Pilot program giving Minnesota artists guaranteed income extended to five years

A pilot program providing a basic income for Minnesota artists was one of the first. Soon, it’ll become one of the longest.

Springboard for the Arts announced Tuesday that it is extending and expanding its guaranteed income program. Not only is it giving artists five years of $500 monthly payments, it is adding 25 new rural artists to its roster. By January, 100 artists in Minnesota will receive the no-strings-attached sums.

In doing so, they’ll be participating in a growing local, national and international experiment.

Springboard was one of the first organizations to focus on creatives whose work is often precarious and whose income is often inconsistent. A nonprofit with offices in St. Paul and Fergus Falls, it is now adding more rural artists, making them a focus of ongoing research into how these payments make a difference for people and communities.

For Torri Hanna, being a fiber artist meant juggling — the grant applications, the second job, making the scarves that pay versus the fiber art pieces that sometimes don’t. Then, in 2023, Hanna received an unexpected email that made her cry with relief: $500 a month, no application required.

“This is the first time I’ve really felt supported as an artist,” said Hanna, 64, who lives in Fergus Falls.

Some months, the $500 helped Hanna buy groceries. Other months, it allowed her to pay down credit cards. After a run-in with a deer, it helped her afford a used car. Over time, it gave her the opportunity to buy a cute, old Victorian house with her daughter.

“It gives me a cushion,” said Hanna, who also owns a yarn store in town. “There’s the car payment, electric, gas, insurance for the car and the house. I’m not going out and partying with it, that’s for darn sure.”

St. Paul is among the cities that have tried sending money to very low-income residents, studying the results. When Springboard launched its project in 2021, it was one of the nation’s first guaranteed income programs aimed at artists.

“It’s not because we think artists are more deserving or more worthy than anyone else,” said Laura Zabel, Springboard’s executive director. Creative work is one form of labor that, like caregiving, “our economy doesn’t value” but that communities need — now more than ever, she said.

“I love thinking about guaranteed income as a way of honoring that we all have contributions to make to our community, and we need a little bit of time and space and breathing room to make those contributions,” Zabel said.

A similar experiment also started in 2021 in San Francisco, run by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, has ended. In 2022, the Creatives Rebuild New York program began providing some 2,400 artists in New York with $1,000 per month for 18 months. That same year, Ireland’s government began providing 2,000 artists about $350 a week, or about $18,200 a year, as part of a three-year pilot program.

Every 18 months, Springboard has extended its program’s funding. Now, it’s guaranteeing artists five years of income. The first 25 participants, who have received income since 2021, will see that money continue for two more years. Those who started receiving it 18 months ago, including 25 artists in Otter Tail County, will continue. And the 25 new recipients there will begin the program knowing they’ll get money for five years.

“So, from a research perspective, that’s very exciting — to be able to research and understand some of the difference between folks who know from the beginning the longer time horizon,” Zabel said, “and what that allows them to do in terms of planning and commitment to their community.”

Springboard’s work, broadly, is focused on place, she continued, so the nonprofit wants to see how this guaranteed income might affect artists’ ability “to stay in a place and contribute to a place and feel like that place that loves them back. For rural places, especially … that’s a huge part of the picture of how we build more resilient and healthier local economies, is people feeling like someone wants them to be there and values their contributions.”

The 75 artists have received $675,000 on prepaid debit cards, according to the Guaranteed Income Pilots Dashboard, a partnership of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research, Stanford Basic Income Lab and Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. Funding has come from private foundations, at first from the Bush Foundation, then the Kresge and Ford foundations and now the McKnight Foundation, Zabel said. Springboard is also putting its own general operating funds into the project.

The guaranteed income pilot has “reshaped their relationship to their art,” removing some of the hustle, said Kalen Flynn, qualitative data scientist with the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s allowed them the space to feel connected to their art again and create what they want to create without the pressure of, ‘It has to sell.’”

Flynn has led the research on Springboard’s pilot, interviewing participants in St. Paul and Otter Tail County. She appreciates that it includes rural participants because “there is this idea that guaranteed income is only a solution to urban poverty.” But rural artists share many of the same struggles, including housing.

This will be the longest-lasting pilot Flynn has worked on and “one of the longest in the country.”

While the fact that Springboard’s project keeps being extended has been exciting for participants, the uncertainty of its renewal “also recreates the precarity of the economic market,” Flynn said, “I’m interested to see if knowing you’ll have it for five years at the onset makes a difference in how people think about stability in community, their ties to their place, that relational aspect. And also, how it impacts how they think about their own goals.”

Hanna ended up in Fergus Falls in 2018 because of Springboard. Newly divorced, the then-southwestern Minnesota resident was scouting the state in search of a medium-sized city where an artist could afford to make a home. She saw that Springboard had a Fergus Falls office and called them up.

She’d never been to Fergus Falls and arrived in January, when the temperature was 5 degrees below zero.

“The snow was whistling through the streets,” she said, “and I just loved it.”

Hanna opened her Tangles to Treasures shop downtown, then moved to a little mall that was more accessible for her mother, for whom she was a caregiver. The $500 a month helped her make that move, among others. And, importantly, it has given her a bit of time to make art.

One of those pieces is a part of an exhibition at Springboard titled “Exhale,” with works artists created about the guaranteed income program. Hanna hand-wove copper wire into a delicate-but-strong screen, then needle felted little images representing what the payments have meant to her. A bank, representing her improved credit. Three figures, representing three generations. A house, the one she and her daughter now share.

“Having the guaranteed income ... allows a little grace to create whatever needs creating,” she said, “whether it’s a safe space for your mother or a work of art for a show.”