Johannes "Joy" Ponader ("they" pronoun) lives and works in Berlin. In 2014, Joy co-founded Mein-Grundeinkommen.de, which holds a regular raffle to give out year-long basic incomes to randomly selected people. This reaches an audience of over one million people in Germany as of today, and raises more than 5 million Euros in small donations each year. In 2015, Joy also co-founded sanktionsfrei.de, a platform to insure anyone against Hartz IV sanctions free of charge.

In his current project grundabstimmung.de, Joy is working to introduce a comprehensively scientifically evaluated long-term basic income pilot in Germany. The pilot shall be implemented by a people’s initiative in 2021.

Being originally educated as an actor and stage director for musical theatre, today Joy is also working as freelance political campaigner, coach and group facilitator for new work and collective leadership.

Joy is also working as a consultant to stiftung-grundeinkommen.de, a Munich based foundation whose goal is to find out if social wealth can be increased by introducing a basic income scheme.