WTR Network Webinar: Maternal Gift Economy with Miki Kashtan

January 27, 2024 – In this webinar, Miki Kashtan and Jo delAmor converse about the possibility of shifting to the new and ancient paradigm that Genevieve Vaughan calls the Maternal Gift Economy, where we focus on sharing resources based on care for everyone’s needs, where we recognize our interconnectedness with all life, and where we know our power to participate in making life work.

Resources that were shared during the event: 

Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL)
Miki’s Blog
From Philanthropy to De-Accumulation, an article by Miki Kashtan
Dimensions of the Great Turning
The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love – by Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zöller
Incredible Edibles – “If you eat, you’re in”
Responding to War with Love

A few nuggets of wisdom from the live session: 

“Life is arranged to care for all that lives through an endless flow of energy and resources.”

“The Maternal Gift Economy is what happens when we organize human life from the biological reality of being a mothering species: all of us are alive because someone else gave to us unconditionally when we were fully dependent on others to care for our needs unilaterally. When we do that, we function in a need-satisfying economy where we share resources as gifts oriented to needs based on willingness and capacity, which continues to be the bedrock of what sustains human life even to this day, well beyond caring for infants.”

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 seed 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.