Why our courses are not for sale (and what this has to do with your child)

“I think that everybody carries in their hearts the knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible. Children feel it. Teenagers especially feel it very strongly, and we call it idealism. But many forces conspire to tell us: “That’s just youthful idealism and you’ll grow out of it.” 

Charles Eisenstein

By Sally Prebble (PhD), Co-founder of Peace Talks NZ

What is the link between your daily struggle to get your child into the car and the increasingly worrisome world economic order? This link may not seem immediately obvious, but we believe it is well worth examining.

Usually, what we offer in these monthly reflections is our insights, learning, and stories about how parents and families can create more connected relationships and come back into peaceful wholeness with each other. This is the “what” of our mission at Peace Talks. 

But occasionally, we like to challenge ourselves to speak about the “how” of our mission, including our choice to offer all of our work on a Gift Economy (pay what you are willing and able) basis. It is this question that we delve into this month, including some of the more uncomfortable and vulnerable bits.

If you find yourself thinking, “I think I’ll just skip this one, because what I really care about is the practical parenting stuff” - fair enough. We honour and respect your choice.

….and, we also extend a gentle invitation to pause and consider with us whether the way we operate economically in the world - the primary methods we choose to collectively meet our needs - might have everything to do with how we raise our children and the challenges you face in your day-to-day family context. 

We see our world as being in a moment of critical and accelerating breakdown of connection; disconnection with each other, with nature and the planet, with our children, and within each of us. We experience first hand in our work the numerous ways that our current economic system perpetuates this disconnection and impacts the wellbeing of parents, families and children, not just for those living in poverty, but for everyone. 

The what and the how our work at Peace Talks are not really separate; to us, they are importantly interconnected. They both represent our heartfelt response to the painful events playing out in the world right now, and they both relate critically to our ongoing mission to reconnect people. 

What is the Gift Economy?

(Or, Why is your business model so confusing?)

One of the defining (though, sometimes invisible) features of our work at Peace Talks is that our services are not for sale. Everything we offer (from in-person training, online programmes to mediations and one-on-one sessions) are offered to you freely, as a gift. If you need our support, you can have it, whether or not you are able to contribute financially. 

We are aware this can be a bit confusing for people. I recently found myself in a road-trip conversation with a friend who was left a little perplexed at my stumbling attempts to explain. 

"Our courses are all freely given, but they are not free." I ventured.

 "All of our support is available to anyone who needs it, even if they can't pay....but we're not externally funded," I went on.

"People are welcome to choose any amount they are able to contribute, but it's not because we don't have financial needs ourselves….." I could see my friend’s eyes scanning the farms we were driving past in her brave attempt to fit our work into existing familiar categories like “business” or “charity”.

We are part of a small, but growing, movement of people and organisations around the world who are choosing to step out of conventional market-based economic practices, where money is exchanged for goods and services rendered, and choosing instead to operate in a different way.

The Gift Economy movement is not a new idea; it is arguably the original idea about how to organise ourselves economically.¹ In its modern form, it is an attempt to recapture a model of operating that sustained humans on earth for the first few hundred thousand years of our life on this planet.

During the vast majority of our existence, humans have lived in communities where resources were shared largely on the basis of needs, with care, gifting, and reciprocity being the critical mechanisms for meeting needs, and gratitude being a large part of the social glue holding us together. If someone needed food, shelter or some shoes, these were provided by the community because a) people cared about each other, and b) they could trust that they would be similarly cared for. 

This is not a ‘Disneyfied’ reinterpretation of the past; it is simply the way things worked before the concept of monetary transaction and market exchanges came into play. This is still, largely, the way we operate in the small social units of families, where, for the most part, we share resources on the basis of who needs them, because we care, not because we profit from offering these services. 

Since founding Peace Talks in 2022, we have operated entirely using a gift economy model, asking people to contribute financially to our programmes and services at a level that is affordable and sustainable for them, even if that means they cannot contribute financially. No one is turned away. No questions are asked. No proof of income needed. 

Why would we adopt such an unusual (or "risky" as business advisors might call it) approach? We see this way of operating as giving us a way to:

• Create systems where resources can flow to needs.² This approach removes financial barriers and has allowed us to offer support to people (and communities) who have not been well served by traditional “market price” services. 

• Care for integrity and alignment with our values. We see the values of connection, care and compassion that are at the heart of Nonviolent Communication as the guiding principles of our lives, not “add ons”. The gift economy approach allows us to contribute in a way that is fully aligned with our values and our hope for change in the world. 

• Experiment with ways of living that are grounded in NVC principles and consciousness. We want the people we work with to have a powerful experience of what needs-based living can look like in the “real world”, not just at the level of inner consciousness or in relationships with loved ones, but at the level of the systems that govern our lives and how we operate with each other in the world.

We work everyday with people who are struggling (and whose children are struggling) to manage in an economic system that relentlessly prioritises parents as sources of labour over their role in providing deep, consistent connection with their children.  We are therefore passionate about exploring, sharing and modelling an alternative vision for the world where care and connection are prioritised in every area of life, including how we give and receive financially.

How to live a gift-based approach in a transactional world

(Or, But you can’t pay your mortgage with a bag of carrots)

It's all very well to dream up alternative models, you might be thinking; but that isn’t actually how the world works. The “real” world involves jobs, and economic responsibilities, and skyrocketing petrol prices, school uniforms to buy, mortgages and rent to pay. How does it actually work to operate a “give-what-you-can” model in a world that runs on money, stocks and bitcoin?    

As it turns out, with some degree of challenge. (Thanks for asking).

The gift economy is not just a “different way of doing things”, it is a complete paradigm shift. We continue to be fascinated by the number of deeply-baked assumptions that are built into our current transactional economic practices that make it quite challenging to operate in a different way. We notice these biases in ourselves, those we support, as well as in the cultural milieu, and they are worth teasing out because they also serve to perpetuate the disconnection that we are all working so hard to repair. 

1. “We need money”

We commonly talk about money as though it were a need, but, in the parlance of Nonviolent Communication, it is actually a strategy - a way to meet needs. If you give me this thing, I will give you this money, and with that money, you can meet all sorts of needs, including some pretty life-essential physical needs like food, clothing and shelter.

In theory, there are all sorts of other, non-monetary strategies we could use to meet our physical needs: growing our own food, bartering or trading, operating in shared-risk cooperatives or communities to name a few. 

Nevertheless, money continues to be a very convenient strategy for meeting needs, and it can be extremely difficult to meet basic, physical needs in modern industrialised countries without money. (The bank seems quite reluctant to receive a bag of vegetables in lieu of a mortgage payment, for example.)   

When people first hear about our gift economy approach, a common assumption is that our offerings must be paid for with external funding (such as a government grant or charity funding), or they assume that our livelihood is already taken care of in other ways.

Our reality is that our work is supported solely by financial contributions from our community. The biggest challenge for us over the past four years is that the income we have received has been far below minimum wage relative to the hours we work, leading to an impact on our capacity, energy and ongoing financial uncertainty and at times, strain. 

Our exploration into the gift economy has given us an unexpected opportunity to explore money as a strategy rather than a need: Which needs do we actually want to meet using money? How much money would be "enough" to meet our families' physical needs (e.g. for food, shelter, clothing)? What other needs are we also wanting to meet with money? What other ways might we be able to meet these needs without money? 

This exercise is sobering, humbling, and highly recommended. For us, this ongoing exploration has revealed that we (Jorinde and Sally) are in quite different financial situations, and have different needs in relation to our financial requests. The gift economy has opened us to a depth of communication, transparency and mutual care that has deepened our NVC practice.

"Relationality" is the word often used to describe this phenomenon. When you start to ask "what do you need?" rather than "what do you deserve?" or "what are you owed?" (or similar, transactional questions) a whole new level of human relationality is opened up. 

2. “We should be (financially) independent” 

Money is a strategy that allows humans to meet our needs without seeming to need other people - it hides, disguises and obscures our reliance on each other and the planet. I can be paid by an electronic transfer, use a piece of plastic to pay for equally plastic items, and have them delivered magically to my door all without any trace of the human hands that facilitated each step.

There is a meditation I quite like involving a raisin (or any other food, if you are a raisin-hater like my son). You hold, look at, feel and gradually taste the raisin  while focusing on each moment of its journey to you, from the sun first touching the leaves on the grapevine, the fertile soil snuggling around its roots, each human who pruned and watered the plant, harvested the ripe fruit, dehydrated the grapes, bagged, boxed and transported them, bringing them across the world to a shop, and so on and so forth. 

Not only is this a mind-opening exploration into food miles and industrialised farming, but also, more importantly for this discussion, highlights the fragile, interconnected web of humanity that is rendered invisible within transactional market economies.

“Freedom from relational obligation” is what Adam Wilson calls this historically odd state of independence from each other, where our actual reliance on each other and the plant is obscured and we are relieved from any sense of corresponding reciprocity, mutuality or gratitude.³

Money also allows us to meet various needs that would traditionally be met within human relationships, "relationally", like being valued, appreciated or cared for.⁴ If these needs are met through our wealth and material accumulation, then our reliance on each other, and our web of social interconnection, is weakened (thus making it increasingly harder to meet these needs relationally, creating a self-perpetuating cycle). 

When we stepped into a gift-based model, we were suddenly confronted with the shocking vulnerability and beauty of our deep interdependence as humans. We have experienced this from both sides of "the gift": from the perspective of offering our gifts, and seeing the confused mix of relief, appreciation, fear (yes, fear), uncertainty and anxiety all registering in the other person; and also from the perspective of experiencing the overwhelming inner turmoil that can accompany receiving from others.

I imagine this tumult has something to do with our loss of shared cultural practices about what to do with our gratitude: how to pass this on, and how to hold ourselves and each other with care and dignity in moment of giving and receiving, and what to do with our gratitude.

Gratitude seems to function best within interdependent circles: I give to you, you give to them, they give to them over there, and eventually, the wheel completes its gentle circle and someone gives to me. This works quite naturally within a closed community, but it is less clear how this might work in the large and disconnected world systems we are currently floating in.    

These are questions we still grapple with, and ones that we see as being at the very heart of what makes this approach so valuable.

“It’s supposed to be uncomfortable, even scary; that’s what makes it a practice. It’s supposed to work on me as much or more than the person receiving…” says Wilson.⁵

This is very much our experience too. 

3. “Money is something you have to earn” 

When people say “earn”, they might just mean in the descriptive sense that most of us receive money as a return for our time, labour or effort. But this language can lead us down a dark and winding garden path, because “earn” can also mean “worthy or entitled to”. When we say we earn (or don’t earn) money, we therefore imply that we deserve (or don’t deserve) the money.  

When you combine this with the first assumption (that we ‘need’ money), we end up with a narrative that people ‘deserve’ the needs they have met, and also deserve the needs they cannot meet.  If a person is sitting in a million dollar mansion, with all of their material needs met, we imagine this is because they have earned (i.e. deserve) it. The painful corollary is the story that those who don’t have money have similarly earned, or deserve, their poverty.

We see in our community the painful and uncomfortable truth that those who most need our support are often less able to contribute financially. It is rarely the case that times of need neatly align with times of material wealth.

Just pause to think about the logic of this for a moment - why would it be that when I am in greatest need of support, I would also, coincidentally, be most flush economically? In our period of history, with our current economic system in place, it is much more likely that times when I most need support and care will also be times when I will have less capacity to contribute financially. We live in a world where resources tend to flow (in a wide, tumultuous river) to those who already have quite a lot.

Does this mean that those who need more support, but lack the financial means to pay for this support, deserve it any less? We ardently believe not.  In our work, we strive to decouple need and means as much as we can. We want our support and services to flow as directly as possible to those who need them, bypassing the (largely irrelevant) port of “financial means”.

4. “Price is a good indicator of value” 

Another common story is that if something costs more, it has more value; conversely, if something is worth less, it is “worthless”. We are indoctrinated into the belief that there is a direct correlation between cost and value from an early age. When we pay more for something, we assume we should value it more, be more motivated to use it, be more proud of it or more committed to it.   

This behavioural quirk has not gone unnoticed by the marketing industry. The advice that we are consistently given as “business owners” and “course creators” is that we should “show” people the “value” of our offering through the size of the price tag. The advice is to offer “high ticket” courses (meaning big price tag) as a way to attract and motivate clients, and to “help” them to appreciate the value of the services you are offering. 

It has been an ongoing challenge for us to communicate the value of our courses and programmes in a world that largely measures value in economic terms. We design our programmes to be very rich, intensively supportive offerings, with our priority being to provide the amount and type of support, care and knowledge that people actually need to make real and lasting transformation in their lives. We are aware of similar offerings being sold for many thousands indicating a “market value”; however, we are aware that our offerings are sometimes seen as being “free”, or “low ticket”, impacting their perceived value and (we fear, at times) people’s motivation to engage fully. 

We understand the confusion; in our binary world, the opposite of charging for something is that it is “FREE”. Our services, support and care are freely offered to anyone who needs them; but they are not free. They are created and offered with love, care and a flow of human energy, years of experience and training, our time, work and effort. Anyone who needs the support, for whatever reason, is invited warmly and with a whole heart to accept this support.

Our offerings are not free in the sense that the mishmash of broken items sitting in a plastic tub outside an op-shop are “FREE”. Our offerings come from our hearts and have a life in them that comes from the passion we have for contributing to a new world. 

Rather than responding by "putting our prices up”, we have consistently chosen to put (sometimes considerable) time and energy into communicating the value of what we offer and giving alternative perspectives about how we might assess value through a needs-based lens. We want to offer the support people need when they need it, and we trust that those we care for are able to experience the value of this gift in their lives. 

5. “Business success means turning a profit”

An unfortunate consequence of the previous assumptions is that our society is structured, sometimes to an alarming extent, so that those with more money and resources have more say in society, more power, more options, more connections, more (in the words of my Gen Alpha kids) clout, riz, and aura.A "successful", influential person is defined as one with greater wealth; a "successful" business is defined as one that is turning a profit.

The whole world is currently watching aghast as we see the painful consequences of designing a world this way playing out before us. In a world structured to elevate and protect the voices of those with more, it is no wonder that those with less tend to be valued, and to value themselves, less. 

Our work through Peace Talks, by design, cannot be valued based on its “financial success”.  We cannot wave a spreadsheet at people to prove the value or “success” of our efforts. In fact, a “successful” year measured by the number of people we have supported, or the depth of support we have offered, could correlate with a year where the financial numbers look much worse. (This makes for many interesting conversations with our accountants). Even within our own close personal circles and families, the work we do is often invisible, or casually disregarded, because our spreadsheets do not paint a picture that people associate with a “thriving business”.

And yet, we continue to experience joy and celebration in our work and choose not to see a financial spreadsheet as the measure of our endeavours. Instead, we choose to celebrate the lives we have the privilege of interfacing with, the moments of reconnection in the families we are lucky enough to share, and the joy of operating in a way that is fully aligned and in integrity with our values. We count our successes in the needs we are able to meet for integrity, contribution, purpose, interdependence and community. 

We don't strive to make a profit from Peace Talks, but we do long for sustainability and sustenance. If we are able to contribute our gifts in a way that makes a difference to the lives of others, while at the same time sustaining our families, we see this as an unmitigated “success”.  

How the gift economy relates to parenting

(Or, Our kids are not fooled)

As promised, I want to return to the question of what these big philosophical and economic explorations have to do with parenting, and the intimate day-to-day challenges you might experience with the children in your life. 

In our writing and teaching, we often share the perspective that a large part of the struggles we face as modern parents is systemic: a challenge of isolation, a breakdown of community, a lack of support and systems that create separation. Our children are struggling (and therefore, so are we), because their deep human need for attachment is very challenging to meet in a world that encourages separation and does not prioritise care, connection and togetherness. 

Our children are the canaries in the proverbial mine. If our children are not ok (and so many of them are not), this is not, as we are consistently encouraged to believe, solely due to a series of unrelated, individual challenges relating to our parenting, or the individual quirks in our children's brains, mental health or behaviour.

This is a systemic challenge in the world that our children are en masse responding to. The pointy end of these systemic challenges are felt by us as parents, through our daily experiences with challenging behaviour, meltdowns and resistance.

Our children are acting out the pain of a global crisis of disconnection in our individual living rooms each day. All of this can be understood as an eloquent scream from the collective children of earth to stop the madness and reclaim a world that can actually care for them, and for their parents.  

Perhaps none of us, alone, can hope to make much of a difference to changing the enormous economic and social machinery that creates these painful symptoms, but what we can do is to choose to start living, in whatever small ways we can manage, as though this alternative world already existed. We can choose to live the change we want to see in the world, or as Yoram Mosenzon puts it: “live the needs we want to see in the world”.⁶ 

This is the choice we are making by continuing to operate Peace Talks on a Gift Economy basis, even though it is often quite challenging to do so. We are choosing to live in a world in which we care for each other, we support each other, and we can operate from deep connection to each other and the natural world, and we can give and receive from a generosity of heart.

We are choosing to reclaim this world each and every day. 

By Sally Prebble (PhD), Co-founder of Peace Talks NZ

Building a Circle of Support

(Or, Does anyone share our wild enthusiasm to find another way?)

At this tender stage of Peace Talks development, we have been exploring (with some brave and supportive souls) a new step of building a much needed “Circle of Support” for us, to offer financial and other kinds of support that would hold us with loving and caring arms without expectation of reciprocity, as we do the same for the people we care for. 

We are hoping to find a network of people who are passionate about the gift economy approach, alternative economic systems, sharing NVC, or who are simply interested in supporting our work. This might include financial support (e.g. regular contributions) but could also include support with networking, sharing our work, mutual learning, networking and collaboration about the gift economy (and other alternative economic models). The act of simply taking time to understand the how of our work is a deeply meaningful contribution for us. 

We can imagine ourselves being inspired to reach out to this group through periodic writing and sharing about the gift economy and our work through an email broadcast, separate from this main Peace Talks newsletter, and having space on our website dedicated to sharing about the gift economy.  

If you feel moved to take part in this group, we would be so excited to welcome you into this early conceptualising stage of our Peace Talks Circle of Support. We don't know what form this will take yet - it is collaborative and emerging, but for now, an interest in understanding and a sense of enthusiasm for this vision are the only prerequisites.  Please have a look here if you are inspired to support us!

References

1. Vaughan, Genevieve. Reclaiming our Maternal Heritage. http://gift-economy.com/reclaiming-our-maternal-heritage/

2. Thank you to our dear friend and colleague, Danny Cohen, for this beautiful phrase. https://artofcommunication.life/

3. Wilson, Adam. The Deep Green Gift of Life: From denunciation to renunciation. https://peasantryschool.substack.com/p/the-deep-green-gift-of-life

4. Kashtan, Miki. From Exchange to Gifting Part Three: Reintegrating into Flow One Experiment at a Time. https://thefearlessheart.org/from-exchange-to-gifting-part-three-reintegrating-into-flow-one-experiment-at-a-time/

5. Wilson, Adam. The Deep Green Gift of Life: From denunciation to renunciation. https://peasantryschool.substack.com/p/the-deep-green-gift-of-life

6. Yoram Mosenzon, https://www.connecting2life.net/trainer/yoram-mosenzon/