Gift Culture Experiment

Recently, instead of receiving birthday presents, we asked friends and family to contribute to a small Gift Culture experiment that would help money flow towards human creativity and cultural life in Western Australia and elsewhere around the world. More than 20 people and one business have so far contributed over $1,000 to the experiment. We aim to give away all of this money in the coming weeks to some of the many individuals and organisations fostering cultural renewal – fostering the generation of new thoughts, meanings, stories, values, identity – through education, research, art, spacemaking for social innovation etc., including those who are actively re-imagining the social organism as a whole, as well as money itself. In so doing we hope to provide a homeopathic drop towards new ways of working with money in Western Australia; we hope to move from the current ‘damming’ of money and streams of capital, towards a freely flowing river of social renewal and healing. This, in turn, will enable the cultural gifts of human creativity to flow into and transform society as a whole. We believe that just as a healthy blood-flow enlivens our human organism, so the social organism is enlivened through the healthy flow of money. May this be one of many experiments and initiatives that work in this direction…

This morning we gave out our first gift. We gave $50 to the documentary film Money and Life – a “story about money at the frontier of transformative change”. We thought this was a fitting first gift for our experiment. The film has now reached its financial goal on the ‘crowd funding’ website Kickstarter. You can view the trailer here. In the coming days and weeks we will keep you updated as the rest of the money flows…

This is just one of many experiments we have in mind.

If you would like to find out more, or take part, email: contact(at)reperth.org or join our conversation on Facebook.

John Stubley and Katie Dobb