The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance

Katherine Collins has become an outspoken architect of investment strategies that help propel us toward a circular economy.

I’ve long believed that the ones who have more joy win.

I don’t think it’s pie in the sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy.

The currency of relationship can manifest itself as money down the road, because Paulie and Ed do have to pay the bills. Free berries might translate to better pumpkin sales, because people will want to come back to a place they have a relationship with. “People feel like they got something more than they paid for,” she explained. “They learned abo

All flourishing is mutual.

The relationships created by the gift weave myriad relations between insects and microbes and root systems. The gift is multiplied with every giving, until it returns so rich and sweet that it burbles forth as the birdsong that wakes me in the morning.

Sustain the ones who sustain you and the Earth will last forever.

They quickly cite access to open-source software and the existence of Wikipedia as manifestations of a gift economy, where knowledge is freely shared on digital platforms in an information commons.

Rebecca Solnit, in her stunning book A Paradise Built in Hell, describes how gift economies seem to arise spontaneously in times of disaster.