Nipun Mehta, Famed Gifting Economy Activist, Shares Some Great Insights in Video of TEDx Talk
Nipun Mehta, founder of Service Space, "an all volunteer-run organization that leverages technology to inspire greater volunteerism", (http://www.servicespace.org), presents some of the most compelling arguments and clearest explanations of the upside of a gifting economy in this video of a 2011 TED Talk. It's well worth taking the 20 minutes to watch this video and to hear the powerful arguments for the transformation that will take place as we shift from a market economy based on money and greed and leading to isolation to a gifting economy based on generosity and leading to community.
Small Southwest Michigan Store Pioneers Gifting Model
Angie Schuyler of Kalamazoo, MI, has begun pioneering the gift economy in her own basement. She has opened a store called Recipro City (gotta love the creative name!) where all merchandise is free. The store is open by appointment at the moment but Angie has already held two outdoor fairs in her community where gifting was the featured approach to the transfer of goods.
She is inspired by the work of Charles Eisenstein and also by Michael Tellinger, the advocate of what he calls Ubuntu Contributionism.
According to a story about her in a local online media outlet, "Schuyler knows that the actions of one person can make a difference and opening a store where everything is free is one step she is taking as she works to make a new economic model to replace the one she sees as corrupt and broken."
Aussie Marketing Consultant Dives into Gift Economy. Follow Her Adventures!
An Australian digital marketing consultant and technologist named Mirror has just begun an experiment in The Gift Economy and she's chronicling her adventures on her blog. Mirror's business consists in helping yoga teachers and studios to build up their businesses and create abundance doing what they love.
After she spent four months in the Philippines with an international aid group, she returned to the relative affluence of her Australian lilfestyle and found herself uncomfortable with the trappings of the money economy. As a fan (she describes herself as "in love with") of Charles Eisenstein, she decided to give living in the Gift Economy a serious try.
She is truly a pioneer, but a pioneer in a growing number of people who are sticking up their heads and saying, "Hey, I can give that a try!" You might find it interesting to follow her weekly journal entries about her experiences in the world of Gifting.
And if you know of others who are doing similar things, let me know. Email me and I'll follow up with another article for The Gifting Earth.
Peace and blessings.
Convinced the Market Economy Made Him Sick, This Vancouver Resident is Promoting Gifting Economy Ideas
The Vancouver Sun published a fascinating article last week about a young man who theorized that a rare stomach cancer he has may have been caused, at least in part, by the money-based market economy.
Brice Royer wanted to figure out what gave him the rare stomach cancer. So he began researching and found that toxins in the air and water are suspected of playing a major role in the emergence of cancer as a huge health risk in modern society. That was only a symptom, though, as far as Mr. Royer was concerned, so he dug deeper. Finally, an economist explained that the root cause of all this toxicity is simple: money.
This led him to think about and explore the nature of financial transactions and he concluded, “The underlying philosophy is that transactions using money isolate people from one another, whereas giving something creates trusting relationships and builds communities.” As his life unfolded, he says he literally "stumbled upon the concept of the gift economy, in which people give and receive freely with no expectation of anything in return, popularized by the movie Pay It Forward."
“For me, at least, it’s a matter of survival,” he said of his new alternative way of living in Vancouver. “Giving and receiving for me is about health and healing.”
By the way, on a semi-related note, we also discovered and liked this Facebook group of gift-economy-minded people in the Vancouver area.
ServiceSpace Offers Keen Insights, Suggests We Use "Gift Ecology" Rather Than "Gift Economy"
This article on ServiceSpace over at Medium.com is an intriguing look at the emergence of "sharing" as a form of economy that has ended up having very little in common with the gift-based economy all of us at The Gifting Earth are most interested in promoting and supporting.
In the piece, the author spends most of his time discussing the way that companies that have emerged into the new sharing market space -- outfits like AirBnB and Uber -- have clearly become motivated by the same profit potential that drives their more traditional, straight-selling competitors. The very industries they are attempting -- or claim to be attempting -- to disrupt are being upstaged by the new upstarts, but only the "feeling" of the payments has really changed much from the consumer perspective.
The author points out that a startup ride-sharing company called Lyft, which began in an effort to supplant Uber's rental model with an actual gifting model, has had to abandon that plan in the face of several hundred million dollars in outside investment.
Sharing companies have their place, to be sure. They have the potential at least to reduce consumerism, impact the environment by creating a less throw-away, over-consumptive ecology, and generally shift thinking away from "I must own my own thing" to "I must have access to the thing I need."
"The essence of gifting is to give with no strings attached. Only generosity can create that kind of economy," the article argues. The article then argues for a shift in terminology. "Gift ecology is probably a more suitable word. Economy reduces value into a few focused dimensions, whereas ecology implies a more intricate interplay of relationships that generate diversified — sometimes immeasurable — value."
What do you think?
Blogger "Reclaims" Gift Economy Dreams of Her Youth, Offers Some Good Insights
Portland blogger Krista Arias recently posted an interesting blog article entitled "Krista's Dream Rates::prologue to reclaiming the gift economy". In it, among other useful tidbits, she addresses the questions she's most frequently asked when she tells people her rate for work she performs is a request for a thoughtful gift. Here are the questions she mentions; you'll have to go to her blog to read her answers.
- How do you survive if you give your work away?
- Don't you end up with a big heap of junk you don't want or need?
- What if you don't like what I give you?
- What if I have nothing of real value to give you?
- I don't feel very creative right now. I wonder if it's okay just to give you money?
Krista is talking about a slightly different gift economy model than we here at The Gifting Earth are promoting and facilitating. But the basic idea is similar and her insights are based on real-life experience so you'll probably enjoy the read.
Charles Eisenstein on Gift Economy: "The More You Give, the Richer You Are."
One of the great friends -- perhaps the spiritual father -- of the gift economy movement is Charles Eisenstein. His book, Sacred Economics, is practically a sacred text among those of us who support and evangelize the notion of a gifting economy.
In a recent edition of International Times, Eisenstein authored a brief article on the importance of gifting economy, contrasting it with what he calls the "greed economy" and what we here at The Gifting Earth refer to as "market".
"We must cease our incessant desire to own the world, realize that owning more things will never be enough to compensate for the wound of separation inside us, and understand that we can only really improve our quality of life by reducing the suffering of others," Eisenstein writes.
While we often talk about our opinions about the gifting economy, the fact is that there are sound philosophical, spiritual, organizational and economic rationales for its existence. While the article itself may be old hat to you, check out the link at the end of the piece that will take you to a site you perhaps do not know about and which may contain some useful and insightful (not to mention inspirational) information.
One More Reason for a Gifting Economy: International Trade Agreements
The authors of the "Giving Tree Homestead" blog have posted some interesting insights into the role international trade agreements play in local economies as a way of explaining from another angle why a gifting economy is an essential part of the world's future.
Mark and Julia (no last names given) are homesteading in Missouri and chronicling their adventures -- and their thoughts -- in this blog. This month's column makes the observation that, "somehow the economic rules the world has 'agreed' to play by are failing most of the people out there." Specifically, he cites his experiences when he went to Haiti to help after the devastating earthquake there and was shocked to discover that impoted frozen chicken parts from the U.S. were ubiquitous while local chicken farmers couldn't raise their chickens cheaply enough to compete.
This outcome, he learned, is a result of international trade agreements which poor nations like Haiti are forced to sign as a condition of receiving aid from countries like the United States. In this case, the U.S. subsidizes American chicken farmers and their exports at a price so low that it makes it economicaly infeasible for Haitian farmers to compete in their own marketplaces. As one more side effect of a market-based economy, this sort of economic injustice is something Mark feels unable to support. A gift-based economy of course eliminates such obstacles to actual free trade.
Actress Creates Ecommerce-Free Site Where Only Payment Allowed is 'Thank You'
Actress, model and brand spokespeson Lily Cole has discovered a new passion in life: a gift-based Web site called impossible.com where people can post simple wishes that can easily be fulfilled by ordinary people. The UK-based site will debut in the United States in April.
“I call it ‘selfish giving,’ ” she says, “because it feels great, chemically! Acts of giving stimulate the production of dopamine, which makes you happy.” That's another great reason to engage in gifting like that championed here on The Gifting Earth! Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were both consultants to impossible.com.
"Money is a useful tool," Ms. Cole says, "but I don't think it should be an end in itself."
Well said, Ms. Cole, well said.
UK-Based REconomy Project Has Some Interesting Ideas on Gift-Based Economy
Community Facilitator
This Web Designer in Philly Operates on a Gift-Based Economy Model
by DAN SHAFER
Community Facilitator
There was an article on Huffington Post recently featuring a Web designer in Philadelphia who transformed his business and his relationships with his clients by not charging for his work. Instead, Adrian Hoppel makes his work a gift to his clients and then allows them to gift him in return according to what they think it is worth.
Now, that’s not quite a gift-based economy; there is still some expectation of a quid pro quo in the relationship. But Hoppel says the new arrangement has been quite satisfying and successful.
“Working in the gift does not mean that I work for free, or that I give my work away without care. It means that people trust me to build them a website, and I trust them to support my work as they believe fair,” he told HuffPo’s Arin Greenwood.
While most of his clients have paid him in cash, some have included other kinds of gifts: free passes to activities, merchandise, etc. He says he makes more on each project, on average, than when he was charging a specific fee or hourly rate. Overall, he has fewer projects but he is adjusting his expectations and marketing plans. “One of the things that I promised myself when I broke away from the type of work I was doing before in the traditional economy was that if I was going to do this, I was only going to work for people and organizations that I could respect. Life is too short to waste.”
Hoppel landed a gig building Charles Eisenstein’s site. Eisenstein is one of the thought leaders on the Gifting Economy.
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How The Gifting Earth Avoids Disappointment in Gifting Exchange
by DAN SHAFER
Community Facilitator
Very often when we give gifts as a part of our participation in our market-driven economy (or as we like to say for short, “in Market,”), we find ourselves having a less-than-satisfactory experience. Either the person for whom we purchased the gift doesn’t like or appreciate it or they reciprocate with a gift that seems to us somehow inappropriate or not useful in our lives.
In part at least these feelings derive from the fact that in Market, there’s an expectation of quid pro quo when we give a gift, particularly at a gift-exchanging holiday. The quid pro quo may not come immediately; when we buy someone a birthday gift, e.g., we don’t expect them to give us a gift the same day. But we probably expect they will buy us something for our birthday when it comes around. And that something should, we expect, be commensurate in value and utility with what we have just given them.
All of this can lead to hurt feelings and even disrupted relationships. All because we were trying to do something nice. Here is a recent article about how these things come about.
In The Gifting Earth, this can never happen because gifts are the economy. You know before you give anyone a gift that it’s something they want, because they’ve either posted a wish for it or they’ve specifically asked you to give them what you are offering. No unmet expectations. No useless gifts.
This aspect of our gifting model means relationships grow and solidify rather than being potentially disrupted or damaged.
Just another reason to join and be active on The Gifting Earth!
Keep on sharing!
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