By Kendall Worth!
As many of you regular readers have noticed nothing new has been posted on my BLOG since September 1st, 2204. See Here
A lot has happened since that date, including that Labour Day has come and gone and I am getting ready for my upcoming trip to Toronto, to attend the Social Prescribing Conference.
I did attend the Labour Day rally, and it had a good turn out. One of the reasons I have not posted anything new on blog, since September 1st, is because I have just been overwhelmed with things over these past few weeks.
The once every year and a half basic Income Conference that takes place here in Halifax also recently happened. See here for details
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| This picture here is one of the panels of speakers who spoke at this years September 7th Basic income Conference. |
I ended up not writing a BLOG post about it this year, as I have
done in the past, when this conference took place here in Halifax. See Here and Here. Even though I advertised this conference on my BLOG in previous years, this
year I did not bother because we almost had to cancel, due to Halifax Library staff being on strike. At the last minute, however, they found a new venue on short notice and the conference went ahead as
planned. However, one thing that made this year's Basic Income
Conference different from previous ones, is that, this year there was no First
Voice panel. All the speakers were professionals. Of course, their
support and opinions dose matter very much. It was held at Saint Matthews
Church instead of the Central Library, which is the conference's
original venue. Also, this year, unlike in the past, I was not one of the speakers at this conference.
Want also to let all of you readers know, as I talked about in this BLOG post, about my upcoming trip to Toronto to attend this conference --- It is happening.
Anyway, I have decided this time around, instead of reporting on the Basic Income Conference itself, this time around I have decided I am going to do something a bit different with reminding my Public Readership of why we need a liveable Basic Guaranteed Income. Let me be blunt!
Right here, in Halifax, these days:
- We continue to see a visible increase in the homeless population.
- We continue to see the effects of rising food costs.
- This BLOG post includes an example of what your grocery store bill could look like these days.
- We also continue to see rising Nova Scotia Power bills. As this BLOG post points out, Nova Scotia is not being friendly with the needs of low-income people.
- Then you have to consider having money to keep yourself out of social isolation.
So this year I have decided to report on how Basic Income and Social Prescriptions/ Social prescribing can be connected and I was thinking about this through the September 7th Conference. We need to demand a basic income of $2000 a month - an income in which one can live in dignity - without vacations or frills -- but with dignity and being able to afford basic rent, food, medicine, transport and communication.
One of the Speakers at this Year's conference was a Doctor who talked about prescribing money to people. This doctor then went on to talk about how prescriptions of money could improve the social lives of people living in poverty This had me thinking, about the idea of a Sober Bar which I have talked about in previous posts, including the relationship between a Sober Bar and Social Prescriptions. They are related, as both ideas promote getting out and safely socializing with people. I want to go further back, to prove my point, to this article which I wrote long ago in the now folded Nova Scotia Advocate. That article proves the point that if people had more money to spend on socializing then a Social Prescription Organization would not be needed.
This also had me thinking that During the existence of All together Link, if the people All Together Link served had more money for socializing, then our participants would been able to afford to pay a small registration fees to take part. As part of my attendance at the conference I am going to, I will get to see what they do about Social prescribing in other jurisdictions and I am excited about this. I had made points about learning from other jurisdictions In this BLOG post.
I will end this by saying the existence of Basic Income would solve a lot of issues, the community of people living in poverty, face these days. Just to let readers know: I do plan to continue blogging regularly following my return from my trip.
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