We Pay Gas & Grocery Bills for Strangers
While educating people about Universal Basic Income in the process
We're a nomadic family of 5 and travel the country in our RV; we've been traveling for years.
Just in the past 6 months we've been to Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. We really get around!
With the rise and popularity of Universal Basic Income (or UBI), we wanted to do something worthwhile during our travels that will help further this discussion.
There's a lot of misinformation about UBI and not a lot of people understand how it really works.
Here's our plan:
- Approach random strangers we encounter during our travels
- Pay for their gas or groceries (we spend a lot of time at gas stations and grocery stores!)
- Give them a simple business card with UBI info on it
- If a conversation sparks, we'll provide in-depth information/materials and answer any questions they have.
- They can also take their groceries/gas and leave. No hard feelings!
This already happens to us everywhere we go: people ask us about our RV, our electric car (towed behind RV), our travels, how we school our kids on the road, etc.
We figured why not steer the conversation towards something meaningful like UBI? (We really get tired of talking about ourselves during these encounters)
We need your help, though...
We aren't wealthy and live on one income (mom is a remote paralegal). So your donations help us pay for those groceries, fuel, and printing materials we give to random strangers.
What does your donation cover:
- Gas & grocery transactions at random checkouts (usually someone in front or next to us in line)
- UBI business cards, information sheets, flyers, stickers, and any banners/marketing materials to further the cause
- Partial RV fuel costs (we pay this for now, but we limit how many places we visit due to budget; with help we can visit more places and make more stops)
Plans for the future?
The big talk around UBI is how the injection of cash will help smaller towns and rural communities.
In the future we'll create campaigns for specific communities we plan to visit and donors can contribute to that specific city. We'll create events in those communities and be a bit more aggressive in our giving and track the results.
We'll do our best to document and interview the people that benefit from our giving while still not being too invasive or ignoring privacy concerns.