The Gift of Giving
I have a friend Tad Hargrave who runs a business called Marketing for Hippies. He has been a long-standing advocate for radical business practices, and one of those practices he has talked to me about several times is the "pay-what-you-can" ethos. With this practice you offer a service, and instead of charging a fixed price for that service, you allow for the people to pay what they can for it. He has stated to me that, not only does this open up your services to people who might not be able to afford it, but it also allows for a naturally occurring sliding scale where some people will pay more, balancing out your income.
As people who are already in alternative spaces where incomes are not a solid concept to begin with, it can be very difficult to trust where your money will come from next. We currently live in a society where we are taught that we are lonely individuals who need to be able to take care of our own needs at any given time, but I think that those ideas need to change. Ideas of collaborative consumption and trust in our fellow humans are two things that I think we need to start seeing more of in our society. As I look around me I see that people who are putting their faith in these things, are being incredibly rewarded for their trust.
This is such a beautiful example of that from musician Amanda Palmer-
And a wonderful interview from Roo Rogers about the art of collaborative consumption-
Photographs by Elizaveta Porodina