Ottawa's Rideau Park United Church has been raising awareness for universal basic income, a policy that would give a fixed amount to everybody, every month, regardless of their income.

"We’ve seen the PBO (Parliamentary Budget Office) put out a report saying it could cost anywhere from $30 to $70 billion in the first year," said Gage Haubrich, Prairie director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Advocates say that “no-strings attached” funding puts participants on a path to financial security because they often use the money to cover basic necessities, pay off debt, and build up savings

Neither dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which paid every state resident $1,100 for 2017, nor Iran’s one-year experiment, in 2011, with paying 96 percent of its population $45 a month, had any effect on employment.

The first trial period of Finland’s basic income experiment did not appear to have any statistical impact on employment

posted my comment on Tildes with links:

This research studied the charity of a foundation called GiveDirectly that specializes in cash transfers, and studying their effects. One of the authors is its co-founder.

I recently stumbled across this foundation in this GiveWell blog post of their 2019 top charities. I found this to be by far the most compelling on the list, both for their direct impact, and their support of research like this, which can go a long way to dispelling myths, and supporting more evidence-based charity as well as policies in developed countries like universal basic income.

They also have a page called GDLive in beta, which lists unedited survey responses to questions like personal impact, what could be improved, what the money was spent on, etc. If I find myself catastrophising my own problems, I find going there helps put my own problems into perspective, reminding me how privileged I am to have won the global birth lottery to have been born to hard-working immigrants that had the education and means to move to Canada (noticing the "invisible things that make my life easier" which "explains why most of us aren’t nearly as grateful as we ought to be" Freakonomics: Why Is My Life So Hard?). It's shocking to see how much of a life-altering difference a cash donation can make to these people, in amounts that often seem paltry to me.