Welcome to the ITSA Newsletter

The headline news of the day is how Comingle’s Indiegogo campaign has just passed its halfway mark with three weeks left to go. Thanks to the donations of 359 people so far, the goal is within reach.

We also currently have two big donors matching up to $10,000 each, with one doing $1 per $1, and one doing $2 per $1, so every dollar donated now becomes four dollars. One of those donors is anonymous, and the 2x donor is one of ITSA Foundation’s own directors, Katie Moussouris, CEO of Luta Security, who announced it on Twitter (X) and Bluesky today.

So keep that in mind if you’re considering another donation, and when you talk with others about Comingle, that a $20 donation now becomes an $80 donation.

I wonder if we can even find another matching donor to crank it up to 5x?

Next, we’ve been hosting Twitter (X) Spaces, three so far, and intend to keep doing them regularly beyond the end of the Comingle campaign. The hope is to help grow the number of people actively engaged in building the UBI movement, and helping better inform the movement through informative conversations with special guests. So far our guests have been Andrew Yang and Sabrina Aviles, director of the documentary film Raising the Floor. If you’d like to listen to any of the discussions we’ve had so far, they are available on YouTube. Click the subscribe button for the Comingle YouTube channel to not miss any future video uploads.

Space 1:

Space 2:

Space 3:

And here’s a brand new Comingle video focused on strikes:

One of the ways you can help other than donating is to help these videos find more viewers by liking them, replying to them, subscribing to the channel, and sharing them in your social networks. Feed the algorithm in a way that helps people find a great video they really do need to see and share themselves.

You can also help by encouraging your favorite actors, actresses, and writers to watch Conrad’s video about how important UBI is to winning strikes.

Some Recent Basic Income News

There are some interesting developments in the basic income world that I think you all may also find as interesting as I do, so I’m going to include some of that here and in future newsletters.

• First, one of the many local basic income pilots recently reported phenomenal success as it reaches its end. A pilot in Delaware focused on pregnant mothers and postpartum outcomes found a large return on investment with the $1,000 per month payments having a 324% ROI and saving over a quarter of a million dollars that would otherwise likely have been spent on hospital visits. Here’s my tweet about it:

• Another very interesting development has been the news that HUD is beginning to experiment with cash versus housing vouchers. If the results of these experiments are positive, which they likely will be, this could help lead to a shift away from vouchers to cash for housing, and thus provide even further support for basic income. Here’s a good write-up about it courtesy of Vox.

• This week I also really enjoyed being a guest for an episode of On Point which for those of you who don’t know, is a popular nationally-syndicated radio show. The episode was about AI and UBI. You can listen to it here whenever you like. One of the reasons they invited me was actually because of my article about The Expanse’s “Basic.”

Thank you for being a subscriber to the ITSA Newsletter!

Scott Santens

Founder & President, ITSA Foundation