Our own Speciality of Income
The Care village within the village: For elderly
people who are still reasonably fit but who do not fit in the structure of
mainstream care systems because of being vegetarian/vegan/follow a different
religion than Church of Scotland/England/Roman Catholic.
Perform multifaith wedding ceremonies in our tipis; name giving ceremonies and
separation ceremonies, which I would like to introduce in our society;
people get married in a ceremonial way, but their separation is often
acrimonious and conducting a cutting-of-ties ceremony might take the ‘sting
in the tail’ away. The participants of the ceremonies will stay in our –two
and three star- guest facilities and eat in our organic restaurant
- Perform multifaith funeral ceremonies.
- Create a forest burial Site
- Host school parties in the tipis (children love staying in them) and
introduce Permaculture to them and how our zero waste zero energy recycle
reuse reclaim policy works in practice and let them shadow our children when the Children’s Federation is
up-and-running!
- Extracts from plant materials: Phyto-therapy; (I have 70 inventions of plant
based extracts, of which a number are patented).
- Open a clinic where people can stay for a week or a fortnight to receive
alternative treatments, like Phyto therapy, ReSOULving, Reiki, and others,
as well as the Perceptional Enrichment Programme, for e.g. Dyslexic
children.
- Open a Ayurvedic clinic and training school.
- Give Reiki courses: a target group to train is persons with Down Syndrome,
so that they can assist Reiki Practitioners.
- Give Permaculture courses.
- Start tree nursery.
- Start a Garden Centre.
- Start an Organic vegetable garden and box–scheme
- Open an Organic farm shop and coffee shop
- Make Goat’s cheese and yoghurt, tofu and bread.
Although many income-generating activities are located within particular
ecovillages, ecovillage businesses need not be limited to individual projects.
Many of these endeavours benefit from co-operation and exchange between
ecovillages, which strengthens ecovillage businesses everywhere.
There are more economic implications: instead of having of involve hard
currency in the equation, one can keep transactions within the informal economy
(gift or love economy), and outside the formal economy. One community in Italy
created their own currency: the Credito. The founders decided to pool their
personal savings so that they could invest in land and build the first houses.
The community needed to have immediate liquidity in order to start all the
planned internal projects, while at the same time having the money to invest in
land and houses. They decided to use ‘vouchers’. These -‘Credits’- were to
replace money inside the community, and to support its services. As this system
worked well, it was decided to issue Credits every time new citizens joined the
community. Each Credit (Credito in Italian) issued corresponded to the same
amount of liras deposited in the bank to be used for other investments. Thanks
to the community management of the resources, a central “Treasury” was also
instituted for all residents citizens. They organised two distinct services: a)
An “issuing authority”, which issues new credits with a corresponding value in
houses and land. This is guaranteed by a real estate cooperative of which all
citizens are members and in which they own shares, and b) A “loans service” to
place loans at the disposal of community members in order to support companies
in the making. In this case we are talking about activities and services, which
have ethical and social goals linked to the ideals of the Federation. They
decided to produce real coins, to have a system that could be both
‘quantifiable’ and symbolic. The value of the Credit is now linked to the Euro.
The gift economy, which involves exchanging goods and services outside of formal
economic registration systems, is instrumental in strengthening the community by
making it less dependent on society at large.
Another alternative system is ‘Friendly Favours’ which connects generous
people to each other: Globalisation has destroyed the value of favours; the
Friendly Favour system measures generosity, not financial wealth.