Poverty Conscious Activism VS. Conscious Consumerism
by Greg Landua
Poverty Conscious Activism, Vs. Conscious Consumerism:
Creating the change we want to see in the world.
In a recent conversation on the facebook wall of a friend and colleague (Slav Davidson, CEO of Common Circle Education) a debate quick started between the ideas of poverty conscious activism and Conscious Consumerism. I think this is an important conversation in our world today.
I see both sides to this conversation. I currently operate in Slav’s paradigm…that as a capable individual in a capitalist system I should make surplus doing right livelihood and re-invest it into regeneration.
However I also see that activists who eschew finances to concentrate on worldchange work are needed. The financial system is fundamentally broken, and indeed Dollars represent DEGENERATION. so if we operated inside the dollar system without EXTREME CAUTION (the likes of which go FAR FAR BEYOND BUYING ORGANIC FOOD) we are actively degrading our home.
As with most answers to the complex problems facing us today, the answer is YES AND. We need to be carefully routing our financial capital to projects and causes that have real, lasting regenerative effects.
Cooperative Strategy for regeneration:
Form cooperative economic groups…
Find right livelihoods that can sustain group overhead and produce surplus, define strategic projects and fund them ourselves. We need to begin to create the alternative economy, and start to redefine wealth. At this moment, The Financial Permaculture Institute, in parallel and collaboration with other groups like Slow Money, is working on :
Financial Permaculture Institute’s Three fold plan for ECOnomic Regeneration:
- Creating, testing and sharing the regenerative enterprise models that allow people to make right livelihood and create cooperative and resilient communities.
- Finding regenerative investing instruments to empower money from the broken system to be turned into REAL WORK AND TOOLS FOR REGENERATION and community empowerment.
- Cultivating a lively discussion on fundamentally different economic models that will allow us to align our hearts, hands and minds with the realities of scarcity and environmental limitations of the planet, and find the abundance and infinite capacity of our creativity and art.
Join us to help shape this conversation. Come to our participatory design based workshop, September 24-26th on The Farm, in Summertown, TN.
FPC 2010 will focus on Regenerative Enterprise models that use Perennial Agriculture as a tool to capture carbon, grow food, and produce value added essential goods for a vibrant local economy.
We will also host participatory design and discussion to outline leverage points for regenerative change and move forward with our collective wisdom.
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