Rekindling a Gift Economy
When we gift our services, we create social capital; when we aggregate the cognitive surplus of that community, we discover our organizational capacity; and when the Internet connects those strands into a collective network, the feedback loops between givers and receivers exponentializes the number of gifts. We end up rekindling a “gift economy”.
At a coffee table conversation in Chicago, a few volunteers wondered if we could shift the energy of college pranks towards kindness; soon after, we printed 100 “Smile Cards” encouraging people to do small acts of anonymous kindness and to leave behind this card, inviting the recipient to pay-it-forward. People could download the cards on the web or order pre-printed cards, which we shipped for free. The idea went viral. We figured we’d keep doing it until we ran out of money; what we didn’t figure is that people’s cups of gratitude would overflow and that they would send us not only unsolicited donations, but heartfelt kindness ideas and stories too. In just a few years, more than a million Smile Cards were printed, tens of thousands of stories were shared and distributed without copyright, and HelpOthers.org became one of the most popular kindness portals on the Internet.
In a gift economy, goods and services have greatest value when they are received as gifts – and when they are offered as gifts; beyond their face value, it is the circulation of these pay-it-forward gifts within a community that leads to growth – growth in both the number and strength of connections. In contrast, accumulation or hoarding actually causes such a system to break down.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand the gift economy is by an example. On Sundays, volunteers in Berkeley and Washington D.C. run a unique restaurant called Karma Kitchen. At the end of the meal, the check reads $0.00 with this footnote: “Your meal was a gift from someone who came before you. We invite you to pay-it-forward for the person after you.” The meal is actually an excuse – the real power is in the reframing of a day-to-day interaction: a table might be served by a CEO, an activist, or a teacher, and their expression of unconditional generosity shifts the environment towards community and trust. And it really works. Karma Kitchen has been financially sustainable since the first time it opened its doors over two years ago.
We all innately understand this ideal. Nature is perhaps the most complex system of interdependencies, but nothing is a quid-pro-quo exchange. All of our lives start with nine months of an unconditional gift, in perhaps the most poignant expression of paying forward what we ourselves have received. Many ancient cultures from Native Americans potlatches to the ‘dama’ gift-system of Mali to the sacred reciprocity of monastics in Asia -have been rooted in a gift culture. Most families, even in modern times, experience small scale gift economies.
Although it is hard to imagine such a world today, it is our modern internet technology that is, ironically, helping revive this ancient gift culture. In these connected times, small acts of kindness don’t just transform the doer they keep circulating, and all those touched get more connected into trust networks. But while technology has been a key driver of this recent emergence, the true core of this movement still lies in the same place as it always has in the heart of the individual. Take the story of my great grandfather: he didn’t have many resources, but maintained a daily practice of philanthropy. On his daily walk, he would feed ant hills with small pinches of wheat flour. He didn’t have the Internet, but he still connected to the Inner-Net. In turn, his goodness shaped the worldview of his children and subsequently their children. Today, those ant hills are a part of what I do, and my small acts of inner transformation today will help seed a seventh generation philanthropy.
The above is from an article by Nipun Mehta in Kosmos Journal, Nov 2009, titled Generosity 2.0:
Nipun Mehta is the founder of CharityFocus, a fully volunteer driven organization started in 1999 to inspire the young IT professionals to provide free web based solutions for nonprofit organizations worldwide. Having served thousands of nonprofits, without any overhead, CharityFocus has now become an incubator of “gift economy” projects ranging from web services to a print magazine to a restaurant. With a base of 285,000 members, they attract millions of global viewers to its websites.
