gift economy – Pam Grout

Money is everywhere

February 28, 2018 45 Comments

“Happiness comes from many sources, but none of these sources involve car or purse upgrades.”—Mr. Money Mustache abundance

Last November, at an executive women’s retreat in Orlando, I met a brilliant CPA named Christi. I feel compelled to mention that I wasn’t at this weekend retreat because I’m an executive woman. I work in my pajamas. I was there because I was invited to give a two-hour presentation which, you’ll be happy to hear, I didn’t give in my PJ’s.

But this story isn’t about me.

It’s about Christi who is brilliant, not just because she helps clients with taxes and financial planning and all that other left-brain rigamarole, but because she helps them really understand money. Not in the way most of us understand money, but in the way money really is.

She considers it her duty to make sure they know that money is energy and that those numbers on their balance sheets and tax forms are a direct result of their thoughts and beliefs. She loves to tell them that money is unlimited and that it is only their thoughts and beliefs that could ever keep it away.

I’m thinking about money today because I just received my yearly bill from WordPress. WP is a free blogging platform, but I actually pay an annual fee so they’ll take all ads OFF my site. I figure it’s the least I can do for those of you who so generously take the time to read my posts

I write them out of sheer joy, as my own spiritual and creative practice. I write from my heart and I view them as a gift to anyone who cares to read them.

Which is why I don’t use my blog to promote what’s known as affiliate programs. You know–those posts that have the same spiel, the same wording and everything, from five different people. While there’s a certain kind of mad genius in promoting someone else’s program or product in exchange for a percentage of sales, I choose to turn down such invitations because I don’t view you as “a list.” You are my compadres in spiritual mischief, my friends, my sounding board. If I write about something, it’s because I’m genuinely excited about it.

So while Christi’s mission is to maximize and optimize finances, mine is to maximize and optimize joy. That’s why, as I often say, my goal is to become the Warren Buffet of Happiness.

And that’s what A Course in Miracles does. It helps us realize that the way we see ourselves and the world is upside down. It teaches us that living a wonderful, fulfilling life has nothing to do with finances and everything to do with how we see the world.

ACIM Lesson 59 encourages us to give up our pitiful illusions, to reach in and grab the absolute peace that abides within. It’s there within everyone, hidden under our thoughts and crazy beliefs, hidden under worry and stress and belief that money (or really anything at all) is limited. Limitation is a false construct that we have cemented in with our thoughts. It can be changed at any time.

Today, I encourage you to notice that, like Christi preaches, money (and abundance of all kinds) is everywhere.

You’ll find it by getting on a frequency of joy and gratitude. By taking off the blinders that block the presence and the radiance and the unforced generosity of the universe.

My service is to this presence. And to you, my dear friends, who have put a little bit of trust in me. For that, I say thank you, thank you, thank you.

Pam Grout is the author of 19 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her new book, Art & Soul,Reloaded: A Year-Long Apprenticeship to Summon the Muses and Ignite Your Daring, Audacious, Creative Side.

This CEO donates 100 percent of his profits to projects that address poverty

February 22, 2014 11 Comments

“I went broke and got fired before I found my calling.”
–Hal Taussig

Enjoy! One of my favorite posts from the past:

Hal Taussig will never make the Forbes list of highest paid CEO’s. It’s not that his Pennsylvania travel company isn’t profitable. Untours, the company he started in 1971 with a $5000 loan, pulls down annual profits of a million dollars, sending thousands of customers a year on shoestring cultural immersions to 24 destinations around the world.

It’s just that Hal donates every penny (yes, 100 percent) of the company’s profits to innovative projects that address poverty. He lives in a tiny two-room house with his wife Norma (she owns the century-old wood frame house that was built for mill workers), rides a bike to work (he gave his car away to a hitchhiker nearly 40 years ago), shops at thrift stores (his one suit cost $12 — “It’s a Brooks Brothers. I’m very proud of that suit,” Hal says) and refuses to take a salary. He has one pair of shoes that he resoles when they get worn and he reads newspapers and magazines at the library.

“I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to accumulate wealth,” Taussig says. “Things do not make people happy. Living simply is how I get joy out of life. I live a very rich life on very little money.”

In 1999, when John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Paul Newman awarded Taussig with a “Most Generous Business in America” award, he went to New York to accept it, but rather than staying in a hotel, he stayed in a $10-a-night youth hostel.

“I don’t feel right about staying in a five-star hotel when there are people who don’t even have a roof over their head,” he says.

As for the $250,000 award, he used the entire amount to help home health-care workers start their own business. His wife Norma had just had a stroke.

“The woman who was taking care of her was only making $8 an hour while the agency was making $18,” Taussig says.

“We give loans and provide a hand up, not a handout,” Taussig says. “I’m trying to make the poor into capitalists, to help them become self-sustaining, to give them a way to make a living.”

Since 1992, when he started the Untours Foundation, he has provided more than $6 million, in loans to support such ventures as NativeEnergy, which sells “green tags” to fund wind, solar, and methane power; strawbale housing on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation and Bionatur, an heirloom seed company born out of the efforts of the Landless Workers Movement.

“We look for really innovative things that have the potential to change the world,” says Elizabeth Killough, who works for Hal at the Foundation. “Hal is off the charts. I tell him I should pay HIM for the opportunity to work here. I used to be his consultant and when he asked me to work for him, I hesitated. Everybody needs heroes and I didn’t want to find out there was a dark side. But I’ve been here seven years now and he’s the real deal.

“Five years ago, he came to me and said, ‘Let’s make Media (Pennsylvannia where they’re headquartered) the first Fair Trade town in America. I laughed and couldn’t imagine what that would look like. I googled it just to humor him. And sure enough, there were fair trade towns in Europe. And we managed to get Media as the first Fair Trade Town in the U.S.or as they say in Europe, the first Fair Trade Town in the Americas.”

“He really walks the talk,” says his daughter, Marilee Taussig, who left corporate America to work for her dad’s company. “It’s an admirable way to live your life, but sometimes it’s hard to be a family member of someone who is such an idealist, someone who doesn’t believe in a safety net.

“I call myself the unheiress. If my dad had decided to leave me a million dollars, would I have turned it down? Absolutely not. But what he left me is something much richer and that is the ability to live what you believe in and put your money where your mouth is. It’s all well and good to talk about living simply, but it’s a whole other thing to live it.”

“Money is the least important thing a parent can give a child. My dad gave me integrity, a sense of humor and a sense of purpose,” Marilee says.

Marilee says the company itself is a real reflection of her dad’s beliefs. “It’s a nontouristy way of traveling.” He believes foreign travel means more if the traveler can live like the locals.

Taussig contends “Americans don’t really want to be herded about like sheep or cattle.”

His loyal customers, many who return year after year, agree.

“We’ve been on escorted bus tours, cruises, the kind of thing where they take you to a hotel, tell you to put your bags out by 6 and be at the bus by 7:01. But Untours are completely different,” says Jerry Nolan, a retired doctor from North Carolina. “There’s nothing quite so informative and educational as traveling with Untours. You become kissing cousins with the locals.”

As a boy, Taussig lived in a log house on a cattle ranch in Colorado. His mother made his underwear from flour sacks. After getting a college degree, he tried to get into the cattle business, but invested all his money in a bull that was sterile.

“I went broke and got fired before I found my calling,” Taussig says.

Taussig taught history at a high school for 10 years before taking a yearlong sabbatical throughout Europe. He and Norma and Marilee rented apartments, shopped in village markets and traveled by foot, bicycle, train, bus and boat.

“That was an educationally important year for me. It got me in deep touch with other cultures,” Taussig says. He wrote a book called <em>Shoestring Sabbaticals</em> and came up with the idea for Untours: a travel agency that enabled tourists to get to know a place intimately.

What does he think about AIG CEO’s making $17 million, Merrill Lynch brokers bringing in $32 million?

“I’m glad these issues are now being discussed. Piling up money doesn’t bring happiness. Having a huge bank account doesn’t produce a profound contentment in life,” Taussig says. “Wealth gets in the way of human kindness, joy and peace.”

To find out more about traveling with Untours, click here.

Pam Grout is the author of 16 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.

“When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”–Lao-tzu

July 10, 2013 7 Comments

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.”–Mary Oliver

Some people go to superhero movies. I prefer to BE a superhero. And by that I mean I actually dress up in a cape and bright costume and go out and perform good deeds.

In fact, in early October, I will join a whole band of bike-riding super heroes with names like “The Zing” and “Love Ninja” for a week of humble and spontaneous service. We’re meeting up in St. Louis.

And in honor of Ethan Hughes who started the International Superhero Headquarters and the Possibility Alliance on a 220-acre farm in northern Missouri, I’d like to re-run this post that ran last December.

Monetize, Schmonetize: the real juice is in the gift economy

You don’t need Alex Trebek or “buzzwords for $5000” to know that the internet’s top trend right now is “How do I monetize my website? My blog? My twitter feed?” Even YouTube offers monetization to prolific video uploaders.

Since I’ve been accused of being a “subversive presence on the planet,” I want to talk today about the exact opposite.

How do you un-monetize your life? How do you go against the culture’s dominant paradigm of wanting to “always get, get, get” and practice what’s known as the gift economy?

The gift economy, a philosophy more than a financial practice, is one in which people refuse to believe in scarcity and fear. Instead of always trying to “get more,” a gift economy is for those looking for ways they can give. It’s so radical that most people can’t even understand it.

I pitched a story about the gift economy to my editor at People magazine. She loves heroes, good news, and heart-warming human interest stories. But even though I gave her three specific examples of people working solely in the gift economy, she couldn’t understand it. “But how does it work?” she kept repeating.

It works, although I could never explain this spiritual belief to her, because once you give up your incessant fear and belief that it’s a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for himself world, abundance can’t help but show up in your life. It’s actually the reality of the human condition, but as long as we’re “monetizing” and erecting walls of fear, we block abundance.

Perhaps the best example of the gift economy is Nipun Mehta, a guy I consider my hero, the guy I begged my People editor to let me profile. In April 1999, when he was 25, he gave up his lucrative paycheck at Sun Microsystems to become a full-time volunteer. A fan of Gandhi, who said, “be the change you wish to see in the world,” Mehta started “giving” as an experiment. He started with money (he gave to charity), moved to giving of his time (volunteering at a hospice) and then decided he’d go full-time, giving of himself unconditionally with no strings attached. Thirteen years later, his experiment has been a huge success.

He started a free restaurant, a free inspirational magazine and has given away hundreds of millions of dollars in free tech services. He’s a Stanford-trained engineer who was raking it in during the dot.com heyday. But he wasn’t sure that’s where happiness lay. He works with a network of more than 100,000 volunteers who operate on 3 principles:

1) Everything is strictly volunteer. Money is NEVER charged

2) No one ever ASKS for money. Many charities do good work, but they all ask for donations. They do endless fundraising. He says that forces people to be in a needy space and he comes from a space of believing in abundance and the goodness of mankind. And indeed, money has shown up in spades (from the billionaire founder of Sony, as just one example) and from anonymous donors who send in checks for $10,000 or more. But Nipun and crew NEVER ask or expect.

3) They focus on small actions. “You just take care of what you can touch, give to whatever is in front of you,” he says and the ripple effects have organized into what he calls their own magic. “I can tell you story after story.”

The Karma Kitchen that he and fellow volunteers started in Berkeley (there are no prices on the menu and the check reads $0.00) spawned karma kitchens in Washington D.C. and Chicago.

“We don’t charge for anything, nor do we advertise anything. The project is sustained by anonymous friends who donate what they can, not as a payment for what they have received but as a pay-it-forward act for someone they don’t know,” Mehta says.

In place of financial capital, Mehta and his network of volunteers are building social capital, synergy capital and a type of subtle capital beyond definition.

Another one of my heroes is Ethan Hughes the guy I mentioned earlier that started the Superheroes Alliance, a group of 700 living, breathing superheroes. Everything he and his wife Sarah grow on their farm at the Possibility Alliance, they give away. They’ve given away goats, fruit bushes, seeds, soil and compost. They’ve given trees to every major city in Missouri. Most importantly, they host more than 1500 people a year who come to their farm from around the country to learn about permaculture. Permaculture classes normally start at about $1500. But Ethan and Sarah give them away free.

“At first people are shocked. So few mainstream Americans believe someone would actually give something away free with no ulterior motives. We’re in a cynical society that rarely trusts someone who says, “hey, I just want to help.”

The Hughes and their network of volunteers have helped build a library, bucked hay for a fellow farmer, cleaned up city parks and donated something like 50,000 hours of community service…all with no expectation.

“It’s really important to me to create access, and the gift economy is about access,” Ethan says.

Another example is Dr. Binal Shah, a naturopathic doctor with a biology degree from Rutgers, who offers a gift economy medical practice. She calls it the Karma Clinic and says it’s not about giving away “free” healthcare. It’s about sharing an experience of generosity that has the potential to shift both the giver and the recipient.

That’s why I say, “forget monetizing.” Think about something important, like what gifts do you have to give.

Pam Grout is the author of 16 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.