Miki Kashtan started her lifelong exploration about why we are where we are and what can be done to realign us with life when she was five and asked a simple question at the grocery shop that, to this day, no one has been able to answer to her satisfaction: “Why do we have to pay? Why can’t we just take what we need?” Decades later, she collaborated with others from around the world to develop a model for global collaborative self-governance. She is the founder, with others, of the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) community, whose purpose is “to integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation.” The NGL community is knee-deep in experimenting with sharing all resources, including money, on the basis of needs and willingness. Miki gave a presentation on these and other experiments entitled “Living a Gift Economy within an Exchange World” at a Maternal Gift Economy Salon in 2021, which includes a slide deck. 

 

Miki likes to think of herself as a practical visionary rooted in feminist nonviolence. In her work she integrates theory and practice, aiming to approximate the vision of living in flow, togetherness, and choice even within systems based on the patriarchal building blocks of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness. She strives to bring together theory and practice, spiritual commitment with conceptual clarity, radical vision and practical applications, heart and mind, and self and other. One of her current ongoing projects is about using the vision mobilization framework as an entryway into the complex and delicate field of power and privilege. Her Learning Packets cover everything from the most internal to the most global. 

 

Miki blogs at The Fearless Heart and on Medium, and her articles have appeared in Tikkun magazine, New York Times, Waging Nonviolence, Shareable, Self and Society, and elsewhere. She has published four books, most recently The Highest Common Denominator: Using Convergent Facilitation to Reach Breakthrough Collaborative Decisions, which has a full chapter on attending to power differences.