the #MeToo, Black Lives Matter. There's a lot of these big, upsurging movements. All of them, when you look at them, they're made up of little grains. They're not amorphous blobs, they've got structure.
Those grains are actually more long-lasting groups of people. It's faith groups, churches, mosques. It's trade unions, it's sports clubs, all sorts of things! Suddenly, they all come together and they make a big noise, and you think, "Oh where did that come from?" When it settles down again, they go back to their grains.
I think one answer to your question is...I am getting to an answer to your question...one answer to your question is, look at your own life and see where are you in a grain? Where are you in a sports club, or a cultural group? Where have you got social capital? Because that might be a place where you should become active.
If you're a parent to your kids at school, and if you're in a faith organization, if you're a believer in some religion, whatever it is, any of those could become big, whereby you're not alone. I'd say my advice would be think about doing that, not just doing the online petition.
frank: Is there anything at the moment you feel really urgent about? Anything you think people need to be taking into consideration but aren't?
Duncan: It comes back to that point you picked up earlier, we need to be activists and reflectivists. I think one of the aspects of reflection, which I think we need to get much better at, is spotting where things are working in our environment.
If you're concerned about the environment, getting better at seeing where people are doing the right thing for the environment, and then trying to ask, "Why?" There's a whole field of work called positive deviance, which looks at where things are unexpectedly good. I think especially now, we should be consciously looking for these positive outliers, these unexpectedly good results on any given issue, and seeing what we can learn from those.
The reason I like that is because it shows some respect for the people and systems who generate solutions. They're not always waiting for the great, white savior to come in and solve it. It might well be my next book, this positive deviance aspect, because I think it's got fantastic potential as a way of reading about change.