Fellow Advocates,

A few updates first...

We have reviewed the video targeted toward business people and are now awaiting the final version

The updates to our forms have been completed and the C-Team will be testing them over the next few days. Once this is done, look for an E-Blast to get your information updated.

We had an excellent webinar training session on how to write letters to your local newspaper. As a bonus, we got the inside scoop from an editor’s perspective with a brief presentation by the editor of the Hamilton Spectator. The webinar should be available shortly and we will make it available to you. There are some other gems there too so well worth listening too!

THE WEBSITE

The website was designed to be a resource for advocating and to share information, ideas and events. Do you find it useful?

Feedback is important Let us know what you need; This helps us to better tailor our efforts.

Unless we are able to find new volunteers, we will need to reduce the effort presently given to the website.

URGENTLY NEEDED: A Content Management team (one or more depending on the time and expertise available). This is to keep our website current and to add new information that is useful to affiliates for advocating.

TO PROVIDE BETTER SERVICE:

A Special Project Coordinator: They will help with coordinating special events, rallies, the AGM, etc. This is not a demanding job but important!

Communications/Marketing Coordinator: They will be active in promoting the adoption of a basic income. OBIN needs to expand its collaboration with other like-minded organisations. This person would also work with our Social Media Communications Coordinator. 2021 is going to be a critical year in reaching more of the public and all levels of government. A federal election is looming and our next provincial election will not be far behind.

“Democracy requires that we make democracy work.”

Governments prefer to do their own thing unless citizens educate them to do otherwise.

Please call or email any of the Coordinators or contact Joe or John at [email protected]

OBIN Affiliates

Are you interested in becoming an advocate for basic income in your community? In order to make basic income a reality in Canada, we need to build political within local communities.

Ontario Basic Income Network seeks to do that by having OBIN Affiliates in each of Ontario's 124 electoral districts.

Building political will involves leveraging the following activities that are all centred around building relationships:

• Lobbying your MPPs and MPs
• sending Letters-to-the-Editor, op-eds and press releases to local media
• community leader relationships
• grassroots outreach
• growing your local basic income chapter
• OBIN Affiliates meet monthly to support each other as we do these activities. We have had a workshop on how to write effective Letters-to-the-Editor about basic income. We have other workshops planned for writing op-eds and lobbying politicians. We are planning a Lobby Day for Ontario MPPs. Our plan is to have a breakfast meeting over Zoom with a keynote speaker and invited MPPs. Breakfast would be followed by breakout sessions organised by locality where we would lobby our MPPs by seeking to understand what they know about basic income and attempting to further their curiosity about basic income.

If you are interested in becoming an OBIN Affiliate or learning more, please contact me. We'd love to have you as part of the team!

We added two new sections to the Cases for BI on our website. You can find the Case for BI and Finance here and the Case for BI and Health here.

We are going to be adding a section for Submissions to the pre-Budget Consultation so that you can see what others had to say about targeting the budget so that basic income can help drive us forward.

We also have some Letters and Op-eds that were recently published that will be put onto the website shortly.

We hope that each of you in the basic income community has been staying safe and healthy through the pandemic. Just a few more months to go and some semblance of normalcy should return so please stay vigilant, wear your mask and wash your hands often.

As always, we will continue to keep you informed of our progress via our monthly Minutes.

Joe and John

Ontario Basic Income Network
www.OBIN.ca