Collaboration vouchers

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Collaboration vouchers (CoVr) is a proposal where people are given vouchers to be spent on joining in-person groups in their local community. Some limited examples exist around children's sport and disabled assistance, and these improve community engagement and mental health. Larger scale programs may achieve outcomes such as reducing extremism, consumerism, and creation of jobs that help the community and environment.

Contents

Overview

Humanity is successful partly because we evolved to be happy and productive when doing useful things cooperatively with other people. Unfortunately government policy rarely works from humanities' strengths, but instead will spend incredible amounts of money to build elaborate structures to police, punish, oversee and administer people. Collaboration vouchers are designed to encourage behaviours that come naturally and make us feel good.[ original research? ]

Aims

Improving social capital

The primary intention of this policy idea is to build social capital through people forming meaningful in-person relationships amid constructive activities, rather than spending large amounts of time in online spaces or consuming streaming services, or less constructive in-person activities such as recreational shopping or gambling. The flow-on benefit should be improved mental health, [1] which has been declining in each generation since the Internet arrived. [2] Collaboration vouchers have been proposed as "annual grants given to each citizen, able to be spent on the membership fees of any registered collaboration. Unions may become registered collaborations, able to receive vouchers, and hence represent not only salaried employees but also the precariat and unemployed". [3] The policy remains theoretical; however, some success has been achieved with using such vouchers for funding youth activities in Australia [4] [5] and Iceland. [6]

Collaboration vouchers (CoVr) have been compared with other mechanisms designed to improve people's standard of living and enjoyment of life, such as a universal basic income (UBI) and universal basic services (UBS). The primary dimensions of both these approaches, and CoVr, is cost, target, and ethos.[ citation needed ]

Alleviating poverty and social inequality by increasing people's capacity to function as part of organisations and networks is an indirect method relative to a UBI but may be significantly more effective. [10] Functional people are more productive, which grows the common wealth rather than just redistributing it. Membership of local community groups may offer people access to new networks, and also significant improvements to mental health and interpersonal skills. These should work in tandem to offer opportunities, while equipping the person to take advantage of them.[ citation needed ]

The necessities of life, such as housing, transport, food and clothing, must exist before people can consider joining local groups. Thus CoVr would require a traditional, targeted (means tested) welfare system, but may work well in conjunction with a UBS.[ citation needed ]

Reduction of misinformation and extremism

The secondary intent of CoVr is to make society more resilient to misinformation and extremism. Both are products of largely online information silos, magnified by in-person self-assortment, [11] [12] where people congregate with (or even move house to be closer to) similar others. In a population sense, self-assortment takes various forms, with the most common being class [13] (wealth) and education [14] (intelligence).

Commonly, more educated and wealthier people prefer (and can afford) urban areas, whereas less educated and poorer people prefer (and can afford) rural areas. Overall, self-assortment magnifies the silos produced by the internet and leads to extremism, both on the left and the right. CoVr is intended to reduce misinformation and extremism by promoting in-person rather than online interaction, and by creating an ecosystem of groups whereby the more friendly are preferred. Groups with a friendly culture are more likely to contain members with moderate views, who will tend to gently challenge extreme or misinformed viewpoints.

Dynamic ecosystem

Collaboration vouchers are intended to create a dynamic marketplace of local groups, where members vote with their feet. While a smaller-scale market in community groups may already exist, such as on MeetUp, the requirement for members or leaders to self-fund dramatically reduces the options that exist, and fewer options reduce the effect of quality control. For example, if only one book club exists in a local area, people who do not like that group have no choice except not to attend any book club.[ citation needed ]

People are given a certain amount of money in vouchers per month, which they can spend on the membership fee to join local groups registered to the system. A month is deemed long enough to learn whether a person likes a group, but not too long that the person is locked in, and unable to join another should they wish. Fluidity in membership improves the ecosystem-like quality because less friendly and functional groups will lose members faster to those providing a better member experience. This is like free-market capitalism, where consumer choice provides quality control.[ citation needed ]

The innovative dynamism of cities [15] provides evidence for the power of such a marketplace in social options. It is not coincidental that cities also tend to be more liberal (left-wing), because more social options, and the ability to leave undesirable social environments, promotes more enjoyable and functional (collaborative rather than hierarchical) groups. [16]

Potential flaws

A collaboration voucher scheme has numerous potential flaws:[ citation needed ]

Some of these flaws have proposed solutions, [17] [ better source needed ] which may or may not prove viable. The latter two flaws would rely upon the availability of vouchers promoting their usage, even by otherwise busy people. In time, it is also hoped that an expectation will arise that everyone takes part in their local community, and not only their family and workplace and existing friendship circles.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Universal access to education</span> Ability of all people to have equal opportunity in education

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disability</span> Impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions

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Guaranteed minimum income (GMI), also called minimum income, is a social-welfare system that guarantees all citizens or families an income sufficient to live on, provided that certain eligibility conditions are met, typically: citizenship and that the person in question does not already receive a minimum level of income to live on.

Community health refers to non-treatment based health services that are delivered outside hospitals and clinics. Community health is a subset of public health that is taught to and practiced by clinicians as part of their normal duties. Community health volunteers and community health workers work with primary care providers to facilitate entry into, exit from and utilization of the formal health system by community members as well as providing supplementary services such as support groups or wellness events that are not offered by medical institutions.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Measuring poverty</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homelessness and mental health</span>

In a study in Western societies, homeless people have a higher prevalence of mental illness when compared to the general population. They also are more likely to suffer from alcoholism and drug dependency. It is estimated that 20–25% of homeless people, compared with 6% of the non-homeless, have severe mental illness. Others estimate that up to one-third of the homeless have a mental illness. In January 2015, the most extensive survey ever undertaken found 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. Depending on the age group in question and how homelessness is defined, the consensus estimate as of 2014 was that, at minimum, 25% of the American homeless—140,000 individuals—were seriously mentally ill at any given point in time. 45% percent of the homeless—250,000 individuals—had any mental illness. More would be labeled homeless if these were annual counts rather than point-in-time counts. Being chronically homeless also means that people with mental illnesses are more likely to experience catastrophic health crises requiring medical intervention or resulting in institutionalization within the criminal justice system. Majority of the homeless population do not have a mental illness. Although there is no correlation between homelessness and mental health, those who are dealing with homelessness are struggling with psychological and emotional distress. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration conducted a study and found that in 2010, 26.2 percent of sheltered homeless people had a severe mental illness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disability in Ghana</span>

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References

  1. ↑ Heslop, Benjamin; Drew, Antony; Stojanovski, Elizabeth; Bailey, Kylie; Paul, Jonathan (June 2018). "Collaboration Vouchers: A Policy to Increase Population Wellbeing". Societies. 8 (2): 37. doi: 10.3390/soc8020037 . ISSN   2075-4698.
  2. ↑ "Study shows generational decline in Australias mental health". The University of Sydney. Retrieved 7 March 2024.
  3. ↑ Bohnenberger, Katharina (January 2020). "Money, Vouchers, Public Infrastructures? A Framework for Sustainable Welfare Benefits". Sustainability. 12 (2): 596. doi: 10.3390/su12020596 . ISSN   2071-1050.
  4. ↑ "How to use a Sports Voucher". www.sportsvouchers.sa.gov.au. Retrieved 27 March 2024.
  5. ↑ "Active and Creative Kids voucher". Service NSW. Retrieved 27 March 2024.
  6. ↑ "The Recreation Card | Reykjavik". reykjavik.is. Retrieved 27 March 2024.
  7. ↑ UCL (16 May 2019). "Expanding basic services could be more effective at reducing poverty than a Universal Basic Income". UCL News. Retrieved 21 March 2024.
  8. ↑ Ager, J.; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E.; Ager, A. (12 March 2015). "Local Faith Communities and the Promotion of Resilience in Contexts of Humanitarian Crisis". Journal of Refugee Studies. 28 (2): 202–221. doi:10.1093/jrs/fev001. ISSN   0951-6328.
  9. ↑ Cattan, Sarah; Salvanes, Kjell G.; Tominey, Emma (14 September 2022). First generation elite: the role of school networks (Report). Institute for Fiscal Studies. doi:10.1920/wp.ifs.2022.3622 (inactive 2 June 2024). hdl: 10419/284206 .{{cite report}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of June 2024 (link)
  10. ↑ Bauer, Annette; Baltra, Ricardo Araya; et al. (2021). "Examining the dynamics between young people's mental health, poverty and life chances in six low- and middle-income countries: protocol for the CHANCES-6 study". Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. 56 (9): 1687–1703. doi:10.1007/s00127-021-02043-7. ISSN   0933-7954. PMC   8286885 . PMID   34279693.
  11. ↑ Eshel, I.; Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. (February 1982). "Assortment of encounters and evolution of cooperativeness". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 79 (4): 1331–1335. Bibcode:1982PNAS...79.1331E. doi: 10.1073/pnas.79.4.1331 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   345957 . PMID   16593160.
  12. ↑ Joshi, Jaideep; Couzin, Iain D.; Levin, Simon A.; Guttal, Vishwesha (8 September 2017). "Mobility can promote the evolution of cooperation via emergent self-assortment dynamics". PLOS Computational Biology. 13 (9): e1005732. Bibcode:2017PLSCB..13E5732J. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005732 . ISSN   1553-7358. PMC   5607214 . PMID   28886010.
  13. ↑ Bowles, Samuel; Smith, Eric Alden; Borgerhoff Mulder, Monique (2010). "The Emergence and Persistence of Inequality in Premodern Societies: Introduction to the Special Section". Current Anthropology. 51 (1): 7–17. doi:10.1086/649206. ISSN   0011-3204. JSTOR   10.1086/649206. S2CID   142678622.
  14. ↑ Torvik, Fartein Ask; Eilertsen, Espen Moen; Hannigan, Laurie J.; Cheesman, Rosa; Howe, Laurence J.; Magnus, Per; Reichborn-Kjennerud, Ted; Andreassen, Ole A.; Njølstad, Pål R.; Havdahl, Alexandra; Ystrom, Eivind (1 March 2022). "Modeling assortative mating and genetic similarities between partners, siblings, and in-laws". Nature Communications. 13 (1): 1108. Bibcode:2022NatCo..13.1108T. doi:10.1038/s41467-022-28774-y. ISSN   2041-1723. PMC   8888605 . PMID   35233010.
  15. ↑ Florida, Richard; Adler, Patrick; Mellander, Charlotta (2 January 2017). "The city as innovation machine". Regional Studies. 51 (1): 86–96. Bibcode:2017RegSt..51...86F. doi:10.1080/00343404.2016.1255324. ISSN   0034-3404. S2CID   157099136.
  16. ↑ Heslop, Benjamin (1 January 2023), V. Turcan, Romeo; E. Reilly, John; Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Kenneth; Taran, Yariv (eds.), "The ComPILAR Model of Group Dynamics Elaborating Authentic Leadership", The Emerald Handbook of Authentic Leadership, Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 179–196, doi:10.1108/978-1-80262-013-920231007, ISBN   978-1-80262-014-6 , retrieved 7 March 2024
  17. ↑ "Collaboration Vouchers Oversight". www.linkedin.com. Retrieved 11 April 2024.
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