Money is a loaded topic.  Some people are obssessed with it, others absolutely abhor it, and many flip-flop in their relationship to it.  Furthermore, when you abstract that to an institutional level, the situation is even more intricate and intertwined with the question of scale.

If you let projects operate organically, sometimes they scale.  If you let them scale, it becomes hard to avoid conventional currency (in the current state of our world).  So what matters more -- being-organic or not-involving money?  With Wednesdays, for example, we consciously keep them small; but if we were organic, we'd have a Church-sized hall by now.  With Smile Cards, on the other hand, we favor organic -- so we let the project grow as wild as the ecosystem supports it.  While CharityFocus operates within the constraint of not-soliciting money, it is still an interesting exercise to figure out the bounds of that value.

Perhaps motherhood is the most organic project of all.  Most people don't have to search farther than their moms to find someone who has practiced kindness for a whole lifetime.  But what if that kindness attracted more people, and now your mom had to care for 20 kids?  Something would have to give.  If a mom is genuinely loving, she will easily attract those neighborhood kids who think of her as a mom; so what is a mom to do?  Stay small or increase the capacity to love?  And what happens when you can't increase the capacity to love in proportion with the increase in the number of kids?  There has to be suffering to face that question authentically, and most leaders shy away from that challenge -- either by "buying" that extra capacity or by shirking away from the responsibility.  This fundamental psychological weakness, I would argue, is what has created situations like peak-oil, and is now threatening to repeat itself with our reckless use of technology.

Still, you have to act in that moment.  A mom either has to refuse the neighborhood kids and be un-natural, or quickly find resources to build greater capacity and be un-principled, or hedge somewhere in between.

If you approach small-acts-of-kindness from a systems perspective, the same query poses itself in a different way.   Birju, for example, wrote a paper in college where he argued (in part) that for someone to be gifting, someone else is paying the price and for this reason, you can't possibly have everyone be gifting.  In many ways, that makes sense -- for people to be volunteering with CharityFocus, they are doing something elsewhere to cover their electricity bill.  And even if the electricity company was giving me free electricity, they could do it only because they're making enough money off other customers.  Of course, that argument assumes finite value -- it's an open question to see how the synergistic value of generosity (where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole)  might change the equation.  We know indigenous examples of how that might work, but given our current context (with roads/airports and non-local communities), its not easy to realistically imagine that possibility for the masses.  So, then, do you still work towards that possibility with unflinching faith, or is it more skillful to compromise? 

As a species, we probably need people, projects and experiments on all ends of the spectrum -- but each approach has its consequences.  Which consequences are you called to accept?  Without clarity on that question, we  propagate our confusions.  Some world leaders who think deeply about the power of "small" are often busy trying to scale their ideas; some grassroots activists talk about "small" only because they have no other choice. 

There is another option, though, of not giving in to the seductive right-wrong duality.  With that option, you simply choose struggle -- an incessant struggle with a set of conditions that will never be perfect.   Struggle is perhaps an unappealing way to frame it, but it involves accepting a state without a definitive answer.  At Karma Kitchen in Berkeley, for example, we do need to have at least $650 in donations every week for the experiment in generosity to continue; Works & Conversations does cost $5 per magazine to print, as does each Smile Deck.  So it's a reality that money is involved in some way.  However, instead of relying on the security of a grant, an investment or a pre-meditated fundraising scheme, gift-economy projects are supported by small contributions from the social capital of a community.   It's trust.  It's a struggle to trust like that, and to continue to choose that trust even when far easier options are available.  Whenever CharityFocus has more money than we need, we give it away; we could have paid staff by simply including ads in each of the 50 million emails we send.  CharityFocus encounters lots of opportunities to cash-in its goodwill, but it repeatedly chooses struggle, chooses to trust.  As a result, we don't get the security and vertical growth of a typical organization -- we get freedom from the seduction of duality.

Then, it is no longer about whether you scale or not, use money or not.  Those are real questions, but their answers are dynamically driven by the nuances of its imperfect context.  The real issue is about acknowledging the struggle, staying with the struggle, and holding our collective struggle with a heart of compassion.  The outcomes will be unpredictable, but the experience our interconnectedness is inevitable.

Posted by Nipun Mehta | comments (5) | permalink | more 'General' |