Recently, I’ve been to Mexico City, leading three back-to-back workshops on topics of collaboration, leadership, and social transformation. It was clear to me that I would want to engage in a Financial Co-Responsibility process with the organizing team along the lines described in my previous post.
Central to what Dominic
teaches about the Financial Co-Responsibility process is that we
develop its specific forms locally, based on a system of agreements
between all involved. When gleaned from what works in our local
contexts, this supports a positive mutual influencing of the
conditions in which we live, and our iterative efforts evolve the
process over time. In this first iteration in Mexico, what I invited
my colleagues into was based on years of experimenting with various
forms of gift economy, most recently specifically influenced by
Dominic’s approach. One of the limitations is that my local
colleagues and I didn’t actually develop a system together; I was
simply asking them to accept a process that I’ve used previously in
other contexts, which then began to be organically adapted, as you
will see below.
The organizing team
accepted, with exquisite grace, my invitation to this experiment,
without having previously done anything like it. They went on blind
faith.
They told me later that
they worked about 4 times as hard as they would have if they’d been
organizing the event using the familiar transactional way. They
decided what their limits of risk were and operated fully within
them, asking most people to pay equally for the basic costs because
it was too much risk for them. Even for this part, they did invite
some people to come without paying for their food and space rental
share.
Had I known how much
stress the organizers lovingly accepted, I might have halted the
experiment, much to everyone’s loss, because so much was made
possible on account of their willingness, and then that of the entire
group. First, about 20 of the 110 or so people who participated in
the events were women from several Latin American countries working
with marginalized or vulnerable communities. Would they have come if
there had been a fixed price? It seems unlikely. Then, the entire
experience of collecting and distributing money was a small taste of
what the world could be like if nonviolent principles were applied
globally to economics.
Because people were
coming and going between the different events, and because of the way
that we collected the money, we didn’t know until hours before the
end how much money we would have. Up until then, the organizers were
still anxious about whether all people would convert their pledges to
money. Then, by the time the money pile started, we were able to
celebrate together that we had all we had asked for.
Once we knew how much
we had, we created a circle at the center for the organizing and
training team and an empty chair for anyone from the larger community
to come into the circle and participate. And then the process went on
for about two hours until we were all done. Every moment contributed
to sustainability for many who needed it (well beyond the original
event team), meaning, transformation, trust, connection, and a
palpable sense of possibility. Even a little bit of seeming magic:
when the process ended, all of us on the team received more or less
what we asked for, through many circuitous pathways, and several
other people in the community received entirely unexpected small
amounts of money in support of their own or their communities’
needs in addition. In the next post, I share some snippets
from how this came to be.
