This Baltimore club created its own universal basic income

There are clubs for just about everything these days: running, books, arts and crafts, video games. The list could go on.

Baltimore also has a money-sharing club.

The Baltimore Community Guaranteed Income Club began last year as a way to build a social safety net and a community. The group’s more than 50 members across Baltimore pledge a maximum of 7% of their take-home pay to help each other cover expenses like rent, utilities and groceries.

Some give. Others receive. Everyone gets to feel like they’re part of something.

Here’s how it all started.

Like many Marylanders, Alex Zhu, the club’s founder, had friends and neighbors who were out of work because of the Trump administration’s workforce and funding cuts last year. Loss of income and an oversaturated job market left thousands in need of financial help.

Counties hosted job fairs. The state government offered loans and prioritized hiring federal workers.

Zhu wanted to help, too. He had heard of universal basic income, popularized by former presidential hopeful Andrew Yang. It’s a financial system where every adult member of society receives a regular, unconditional payment.

Zhu had also heard about the app Comingle, “a modern, tech-driven take on the concept of a Universal Basic Income,” according to its website. Employed app users dedicate 7% of their income, which is then pooled together and paid out weekly to app users in need. The company also keeps 2% of contributions for operating costs, including paying its staff.

Building on those ideas, Zhu created the Community Guaranteed Income Club last April, and it quickly attracted interest.

“I am not surprised that people want to help their friends and neighbors out,” he said.

Zhu was eventually swept up in government cuts himself. He wasn’t a federal worker, but he was employed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security when his role was eliminated in October.

Seven percent of take-home pay sounds like a lot. Many companies don’t offer a retirement contribution match that high.

I asked Zhu whether he had heard any pushback about the amount. He hadn’t.

That could be because most members don’t actually give 7%.

“Unless you are the person who is the highest earner in the group, you’re not giving 7%,” Zhu said.

Confused? I was, too. When I attended the group’s June meeting, members walked me through the calculations.

Here’s how it worked:

Members threw out random amounts to serve as their monthly income, ranging from $12,000 to $0, for someone who lost their job. I said $3,500 for the sake of example.

The average income among the 13 people in attendance, including me, was $3,369.

People who earned above the average income became givers, and those below it became receivers. The average income was also used to determine how much people would give.

Remember my $3,500? That was $128 above the average, so I would give 7% of that difference, about $8.69, or 0.25% of my fake monthly income.

The person who would receive that money made $3,000 in this example. That’s $369 less than the average, so they’d receive 7% of that difference, or $25.83, from me and another member.

Club members don’t do this math on their own. Zhu enters their reported monthly incomes into a spreadsheet to do the calculations. The results are then hosted in Airtable, a web-based workflow platform, for members to see.

Zhu said he’s working with the Relational Technology Project to build a website that will do this math and share results with members. The goal is to share the formula, technology and format so the model can be replicated in other communities.

Funds are sent between members through mobile payment apps like Venmo, PayPal and Zelle.

If a member forgets to send money — which Zhu said hasn’t happened often — they don’t face consequences. Receivers are encouraged to remind their givers, just in case they’ve forgotten.

That can be a bit awkward, Zhu said. He recently started sending general reminders.

This home-brewed form of socialism comes as people aren’t giving as often to charities, foundations and nonprofits, which have typically formed much of the U.S. social safety net.

Individual donations have declined significantly since the late 1980s, when they accounted for 80% of overall contributions, according to a recent report from the Giving USA Foundation. Now that share is less than 65%, with giving increasingly concentrated among fewer, wealthier donors.

The state of the economy is a likely culprit. But Giving USA also said the country has lost its “culture of generosity.”

Baltimore resident and Community Guaranteed Income Club member Josh Derrick used to give about 10% of his income to charity, but now he questions how nonprofits use the money.

Was it in a way he agreed with? Was it going to the cause, or was it paying a CEO’s salary?

And, he said, why fling money far away when there are problems to solve right here in Baltimore?

The Community Guaranteed Income Club is not a charity or a nonprofit. It’s more like a mutual aid group, a resource-sharing model that gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s also reminiscent of the “savings circles” that predate banking.

Members’ demographics vary across age, race, gender, neighborhood, industry and income.

Derrick, a Ph.D. candidate at the Johns Hopkins University, learned about the club last year at Zhu’s Spanish-speaker happy hour.

“This is a way for me to give but also enhance my local community,” Derrick said. “There’s not going to be any overhead because all the money is just going directly to people and it’s helping people live their lives. All that money is mainly staying in Baltimore.”

The prospect of a safety net is part of the appeal, some members said. If a member’s income drops below the group average one month, or they lose it entirely, they shift from the role of giver to receiver.

Ev Bowen discovered the Community Guaranteed Income Club through a flyer Zhu posted at Baltimore Penn Station. Bowen, who uses they/them pronouns, lost their job with the Social Security Administration last October.

They landed a new job in the events industry after months of searching, but they make less money and their income is inconsistent, they said.

Bowen attended the group’s June meeting and signed up right away.

“There will be months where I won’t make as much money, and this will probably help,” they said. If they’re able to make more and become a giver, they’re willing to do that. “It seems like a really easy, tangible way to help the community.”