“I made my bed… Do I need to lie in it? Or can I make a different bed?”

In Week 6 of our inquiry to confront complicity in capitalism, we explore CHOICE, especially the places in work and money where it feels like the choice is all-or-nothing: full financial independence not relying on anyone, or complete merging of finances; everything separate or everything in common. 

We refuse to believe that… and try to find our way into the middle ground.

This week, we dive into the choice and middle ground in:

• How we work. Beyond “entirely dependent employee” or “fully independent freelancer.”

• How we do money. Playfully choosing what ways we interlink our finances, money, resources, needs.

• Beyond the project. It’s easier when there’s a project and budget and start/stop. What about in between projects?

• Opening possibilities that weren’t there. For example, applying for one job as two people. 

• Material limitations. Not all options are always on the table. 

• Choice in relationship. What if others aren’t in the same relationship to choice, and see it as more fixed.

We’re curious:

Where do you get caught in ‘all-or-nothing’ ?

How did you break out of it?

What beds have you made that can be made differently?

This is part of a new series called Confronting Complicity in Capitalism. This special series is a season of experiment to really look at money and privilege with care & joy rather than shame & blame.

As always, follow along on…

- video on LinkedIn (visible if you’re connected to me or Elena

- blog on Medium: https://juliash.medium.com

“When I accumulate, resources don’t flow.”

In Week 5 of our inquiry to confront complicity in capitalism, we reconnect to FLOW – how this inquiry flows beneath the surface even when life happens, how we are complicit in not flowing resources where we really want, how we can be choice-ful in how we live and work and spend.

This week, we dive into:

• Life happens. This conscious inquiry in the forefront … AND seeping in the background.

• The point is flow … YET accumulation is the opposite of flow.

• Privilege in capitalism. We are still complicit … WHILE we’re trying to create something new.

• The full range of options. Nurturing a multiplicity of alternatives… NOT just one logic: where to be in gift economy, in conscious exchange, in mutual aid, in other ways we don’t even know yet.

• How to be in this system … WHILE weakening capitalism from the inside out. Is that even possible?

We’re curious: How are you flowing resources in your world to subvert harmful systems?

This is part of a new series called Confronting Complicity in Capitalism. This special series is a season of experiment to really look at money and privilege with care & joy rather than shame & blame.

As always, follow along on:

• video on LinkedIn (visible if you’re connected to me or Elena)

• audio in the Impact Journey podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/impact-journey

• blog on Medium: https://juliash.medium.com/ 

Could I ever give away everything I’ve earned or inherited? What leads someone to make that choice?

In week 3 of Confronting Complicity in Capitalism, we take in the wisdom of someone who’s been doing this work — for herself, with her family, with others with privilege — much longer: Morgan Curtis at Solidaire Network.

I interviewed Morgan on this podcast, where she shares what led her to question the origins and impact of her family’s wealth, and to ultimately to give away all of her financial inheritance (before the birth of her first child, no less!).

As we listen to Morgan’s insights, Elena and I may not end up at the same conclusions, but are certainly challenged to dive into tough questions for ourselves:

• What does it mean to question whether ‘my’ money is ‘mine’?
• How have I fallen prey to capitalist conditioning to replace relationships with transactions?
• What would it take to ‘invest’ in a safety net that’s NOT based on accumulating money?

This is part of a new series called ⁠Confronting Complicity in Capitalism⁠. This special series is a season of experiment to really look at money and privilege with care & joy rather than shame & blame.

Follow along…

- video on LinkedIn (visible if you’re connected to me or Elena): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ugcPost-7445803475755499520-zQnc

- blog on Medium: https://medium.com/@juliash 

This podcast is part of a new series called Confronting Complicity in Capitalism. 

I cannot think of a better first special guest on this series as we confront our privilege: Morgan Curtis, who supports people with wealth and class privilege toward redistribution and repair, starting with herself.

THE IMPACT. Morgan Curtis:

• Supports people with wealth and class privilege toward redistribution, atonement, and repair. 

• Does this herself: redistributing 100% of her inherited wealth to Black- and Indigenous-led movements and land projects, and 50% of her coaching income.

• And supports others: as a facilitator, money coach, organizer and ritualist, both with individuals and with collectives like Solidaire Network and Resource Generation. 

• Lives in a multi-racial, cross-class, intergenerational intentional community: Canticle Farm. 

• Holds a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, where she focused on the spiritual dimension of reparations work for white descendants of colonizers and enslavers.

Mentioned resources:

• Article by Iris Brilliant: How to create safety and security without accumulating wealth

• The NPR podcast with Morgan challenging her dad and generations of inherited family wealth.

• The spectrum of allies. 

• Morgan’s extensive resource library on ancestors, money and redistribution.

THE JOURNEY. In our conversation, highlights that stand out from Morgan:

• Seeing complicity. "Capitalism: both my grandfathers worked on Wall Street. White supremacy: no one has ever taught me about race, but I'm coming to see that I am white. Colonialism: that's those creepy ancestors on the wall. I see that the pain I felt from what was happening on our planet this time couldn't be separated from the family history that I was born into, and the choices my ancestors made to extract so much from people and the planet."
• Capitalism and privilege.  "What capitalism conditions us to do, those of us that have privilege, access, wealth, is to replace relationships with transactions. This vicious cycle: we need help, we turn to money. We use money to buy a good or a service that we think is gonna help us meet our needs, then it doesn't. And we feel alone again. And we think we need more money to get a different strategy to meet that need. We are stuck thinking that we need more. The way our bodies know, our ancestors know, is that we meet needs through relationship with one another, with the earth, with place, with ancestors, with intergenerational community.”
• On finding her role. “People started finding me and whispering in the hallway ‘I secretly have a trust fund and I've never told anybody; can we talk?’ This might be the thing that I do: walk with, accompany, love the people that find themselves in this tension between the resources they inherited and the values they now hold."
• On accumulation and extraction. "Part of our responsibility is to [see that] no story of accumulation can be disentangled from a story of extraction. We live on a zero sum earth. When we have more than we need, others have less than they need."
• Not needing to convince everyone.  "The only strategic move is to work with your passive allies to get them to take action. Your opposition: bless them. May they change, may they see something different, if that's their path. For me, that was such a relief. My role is to support the people who feel disempowered, overwhelmed, confused, alone, but already have a longing within them to step onto this path."
• Parenting. "I could choose. Am I gonna accumulate money, save money to buy all the stuff and care and education that my children need? Or can I lean into strengthening the ties of community? I feel clear that's my path. And it definitely still involves money.”
• Who decides. “ Wait, am I really the right one to figure out how to change this world? I came out of the system that produced this mess. I can't ever really take it off, as much as I try to unlearn and learn.”

Confronting Complicity in Capitalism, Week 2: Stories We Tell

Week 2 of our experiment – and this week, we are physically in the same place! 

Which means… lots of rich inquiry into the stories that have been keeping us stuck in traditional patterns of money and privilege. 

We notice how many of our stories are false binaries:

• Spending less is better … yet accumulation is problematic
• Accumulation gives me safety and security … yet it means money doesn’t flow where it’s needed
• I’m only “legitimate” if I do paid work with a title and salary … or I reject it completely and stand alone
• I’m either dependent on others (and thus not in choice) … or independent (and thus separate)
• I’m either an “enslaved employee” … or an “entitled spoiled brat”

Follow along on video (LinkedIn) or audio (this podcast) and blog (medium).

As you listen, we’d love to hear: 

What stories or binaries do you hold?

What did you learn - or unlearn - about legitimacy?

This is part of a new series called Confronting Complicity in Capitalism. This special series is a season of experiment to really look at money and privilege with care & joy rather than shame & blame.

Our experiment has begun, and our first step is seeing clearly the privilege that makes our lives possible.

We start by taking honest inventory of what we have and where it comes from — diving into financial history, talking to family members. Without looking away. Without getting lost in shame or guilt. Naming what’s uncomfortable.

We recorded our conversation, and are sharing it here and video on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7442988454805827584-FtCe

Some big themes start to emerge:

• Accumulation and having more than I need
• Reconnecting to family history
• Security and the fear of losing it
• What is my money doing when I don’t see it

As we keep this conversation going, we wonder:

What comes up for you? What can you relate to?

This podcast is part of a new series called Confronting Complicity in Capitalism. 

This special series is a season of experiment to really look at money and privilege with care & joy rather than shame & blame.

On this first episode, I will share what this series is, and why it feels relevant now.

In future episodes, you’ll hear me and my colleague Elena working through this week by week. 

And I’ll be inviting special guests to help us make sense of it all.

We’ll also be sharing video on LinkedIn and written notes on Medium

In the latest episode of The Money Reckoning series, I speak with a next-gen wealth holder about the uncomfortable journey of questioning privilege and purpose.

THE IMPACT. Patrick Knodel:

• Is the founder of impact investing fund Innovation for Impact

• Is the CEO of the philanthropic Chancemaker Foundation

THE JOURNEY. In our conversation, we explore:

• Working for purpose and not for money. "I want to feel useful for the world, not just for myself. Let's be honest, in the current system, the best paid jobs are the ones that ruin the world. That's a systemic problem at the moment."

• Next gen wealth. "The baseline is always how can you keep the wealth in your family over generations? That's the bottom line. The standard is: can we accumulate and keep it? There's not even a question whether that's a good thing to do. That's just a given."

•  "I only have one life. There is an exchange between time and additional accumulation of money. "

• The inner fight. "How much do I wanna accumulate, to provide a safety net for my own family. And to what extent do I just wanna spend my time working so that it doesn't happen."

• Planning for the future.  "You can have all those scenarios,  own property and land in different parts of the world that you can reach anytime. And that's what rich people do. Do I want to be like that? No. Let's work really hard toward community and togetherness, so this doesn't happen."

• Wealth redistribution. "Climate change, biodiversity loss.  You go to the root cause then you have to talk about wealth and about wealth distribution, and nobody who really looks at the world from an outside perspective without taking his own privileged position can deny that the accumulation of wealth is the main root cause of all our problems."

This podcast is part of the Money Reckoning series.

THE IMPACT. Kazu Haga:

• Is a trainer, educator, student and practitioner with over 25 years of experience in nonviolence and restorative justice. 

• Weaves in lessons from decades of Buddhist practice and trauma healing work to advance social change and collective healing. 

• Is a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding member of the Ahimsa Collective, a Jam facilitator and author of the books Healing Resistance and Fierce Vulnerability. 

• Teaches nonviolence, conflict reconciliation, restorative justice, organizing and mindfulness in prisons and jails, schools, faith communities and activist movements.

• Has worked on the gift economy for over 15 years. I particularly recommend his Substack, and the article about how the “gift economy is not free.” 

THE JOURNEY. In our conversation, we explore:

Early influences

”Depending on the causes and conditions in our lives, we could be so many different people. We could be Trump supporters, we could be prison guards, we could be an incarcerated person… just based on just the factors in our lives.“

Big questions 

“The point isn't to figure it out. The point is to just be with the question, and have faith that at some point, if we listen deep enough, we'll be guided to the most skillful next step. And that's perhaps all we need to know.”

The healing work of nonviolence

“ What would happen if, in a nonviolent direct action, instead of yelling and chanting, we held a public grief ritual for everyone to witness? What would happen if, instead of leading with our anger, we led with our heartbreak?”

Fierce vulnerability

“Can we have the spiritual maturity and the capacity to really see the world for what it is and to not collapse under the weight of it?”

“The amount of spiritual energy that it takes to constantly suppress a deeper truth that I think all of us are feeling that something is so deeply wrong with our society … it is sapping us. You see the impact, the mental health epidemics, the depression, the sense of isolation. We're constantly using our energy to, to live in this delusion of everything's fine. Don't look, don't look.” 

Spaces safe enough to look at the reality of this moment

“ In a lot of the spaces that I facilitate, we do this activity where we do like check-ins and the first prompt is, how are you doing? And then the second prompt is, how are you really doing? And then the third prompt is, how are you really, really doing? We so rarely have an opportunity to slow down enough, just to say, how am I actually doing, in the midst of post pandemic and war and genocide and polarization and the rise of authoritarianism, and ecological collapse?”

Reckoning with capitalism

 ”People are slowly realizing more and more how unsustainable the capitalist system is. Those are scary moments. Because capitalism is all we've ever known. A lot of us believe that if capitalism fails, there'll be complete lawlessness. So just to create space for people to be with that fear, let them know that the fear is real, it's legitimate. And at some point I think there'll be openness to hear that there are other ways that we can organize society.”

The gift economy

“The gift economy is one way to really imagine: how do we share resources, distribute resources, manage our shared resources in a way that understands that we are a communal species. It's not through individualism and competition and hoarding that we thrive. We are at our best when we are communal.”

“It’s  not about how do I make more money so that I can thrive, but how do I make less money so that I have time to invest in the relationships that will really help me thrive?”

Running an organization on the gift economy

“ I started a nonprofit. We barely did any fundraising. We barely worked with foundations and somehow managed to become sustainable. Partly because we're committed to simple living. But so many things happened that gave me a sense this could work.”

I have been writing The Money Reckoning blog, untangling money at work, following a groundbreaking team change how they pay themselves.

I didn’t expect that I’d be tested.

I was recently asked to “value my time.” 

I've been questioning transactional vs gift nonviolent approaches.

Before, I would have responded with a rate.

Now, here’s a chance to actually try something different. But what, and how?

So I turned to a mentor, Roni Wiener, a brilliant nonviolent facilitator, who is walking the talk – moving from highly-paid consulting to offering their work as a gift – and sustaining much of their life through gifts.

I was fascinated – how would that even work?

So I asked Roni for a call, and we recorded our conversation.

Follow The Money Reckoning blog series.

Watch the video interview with Roni here.

THE IMPACT. Roni Wiener teaches groups to make decisions that care for everyone, on transforming collaboration and in partnership with nonviolence organizations like NGL. 

THE JOURNEY. Roni has moved from highly-paid consulting in the traditional capitalist model to offering their work as a gift – and sustaining their life with gifts. 

Here are the lessons I learned from Roni about the critical steps toward working in a gift economy:

We’re not in a gift economy – but we might be preparing

“We cannot actually operate in a gift economy, it is not possible for us to have enough access to gifts to meet needs.”

In an exchange culture, money is needed, but money is not a need

“Technically, money is not a need. What I really need is food and housing. You could gift me food to care for me. Sadly, our culture is not set up that way.”

Knowing my audience: where and who matters

“Sometimes it just doesn't make sense. At the local grocery store, I'm not going to start a conversation with them about: are you willing to gift me the groceries?”

Before talking to a client, I need to talk to myself 

“It really helps to have that clarity, because the conversation might already be uncomfortable because we're talking about money, or because we're talking about quite a change from the mainstream.”

Getting to numbers – knowing my limits

“Am I willing to receive zero? Is that an option? Hold clear limits. Otherwise, you may appear open to receiving nothing – that leads to friction and conflict.”

Getting to numbers – not my value, but my needs

“I'm not interested in ‘how much is my time worth’? I'm interested in ‘what would be sustainable for me to be able to offer this time as a gift to you?’”

Getting to numbers – not yes or no, but getting creative

“With one organization, their financial situation fluctuates. This didn’t come from me, they proposed it: what if we just look at the end of every month, and we just send you what we have left? Let's try it and see. I don't even know how much money that's gonna be. It was a complete mystery.”

Getting to numbers – my tolerance for risk

“ These are real consequences if we are not able to pay for things we have committed to paying, like housing. Really think through and not overstretch.” 

Find the right amount of stretch

“If you try to do too much too fast, and you end up not receiving enough money, you may get discouraged with the whole thing. And then you just stop trying.”

De-linking giving and receiving

“In a true gift economy, there is no link between gifting and receiving. I would gift you something, and receive from somewhere, not from you. That's not possible yet. I'm working to make that link less strong.”

Connecting to my privilege and class status

“Privilege in some ways makes it easier to have these experiments, because you have financial resources to lean on. And in some ways it's harder, because you're so used to leaning on money as a solution to all problems.”

This shift is a lifelong project

“ It's a big transition. This touches so many things: scarcity thinking; getting reconnected with generosity, with trust in life; increasing our risk tolerance; engaging with our addiction to comfort.”

THE IMPACT. Elspeth Jones:

- Is a non-profit leader, advisor and coach at the intersection of law, leadership and environmental and social impact.

- Was born and grew up Wales, is a Welsh speaker, and now lives in Wales with her family, where she enjoys going on adventures and exploring the outdoors.

- Initially practiced as a barrister in London and in law firms in Ghana, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

- Most recently, was Deputy CEO at the environmental law NGO, ClientEarth, using the power of the law to drive systemic change. 

- Was Executive Director of the climate change and sustainable development charity Size of Wales.

- Was a trustee for the Sumatran Orangutan Society, and is currently a trustee at the Esmee Fairbarn Foundation. 

- Now has her own advisory called Wild Counsel, where she supports those working at the critical intersection of law and environmental and social change with thought partnership

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THE JOURNEY. In our conversation, we explore:

- The evolution of what the law is for: From traditional commercial law to using law for environmental impact, from focus on clients' interests to representing the planet and ecosystems.

- Organizational growth and leadership: The challenges of scaling a nonprofit like Client Earth, balancing freedom and creativity with coordination, governance, and risk management, and the leadership challenges in guiding a growing team of lawyers.

- The complexities of measuring impact: How to assess success in systemic change when outcomes are often indirect or long-term, and the challenge of defining impact in a field where wins are not always immediately visible.

- Lessons from failure and loss: How losing cases can still drive progress by sparking critical conversations and shifting mindsets around the law and environmental responsibility.

- The mycelium in her new role: The importance of creating resilient networks and support structures within the legal and nonprofit ecosystems, and exploring the role of coaching, mentoring, and peer learning to amplify collective impact.