Are you a sustainable economics geek? I certainly am.
‘Round here we often talk about sustainability as three legs of a stool—environmental, social, and economic.
I’ve noticed that there’s a ton of interest, both inside and outside of our village, in two legs of the stool: the environmental (our homes, our farms, our food, our common areas) and the social (relationships, potlucks, conflict resolution, agreements, etc.).
But overall there’s less interest in how our economy works.
Is it because folks find economics confusing? Or boring? Or both?
The truth is that if we don’t find ways to create viable economies, then ecovillages and other land-based projects cannot survive.
Yet, as usual, we have to recreate these systems from the ground up. We don’t want to use the models of economics offered by our larger dominant culture. We don’t want predatory lending, or trickle down theories, or the rich-get-richer scenarios.
We want fair-share policies, and right livelihood, and living wages, and cooperative ownership models, and a world (and village) where everyone is thriving economically.
NikiAnne (she/her) was born and raised on a horse and cattle ranch on the ancestral lands of the Salinan people in the Central Coast of California. She currently lives at Earthaven Ecovillage on unceded lands of the Catawba and Cherokee (Tsalagi) people. Her ancestors come from Eastern and Western Europe — France, Germany, and English Isles as well as Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia, from Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
Throughout the last two decades, NikiAnne has been immersed in community and in service to a wide range of educational endeavors focused on nature connection, personal empowerment, and community resilience. NikiAnne considers herself the grease and glue – that which helps things run smoothly or holds things together. Before co-founding SOIL in 2012, she worked and traveled through much of Asia, the Americas, and Europe, which made her formal education at George Washington University in International Affairs come alive in ways that can only happen through personal experience and relationships. Collectively, these experiences have undeniably shaped her cooperative cultural values and commitment to supporting leaders to think, feel, act and design from a foundation rooted in interrelationship. No matter what she’s teaching, NikiAnne is always on the same mission: to raise awareness of our whole selves – gifts, passions, blind spots, shadows – and help those whole selves find and fill niches in their communities. This is how the web of life is woven, and the fabric of culture repaired. She’s especially eager to support those in transition – between vocations, stages of life, and stories of world and self. Within this context, she is particularly passionate about community grief tending and death care midwifery.
