Habitat Re•Imagined

Sustainable Community

The Healthy Money Summit

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Last week 24 pioneers of change presented a free teleseminar series to help people create a”healthier, happier, and more productive relationship with money”. The Healthy Money Summit was hosted by Vicki Robin, coauthor of Your Money or Your Life which is considered by many as one of the best foundational resource for getting a healthy perspective on this vital issue. The goal was to provide a glimpse of the following hopeful solutions to our current economical conditions:

  • New ways of earning and spending that liberate your time and passion for your real life’s work
  • New investment strategies that favor the triple bottom line and sustainable business practices
  • New psychologies that favor generosity and sharing over hunkering down
  • New currencies that favor connection and community over hoarding and lack
  • New economies that favor Main Street over Wall Street, and prioritize community well-being as the new bottom line
  • And a new money spirit of “enough for all,” rather than “winner takes all”

If you missed the summit,  the good news is that everything was recorded for ongoing free access. Check it out and register here. If you don’t have time to listen to everything, Vicky Robin will be presenting a follow up teleseminar Thursday, Feb. 3 at 5PM PST. In addition to a summary of the most important points of the Summit, she will also introduce a few of the key principles from Your Money or Your Life:

  • The 5 most important myths and limiting beliefs about money and happiness and what you can do to shift them.
  • How to inventory your lifestyle and align your spending with your deepest values.
  • Key practices for increasing joy and decreasing stress in your life by eliminating what doesn’t fulfill you.
  • A deep understanding of the nature of money and how you can transform your relationship to it.

You can find out more info on Viki’s telesminar here, and be sure to check out my previous post for more resources on Your Money or Your Life.

Join The Revolution – Move Your Money

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Last year at this time Arianna Huffington from Huffington Post challenged Americans to a New Year’s Resolution that had potential to start a revolution. Within a week the Move Your Money Project had become a “movement” to help relocalize our economy. Within that week 7000 Facebook fans signed up and today, one year later, there are 36,345 fans. In addition, there have been many other initiatives started to encourage this movement that seems to have plenty of agreement on both the right and the left. By mid year it was estimated that 5 billion dollars was moved from 2 million accounts in big banks to local responsible institutions.

Another Facebook page, started by a more conservative former banker and president of an investment firm, states “It is time that Americans began to vote with their money and tell the Wall Street bailout banks & the Federal Reserve paper dollar where to go…Dr. Gary North on the right, and Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post on the left, are urging freedom loving Americans to move their funds out of the bailout banks to smaller local financial institutions who still make loans.

Along the way many people have heeded the call of this movement, including groups that have collectively challenged the banking system. Early last year, the City of Los Angeles voted to move their money from banks that don’t comply with their new “responsible banking practices” motion. Another group that stands out  is the  members of 50+ congregations associated with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization who collectively closed more 100 accounts at the Bank of America on November 17.

This all seems like a no brainer to me. “We the people” have allowed the Wall Street banks to get bigger than life. Over the past 30 0r 40 years the majority of Americans have moved their money from local institutions to the big banks in favor of better interest and convenience. In the same way that many of us have removed our support of other local businesses in favor of “more” and “cheaper”, we have contributed to the corporate and governmental corruption that has shaken the foundations of our economy.

Well, it is time to reverse the trend. Although it is a complex subject with many aspects to consider, one thing we can do is take responsibility and vote with our money. It is time to stop complaining about the government and start exercising the freedom we have to do what we can do. It is time to relocalize our economy and once again support out neighbors. It is also time to help Wall Street come down to earth.

So here it is another New Year and, if you haven’t already, a great time to join the revolution. For more information check out the Move Your Money Project website and be sure to watch the video that started it all:

Your Money or Your Life

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I am not sure I ever met anyone without issues around money. Most people worry about having enough and/or feel guilty about having too much. We spend incredible energy accumulating it, figuring out how to spend it, and then maintaining what we spent it on. More energy goes into storing enough for the future and protecting that storage from loss and theft. Then there is the politics – but I will save that for another time.

Most people spend their life energy on these issue and never even get to what they really would love to do. From childhood on, we are taught the importance of money. It is a measurement of responsibility, success, and prestige – and we are taught to prioritize it above most other values. In one way or the other, whether overtly or subtly, we learn to trade our life energy for money.

We now live in a culture where the majority are enslaved by debt, living passionless lives, and where too much is never enough. We also live in a culture where it has finally caught up with us. People are taking their heads out of the sand and looking at life with fresh eyes. It is time to question what we have learned, reprioritize our values, and discover the luxury of enough.

Your Money or Your Life, written by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, is one of the all time best guides for exploring your relationship with money. This book is not only a great resource for getting out of debt and saving money, but it was written to help people reorder priorities, resolve inner conflict, and attain a wholeness of livelihood and lifestyle.The book is a primer for straightening out those issues with money, and several programs have been written to facilitate the process.

The Financial Integrity Program is one of those – a nine step process to reclaim your life.

  • Step 1. How much money has come into your life – what do you have to show for it?
  • Step 2. Being in the present: Tracking your life energy
  • Step 3. Where is it all going: Monthly tabulation
  • Step 4. Three questions that will transform your life
  • Step 5. Making life energy visible: Your wall chart
  • Step 6. Respecting your life energy: Minimizing spending
  • Step 7. Respecting your life energy: Maximizing income
  • Step 8. Capital and the crossover point
  • Step 9. Securing your financial independence

Holistic Sustainability

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A foundational aspect of sustainability is to think holistically. It seems, even for those of us who try to think that way, the human tendency is to compartmentalize life. We tend to separate and focus on either the physical, emotional, or spiritual dimension of life and neglect the others. Even among health practitioners that acknowledge body, mind, and spirit one mode of healing is often focused on without integration of others.  It seems we are in a constant struggle for balance and, perhaps, it is balance that really is the solution to sustainability.

To be sustainable means the ability to endure. It is our capacity to continue day to day, month to month, year to year, generation to generation. It involves the needs of the individual, the family, the local community, and the the world as a whole. And it requires the balance of environmental, economic, and social concerns.

For the past forty years environmental sustainability has come more and more into focus. There is a growing concern about the sustainability of our energy sources and water supplies, our consumption of natural resources, the ability to process our waste, and other issues concerning our impact on the planet that sustains us.

Peak oil suggests that we are near the earths capacity for daily oil production – not to mention our dependency on foreign sources and the relations that involves. Along with peak oil, there is reasonable concern for our diminishing aquifers and the earths capacity for replenishing our water supply. Our consumption of resources has threatened ecosystems and species of life around the world, and our landfills are exhausted by the waste we produce.

Economic sustainability, also a growing concern for some time, has come into focus the past several years as personal investments have been lost and financial stability across the globe has been threatened. The concern of increased debt on a personal, corporate, and governmental level along with decreased employment and monetary value has suddenly shifted into awareness as the bubble we produced had suddenly burst. More and more people are considering their relationship with money – the debt they maintain, the business they support, and the luxury of enough.

Social sustainability, probably the key to sustainability in general, is the third leg to balance the sustainability stool. We are in vital need of support and collaboration with one another to find the solutions. We live in a time that demands that we once again learn to know our neighbors – this time in a deeper way that enables us to join hands in building a sustainable future for all.

I also want to add spirituality to the mix for pursuit of holistic sustainability. We must cultivate a worldview that sees our connection to all people and the environment we share. It is time to transcend our egos to embrace diverse opinions and perspectives. It is time to cultivate the understanding, wisdom, and compassion we need for balance and endurance.

The Story of Stuff

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I have always been baffled by the encouragement in our culture to purchase stuff we don’t need in order to boost the economy and provide jobs. It doesn’t seem to take much more than common sense to realize that doesn’t make much sense – especially sustainable sense. Sure, spending money on its own merit might temporarily boost a sagging economy but, long term, it only seems to enslave the masses with debt and increase the size of our homes, storage sheds, and landfills.

If we are serious about sustainability, both economic and environmental, one of the most important issues we all need to consider is our addiction to comfort and convenience. Somehow we must back out of our consumer culture and help to create a new culture based on need and care. If you haven’t seen this already, check out the Story of Stuff for a great reality check.

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