Money Makes the World Go Around?

No, it doesn't.  But it stokes the engine and oils the wheels. 

Money and our personal access to resources affects us in all sorts of ways.  Lack of money can affect our self-esteem, i.e. how we feel about ourselves.  Where we can afford to live, what kinds of holidays we can have, even, in some parts of the world (including Britain), whether or not our families will eat today. 

Miki Kashtan argues that the ways we exchange money and resources can be changed by applying empathy.  Wouldn't it be wonderful to live in a world in which everyone has plenty, everyone has access to abundant resources, rather than some people accumulating vast resources and others having nothing? 

It is possible to redress this imbalance.  And Miki gives examples from her own experience.  Check out her blog posts: 

Restoring Flow and Natural Abundance; and

Restoring Flow and Natural Abundance Continued.

Please leave your comments below, and please share this with your networks.  Thanks. 

Go here for Parts 1-4 and all of the other blogs from The Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence 2018. 

 

Miki Kashtan: Restoring Flow and Natural Abundance, Continued

In this final part of her blog series, Miki Kashtan continues to explore how we can share resources in ways that encourage connection and are based on empathy.  She describes her experience of the challenges and the joys of working in this way. 

One opportunity for deep transformation emerged from all of us aiming to use money to serve only needs that are truly about sustainability, and not as a substitute for needs that are somehow related to recognition and indirectly to “deserve.” This helps us restore the direct connection between need and resources, instead of mediating it through conceptual structures that reinforce separation and justify scarcity. It was instructive for all to see how many times people slipped into the old ways, and the degree of transformation for them and the group when I invited everyone again into full awareness.

In our team two people had asked for nothing because they are OK financially. Someone pushed just under $1,000 toward one of them, knowing she has an upcoming transition that was stressful for her. And, bit by bit, she pushed it all toward others. She had been profoundly affected by the entire process, from the moment we began, within the team, to examine how much each of us would ask for initially. By the time of the money pile, she had gotten into the trust that, if and when she needs it, somehow it will come to her. Since she didn’t need it then, she wanted it to go to those who did.

At a certain point, money started flowing with the larger group, too. First, money exited our group and was being pushed toward participants, in support of their needs. Then, person after person joined the circle and pushed money, from the pile in the center or from what was already in front of someone, toward someone who needed it, sometimes first adding more money to the pile from their own pockets. Some of it happened directly, and some indirectly. For example, one team member took some of the money in front of him and asked anyone who knew someone else who needed money to take that money and give it to that person. In another moment, I asked people who came from Guatemala, working in difficult circumstances implementing restorative justice, if they needed money for their work.

They looked at each other and said no, and I trusted them. This moment stands out to me, because it offered them the knowledge that their needs mattered and yet that money was then available to give to another community. It seemed as if there would be no end to more money being generated. Even though the overall amounts beyond the initial request were relatively small, the experience of the amount of money growing and growing through generosity and solidarity was nurturing and healing an old collective wound of mistrust.

An entire other theme was working out the challenge that so many women have about asking for money. One woman on the team who’d been really challenged about asking for an amount of money to support her sustainability took some money from the pile, put it on the extra chair, and invited any woman for whom it’s hard to ask for money to come and pull it toward herself, so she would have companionship in this stretching. More and more women then came forward and stretched themselves to do this, and others stretched to give beyond their comfort zone.

Through all of this, we left behind notions of scarcity or transaction, and we fully entered the flow of life. A third of the people were in tears by the end. Several people told me that seeing this process put everything they had learned over eight days into more clarity. Given how long it was, and how far it stretched, I was vividly reminded of the Hanukah oil lasting eight days or the story of Jesus feeding multitudes of people with one loaf of bread. Maybe a better metaphor would be that the money became like a culture that keeps making more and more dough possible. True abundance.

I wonder if something as profoundly based in solidarity and community could have happened in any of the global North countries in which I also teach. Solidarity and generosity are born by knowing that we need each other. When we live isolated, fully transactional lives that give us the illusion that we don’t “need” each other because we have money, we lose out on the possibility of knowing that our lives depend on each other, that we are never separate from others, and that, when in need, if we are part of a community, mutual generosity can be, once again, a way of life. 

Go here for Parts 1, 2 and 3 and all of the other blogs from The Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence 2018. 

Please leave your comments below, and please share this with your networks.  Thanks. 

Miki Kashtan: Restoring Flow and Natural Abundance

In this third part of her blog series, Miki Kashtan continues to explore how we can share resources in ways that encourage connection and are based on empathy.  She describes her experience of the challenges and the joys of working in this way.  

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.

Miki Kashtan: "Financial Co-Responsibility"

In this second part of her blog series, Miki Kashtan continues to explore how we can share resources in ways that encourage connection and are based on needs.  She describes practical ways to implement "financial co-responsibility". 

In the last few years, I’ve been experimenting with one particular process that approximates the gift economy on a small scale: an alternative to how money usually functions now in workshops or other public events. Here’s what I said about this process in a recent blog post:

“Financial Co-responsibility” [was] created by Dominic Barter as part of his pioneering efforts to support system building within communities…I consider [it] a quantum leap in creating a collective capacity for challenging the hidden assumptions that surround money and resources more generally and approximating ever better the matching of resources to needs. This process involves two interconnected circle dynamics, one in which resources are pooled and another in which they are distributed.

What we are familiar with is “charging” money for workshops or other public events, which is then distributed among the event producers and those who train or facilitate based on the familiar logic of exchange: a % of gross or net income; a fixed rate per hour worked; or some permutation of the above.

Instead of charging, I invite people to give the lower of two amounts: what they can based on their resources, and what they are willing based on their connection with the sustainability needs of the event team. And those are estimated by each member of the team based, primarily, on the impact on their sustainability of having participated in the event.

Instead of distributing whatever money is generated within the logic of exchange, based either on “value” or “merit,” I have been experimenting, more and more, with the second dynamic in the Financial Co-Responsibility process, which Dominic calls the “Money Pile.”

I’ve found this part of the process quite demanding of courage, truth, and love, the trio that is the foundation of nonviolence as I understand it. It invites honesty, vulnerability, and care. I’ve seen astounding results happen which have taken whole groups outside the logic of exchange, if only briefly. Here’s the general explanation of how it works, taken from the same blog post: 

The basic format of the money pile is that all those who are requesting to receive money collected at an event gather together and dynamically decide how to divide the money. Initially, the entire amount is in the center. Then individuals either “push” money towards someone else or “pull” money towards themselves, either from the pile at the center (which is what gives this form its name), or from what is already in front of someone. The money pile ends when no new movements are made…

… each person pulling or pushing provides the reasons for their choice, for everyone towitness. Each naming of reasons influences everyone. Mutual influencing, one of the core aspects of community and of interdependence, becomes an explicitly integral part of the process.

My colleagues and I continue to experiment with asking for and distributing money in this way, learning from our experiences and from conversations with Dominic and others about their experience and ours, putting this learning into practice, and iteratively integrating this process – developed in particular contexts in Brazil over the last 15 years - with the contexts in which we use it, while acknowledging and seeking to nurture the context from which it came. One thing that has come from these conversations is an understanding of the importance of including, when we use this process, a flow of resources back to the place where the work originated. I intend to make this part of our future experiments, and encourage others who try it to do so as well.

Go here for Part 1 and the other blogs from The Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence 2018. 

Please leave your comments below, and please share this with your networks.  Thanks.  

Miki Kashtan: Recovering the Flow of Resources Part 1

Miki Kashtan

The way we distribute and accumulate resources affects all of our lives, from the personal and interpersonal to the global.  

In the first part of this blog series, Miki Kashtan explores how we can share resources in ways that encourage connection and are based on needs. 

When I was about five, I asked my mother why it was that we needed to pay to get our groceries. Why wouldn’t everyone just come and get what they need? My mother had no response for me, and no one has since. I still believe that money is entirely unnecessary. I still see it as entirely feasible and practical for each of us to receive what we need using available resources created by the generosity or willingness of others. I still see, easily, how this can be orchestrated through community relationships expanded to include the entire global human population. The result can simply be a globally coordinated and locally managed gift economy running entirely without money.

I believe that children often have intense experiences upon discovering the role of money precisely because of its difficult interaction with relationships. When my sister Inbal’s son was still quite young, he learned that some of the people he only knew as his adult friends were receiving money, and he became quite distressed. He recognized, I believe, that exchange undermines relationships. When Inbal was able to explain to him that if they didn’t give them money, they would need to go elsewhere and then have less time with him, he settled, because this explanation was an exit from the logic of exchange, and the relationships were restored for him.

I was well into my 30s when I understood, in a flash, why economics never made sense to me even though I was always very facile with numbers and managed to ace a macroeconomics exam. Economics, has never made sense to me because it is “the study of the allocation of scarce resources” to satisfy “infinite desires and wants.”¹

Money has been a key instrument of supporting separation and scarcity, both of which are fertile grounds for both the everyday and intense forms of violence. Here’s how. Money facilitates exchange which reinforces separation: I give to you not because of my heart’s generosity or willingness; I give to you because I want something back. We are separate, and we “use” each other to satisfy our own desires. Similarly, money facilitates accumulation which reinforces scarcity: when I take more than I need to accumulate, I remove resources from circulation, and there is less available to others.

The logical conclusion for me has been to seek and experiment with as many ways as I know to subvert the logic of exchange and accumulation and to transform my relationship with money for the foreseeable future in which it’s here to stay. 

Stay tuned for this blog series.  

Miki Kashtan is a CNVC Certified Trainer, co-founder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (BayNVC) and Lead Collaboration Consultant at the Center for Efficient Collaboration. Go here for her blog, The Fearless Heart.  

Go here for Miki's writings and publications.  

Go here for more blog posts from The Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence 2018.  

Please share this blog post with  your networks and please leave your comments below.  Thanks. 

1

These definitions are ubiquitous. See for example https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/08/15/economics-is-scarce-resources-allocation-what-resource-constraint-does-urban-farming-solve/#369528742a55 accessed Aug 12, 2018.