Last updated: September 1st, 2024.

Welcome 👋🏼

If you are here, we hope to have one intention in common: to cultivate a more liberating relationship with money and economy, rooted in reciprocity and abundance. This library of resources is curated by members of the Abundance Fellowship and our extended collective. It is open for anyone looking to proactively challenge the extractive, competitive and scarcity-driven practices dominating the mainstream economic system.

Be our guest and dive in! In case you have any related resources you would like us to feature on this page, simply write an email to [email protected] and we will consider it.

Table of contents

Introducing the Abundance Fellowship

Across sectors, cultures and life stages, social innovators around the world struggle with one aspect: money 💸.

The financial system is often at odds with our values, making our relationship to money complicated. The worst part is we are expected to cope alone with such a collective issue. We need a more holistic approach to our economic systems, one that can do justice to all people and the planet. Yet opportunities to practically experiment with these new and radical forms of wellbeing are rare.

<aside> 🫐 The Abundance Fellowship is an in depth program for social innovators looking to regenerate their relationship with money, economy and (a)livelihoods.

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What is economics for anyway?

“... It turns out that answer depends a lot on who you ask. On their website, the American Economic Association says, “It’s the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives.” (...) With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.

[Dr. Valerie Luzadis, professor of the US Society for Ecological Economics], prefers the definition that “economics is how we organise ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It’s a way of considering how we provide for ourselves.”

The words “ecology” and “economy” come from the same root, the Greek oikos, meaning “home” or “household”: i.e., the systems of relationship, the goods and services that keep us alive. The system of market economies that we’re given as a default is hardly the only model out there. Anthropologists have observed and shared multiple cultural frameworks coloured by very different worldviews on “how we provide for ourselves,” including gift economies.”

Source: The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Featured in The Emergence Magazine | Artwork by Studio Airport

The Abundance Fellowship is an in-depth, online, 3 months journey, open to social innovators around the world who feel ready to revisit their assumptions about the world and reclaim their inner economists towards more abundance and regeneration. We design and facilitate experiences that invite participants to co-travel from separation to interconnectedness, from scarcity to abundance, from extraction to reciprocity, from individualism to commoning and a sense of belonging.

Every year, up to 20 fellows get a chance to experience a conscious economy framework by sharing decisions, money and power, unlearning, remembering the ways of the gift economy, collaborating and developing a systems thinking lens in their lives and work. If you are curious to discover more about the journey itself, you can read this article we shared with our friends at ChangemakerXchange.

• Questions guiding our work and active experiments

Besides this annual, cohort based journey, we are also opening our work to a larger audience through the Abundance Masterclasses and this resources corner right here. 🤓

Appetizers

In case you don’t know where to start exploring this library, here are some of our favourite picks:

The Waterworks of Money | ****Carlijn Kingma, Thomas Bollen, Martijn van der Linden

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IszXpzIo_ZQ&t=1292s

Although money plays a key role in our lives, the workings of our monetary system are a mystery to most of us. ‘The Waterworks of Money’ by cartographer Carlijn Kingma is an attempt to demystify the world of big finance. It visualizes the flow of money through our society, its hidden power made manifest.

**Unlearning Economics** | Jon Erickson, Josh Farley, Steve Keen, Kate Raworth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC11UQD9q3w

In this lively discussion, each guest begins by sharing one fundamental aspect of what conventional economic theory gets wrong and how it could be improved in our education system. What areas has (mainstream) economic theory turned a blindspot to as the foundation of our economic systems?

Pluriverse - A Post-Development Dictionary | Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Arturo Escobar

This is a collection of over 100 essays on transformative initiatives and alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalised development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values.

The Serviceberry - An Economy of Abundance | Robin Wall Kimmerer

As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?

3000-year-old solutions to modern problems | a TEDx with Lyla June

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH5zJxQETl4

In this profoundly hopeful talk, Diné musician, scholar, and cultural historian Lyla June outlines a series of timeless human success stories focusing on Native American food and land management techniques and strategies.

**Boy and the World** | Alê Abreu’s Academy Award-nominated movie

Brazilian artist Alê Abreu’s Academy Award-nominated masterpiece is a vibrant cinematic experience that depicts the wonders and struggles of the modern world as seen through the eyes of a young boy.