On Monday May 11, 2020, my ancestors tapped at the door of my consciousness. First in a dream. Then in a rarefied subtle body/mind awareness, carried with me intentionally throughout my waking morning. Then, strange signals reinforcing themselves in a phone conversation with a spiritual leader and peer. Then, in a “fugue” episode of pouring out grief and love before my altar, and receiving clarifying guidance from my ancestors.
Then, in the creation of a new holistic system from which I will be operating my life and my business, which I am honored to reveal to you today.
This new system reflects a climax of my thinking and designing work over the past year, as I’ve considered how I must “re-do” my business from the inside out.
You see: in 2011, when I was just 24 years old, I began on this rewarding career path as a cooperative business development consultant. A natural fit for the autonomy and creativity of the freelancer lifestyle, I’ve owned my own “solopreneur” business ever since.
I love the dynamism of my work: how I’m constantly learning and challenged, working with new organizations, new teams, who themselves are new, and are learning, in what they are setting out to do. I love the diversity of visions and approaches I encounter, the flexibility of the co-op model to suit a community’s authentic character. I love wearing different hats in my role: from business model analyst, to facilitator, to leadership coach, to educator/trainer, to documentarian, to connector, to strategist, to designer.
Amidst all this dynamism, I tend to be swept along by the tide of the work, prioritizing adaptiveness and responsiveness to my clients over my own needs or the needs of my business. As years of experience have accumulated, so has the feeling of becoming slowly buried by inadequate internal business systems and standards.
I’ve had the luxury to slack on building my business: All of the work I do has come through word of mouth or networking, which has been abundant, thanks to the many satisfied customers I have served. I charge very reasonable rates so I can work with the people who need my services most. I am not incentivized to raise my prices, even as the quality of my work grows, because I am driven by a spirit of service to our empowerment.
In the nine years I’ve been working as a cooperative developer, my annual income has not once exceeded $23,000… before taxes (which as a self-employed worker I am fully responsible for.)
The gist? My income has been dwindling each year, as my inner call to show up in deep service grows ever louder.
There is a conflict inherent there. And something had to break… or break through.
The socioeconomic order that I grew up with, that surrounds me in the U.S., that is fighting tooth and nail not to die as we speak, dictates to me and to all of us, as canon: I must earn more, I must profit from those who receive my services, I must prove myself, I must get ahead.
In witness of my ancestors and my altar on Monday, I owned the truth:
I don’t want to get ahead.
I want to be of greater service to my community.
When it comes down to it: I trust my path, and my ancestors, and the spirit that weaves us together, so much more than I trust the integrity of the dying economic system surrounding us.
Now is the time to innovate, not default to fearful grasping.
Now is the time to go to the edge of what’s possible, and take up a stake there.
So, I am proud to announce today, in your full witness, that I have taken a position in open defiance of the norms of capitalist systems (external and internalized):
I will NOT charge more.
I will charge LESS.
I will do whatever it takes to be of MORE service to my community, especially as things are falling apart and the future looks dire.
I will spread cooperativism.
I will spread systems thinking.
I will spread reciprocity and relationship.
I will spread design competencies.
I will spread wholesome leadership.
I will spread methods to self-empowerment.
I will spread truth.
I will spread wisdom and skillful means to it.
I will witness you as you grapple with your path,
gain freedoms of mind and creativity,
and confront the meaning of your life and your highest purpose
in (y)our communities.
I will do this in the name of our liberation.
Now that the pandemic has afforded me some breathing room to rethink how I do business, this I declare. If I am going to “put myself out there,” and promote my work, I am going to do it this way. Because what you need to know about me, first and foremost, is that I put what is in service to our liberation primary, in everything I do.
I call this model “the Plenty Pact.”
In it, both myself and my client commit to striving for wholeness.
We commit to ensuring we each have “plenty”—principally,
plenty of love and power, circulating and multiplying in our lives.
We acknowledge how essential mutual aid
and doing our best is
to the benefit of us all.
Work as Church
Such a spiritual commitment spoken in witness of full community, and made in open confrontation of an extractive and hostile status quo, would seem most fitting in the context of a church.
A priest is called on, and responds, in the form of a spiritual leader. People benefit from the priest’s role. They do not compensate the priest directly, either: each gives what they can to the alms plate (each practices tithing; only God witnesses what they give). Ultimately, in this communal model, the priest and church’s needs are met. It is understood that it is a shared, community responsibility to sustain the church.
Everything I am about to lay out, that I call the “Plenty Pact,” resembles the model of a church, where the service provider’s duty is to service, and the community’s duty is to benefit and to support. I’m describing an ancient model, a pattern crossing countless cultures. It should therefore seem somewhat familiar… even if the context for this pattern is being purposefully reinvented.
In doing so, I confront and disrupt today’s over-worshipped yet declining status quo: neocapitalism and its toxic norms. Capitalism would have us put a price tag on everything—even our most sacred offerings should be converted to financial “capital.” This system is ambient in our culture, and internalized within us: so much so, we forget that these norms are not fixed, but are illusory. The illusions are even more visible these days, as the pandemic pummels and potentially unravels on our “infinite growth” dogma. Yes, capitalism is a false god; we reap economic, social, and environmental collapse as payment for our blind faith in it, while only the wealthy get wealthier, like the corrupt religious-political orders of yesteryear. Yet because this false god has been our god, wrapped up in our identity, to some extent, it can feel unnerving, uncomfortable, dangerous (even if exhilarating) to have conversations outside of those structures—such as the one I invite you to have with me through Plenty Pact.
Plenty Pact is structured to be more in alignment with a world growing in the sidewalk cracks and skyscraper shadows of this waning socioeconomic order: a world organized by spirit communing, by gifts circulating, by love and trust for our wildness, by dialogue, by faith in our beingness. Yet this cannot fit the old mold of a “church,” either: it must be something in between, like a hybrid, an innovation, a bridge to a living future, in which we practice direct community support/supported models—using money, but not dependent on money.
You see… I don’t believe I am condemned to abandon the money system in order to express my “next level” service to my community. My participation in the money system allows me to live an ordinary cooperative life in Denver, among the people, and work alongside them. Not in the model of a rarified, ritually separated special role like a priest, but as an ordinary (if especially bold and principled) fellow.
I suspect it is not true that I must leave the money system entirely: after all, I am a professional providing high-quality thinking, ideation, training, management and leadership. I want to continue providing these services as the very theory and method by which my community most benefits.
Furthermore: My community is not structured like a church, however its members hold alternative-to-the-mainstream values, ethics, ideas, frameworks, understandings, that are moreso oriented to our human dignity and freedom than to accumulation and exploitation. I believe this precious community, eking out existence on the fringes of mainstream society and money, deserve to be “ministered” to, in a sense, by tailoring services particularly to this subculture.
Integrity and transparency throughout the process will no doubt be critical to success, especially because we are playing at the “edges” of what’s possible. I have designed a carefully structured conversation in the exploratory stage of a working relationship that I believe allows for my client and I to build trust, experience solidarity, and practice honesty in our exchange. This makes space for witnessing the discomfort and fear that is liable to come up as we navigate through our internalized capitalist norms and belief systems. Everyone who goes through an exploratory conversation with me in good faith helps me refine and improve this process.
I hypothesize that I will still be able to pay rent, pay for groceries, pay for basic necessities, maybe even save a little money. This would be accomplished, however, not by charging a fixed and market-determined rate for my services, but by accepting what people offer me in faithful acknowledgement of the quality, value, and spirit of the services I deliver.
This is a grand hypothesis. It will be tested.
As a spiritual seeker on an unwavering path, my faith will no doubt be tested. The validity of my choices and my service offerings will be tested, too. I am making myself vulnerable to this model, I am striking out on faith and trust. It is bold, it is edgy, and its consequences have already been accepted.
I must serve. You must benefit from my serving, and reciprocate in gratitude.
A simple formula…
Join me in testing it.