Go Far Together: The Two Year Journey of a Kola Nut

As 2019 comes to a close, the Kola Nut Collaborative has taken up residence in an office at Flood’s Hall which will allow us to broaden the number of regular programs we may to present to the public in furtherance of our mission to use timebanking as a method to cultivate social infrastructure. This development arises at the close of the year providing an opportune time to reflect on where we have been and are heading.

Between You & Me: Conversations on Space, Time and the Economy of Relationships w/Lara Oppenheimer

Editor’s Note: This article was originally written for The Literate Epoch in 2014 at a time when Chicago Time Exchange was experiencing a revival and is the product of a timebank trade for which I received tickets to the show. It was my initial introduction to our local timebank at the time and may be credited as one catalyst for my …

The Social Economy of Resilience Based Organizing

In a Solidarity Economy 101 planning session, the model of “Resilience Based Organizing” arose as part of general group discussion which presented an opportunity to offer some background on the meaning of the phrase. Resilience based organizing is rooted in the idea that organizing strategy and practice evolves very differently in front line communities where social position and an absence …

Lewis Hyde & The Tyranny of the Gift

Editor’s Note: The transformation of our economic model from one which values extraction for the purpose of monetization, securitization, and privatization requires a rigorous revision of the values we associate with money. Philanthropy as an element of an extractive economic model values a charity downstream which does not serve to prevent people from falling into a river upstream. We need …

Selections from The Money Paradox : TED Radio Hour : NPR

THE DESIGN OF MONEY: Whether discussing the evolutionary irrationality wired into our brains, contemplating how futured versus futureless languages change what and how we accumulate, or experimenting with the types of incentives that shift human behavior, a central premise of the episode that money is a technology capable of being iterated, upgraded, deprecated, or rendered obsolete based upon its utility …

Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

“Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we’re residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism. Now, a superorganism is a collection of …

Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein

“Money is an agreement. It doesn’t have value all by itself. It has value because people agree that it has value.” – Charles Eisenstein THE SHIFT TOWARDS THE GIFT: Economic globalization has served to reduce transactional redundancy by stripping out the local social infrastructure and communal relationships which form the foundation of a robust local economy. After this infrastructure was …

No Price Tags: These Neighbors Built Their Own Economy Without Money – yes! Magazine – Winter 2018

EDITOR’S NOTE: In solidarity with our St. Louis kinfolk who also seek to diminish the outsized role money plays in the social structure of modern communities. Cowry Collective is lifted up in praise by YES! Magazine. Midwest to Jackson to Bay to Atlantic Coast, a new economic story is giving rise to radically imaginative solutions to build tribe and weave community …