WEBINAR | The Road to Basic Income Earth Network Congress 2026

April 23 & July 22, 2026

1:00 pm - 2:30 pm EDT

Description

Join the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduction and partners for a series of critical conversations leading up to the 2026 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress.

Part ONe:  Canadian context for basic income

April 23, 2026

Join the Hamilton Roundtable for poverty reduction alongside former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, University of Manitoba economist and author Dr. Evelyn Forget,  Kwame Mackenzie from Wellesley Institute, Dr. Wayne Lewchuk and Senator Kim Pate, in addition to former basic income pilot participants.

Part TWO: International polycrises and context for basic income

July 22, 2026 | 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm ET

Join the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction alongside international economists, authors, doctors and other specialists in basic income from across the globe. Guests to be announced in May.

About basic income

Basic Income is a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all individuals, without means-testing or work requirements.

BI has the following FIVE characteristics:

• Periodic: it is paid at regular intervals (for example, every month), not as a one-off grant.

• Cash payment: It is paid in a medium of exchange, allowing the recipient to decide how to spend it. It is not, therefore, paid either in kind (such as food or services) or in vouchers dedicated to a specific use.

• Individual: it is paid on an individual basis - and not, for instance, to households.

• Universal: it is paid to all.

• Unconditional: it is paid without means test and without a requirement to work or to demonstrate willingness-to-work.

 A wide variety of Basic Income proposals are circulating today. They differ along many other dimensions, for instance, the amounts of the Basic Income, the source of funding, the nature and size of reductions in other transfers that might accompany it, and so on.

We are honoured to co-moderate with Basic Income Earth Network organizers and long-time changemakers from the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction and the Anglican Diocese of Niagara.

speakers

Tom Cooper. Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction

Since 2010, Tom Cooper has served as Director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction. Through the Roundtable's work, Tom has engaged governments at all levels to invest in poverty reduction initiatives and worked to give people experiencing poverty a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. He's advocated for social assistance rates that reflect the real costs of living, fought to end predatory lending in Ontario and helped co-found the Ontario Living Wage Network. Tom was involved in helping to establish Ontario's first basic income pilot: a critical research project testing whether providing a basic income could stabilize housing, improve health and enhance social inclusion opportunities for low-income residents.

Sheila Regehr. Basic Income Canada Network (BICN)

Sheila Regehr is a founding member of the Basic Income Canada Network, its chair since 2014 and co-author of Basic Income: Some Policy Options for Canada (2019). She is a former Executive Director of the National Council of Welfare, the position from which she retired after a federal public service career that included front-line work, policy development, and federal/provincial/territorial relations. Her expertise includes income security, taxation, child benefits, and pensions. Much of her career focused on gender, race and the public policy implications of caregiving and other non-market work.

Miriam Opwonya Laker-Oketta. Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA)

Miriam leads IPA Uganda’s strategic direction, partnerships, and operations. Before joining IPA, she was Senior Research Advisor and Research Director at GiveDirectly, overseeing a global portfolio of 20+ cash transfer trials and serving as the organization’s evidence spokesperson. Previously, she was Co-Principal Investigator on multiple-country studies and Senior Clinical Research Scientist at Makerere University’s Infectious Diseases Institute. She was also on the Board of the CALPNetwork. Miriam is a medical doctor with advanced degrees from UCSF and LSHTM, and a Fellow of the International Women’s Forum Leadership Program (INSEAD & Harvard).

 

Jurgen De Wispelaere (PhD). University of Bath

Jurgen is a former occupational therapist turned political theorist and policy scholar. He is a Visiting Professor at the Götz Werner Chair of Economic Policy & Constitutional Theory in Freiburg. His research focuses on the politics of basic income. He is the research coordinator of BIEN and a scientific advisor of the Catalan Basic Income Pilot project.

 

 

Josephine Grey. St. Jamestown Community Co-operative

Josephine is a human rights advocate, community organizer and public speaker.  She is a founder of Low Income Families Together, Foodshare, the Center for Social Justice, the Income Security Advocacy Centre, and the St. James Town Co-operative and its Oasis project on food and water security. She is a champion of youth empowerment, climate change resilience and basic income. Her international work has taken her to 7 continents and involved hundreds of organizations and presentations to UN human rights bodies. She was organizer and speaker at the NABIG in Hamilton and Canada’s 2024 BIG Forum in Ottawa. 

 

Amy Castro (PhD). University of Pennsylvania

Amy is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the School of Social Policy & Practice and is the Co-Founder and Faculty Director of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research. Her work explores economic mobility, guaranteed income, innovation, and disparities in housing and lending. She served as the Co-PI of the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration under former Mayor Michael Tubbs which, lead to a proliferation of experimentation with unconditional cash across the U.S. Dr. Castro is the Co-PI of 30 applied cash-transfer studies housed at CGIR where she currently advises more than 20 Mayoral teams, state, and county legislators on unconditional cash research. Her work on guaranteed income has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Hilton Foundation, the Monarch Foundation, the City of Los Angeles, LA County, the City of Newark, the Yellow Chair Foundation, the City of Oakland, the Social Impact Fund, and the Economic Security Project. Dr. Castro’s research is featured often in the popular press including the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Economist, the LA Times, CNN, NBC, PBS, and National Public Radio.

Sid Frankel (PhD). University of Manitoba, BICN Executive Board Member

Sid is a senior scholar with the Faculty of Social Work.  He holds a Ph.D. In Social Welfare from the University of California at Berkeley and M.S.W. and B.S.W. Degrees from the University of Manitoba. His research program includes poverty reduction policy, especially basic income, and the nonprofit sector.  He was a principal organizer of the 2016 NABIG. He is also a long term member of the national steering committee of Campaign 2000 to End Child Poverty and chair of the Board of Basic Income Manitoba.

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