OurGoods

Participatory Learning and Action

Christopher Robbins is using his Peace Corp training to engage local communities here in NY. He showed us Participatory Learning and Action engagement techniques for mapping, ranking, and interviewing and handed out pamphlets that can be found here.

What group role do you most identify with?

A) I like to lead from the start.

B) I like to sit back and wait for someone to take the lead; ony when I know other’s positions will I try to influence events.

C) I don’t like to make direct contributions to group discussions, but prefer to do things quietly, making alliances with others.

D) I am easy going and let others run the show. Only when things go against my wishes do I intervene.

E) I prefer not to take the lead, but to carry out practical issues that the group decides upon together.

In an eerie moment, all but one of us had written B) I like to sit back and wait for someone to take the lead; ony when I know other’s positions will I try to influence events. SO HOW DO WE BEGIN ANYTHING? WHO TAKES THE LEAD FIRST?

“In the peace corp, people realized that it was useless to ask me for money or fancy tools. I was best for helping people break social norms. They could use me as an excuse.”

Find more out about his WPA project here.

Me: Why do you think OurGoods (barter for creative projects) can make the
world better?

Christopher: We have so much heart and skills in this country, yet so much passion goes into money and strategy and competition. There is no reason we can’t turn the crazy wealth of this world towards a vision of people giving and sharing and learning and not having to be so single-mindedly driven.

In other words, a small step away from currency-focus is a good step. Currency is the symbol, the intermediate step, not the goal, but we forget that. Losing currency helps us to focus on what the currency is actually doing.

Also, I do believe that every last human on this planet has something really interesting in them, and TradeSchool seems like a good way to pull that out. I’d even up the trade ante and make people give workshops to get!
How to you think OurGoods might fail?

Well, conceptually/ theoretically it is failing in the purest purist sense, in that I had to spend $50 at Staples to photocopy documents for a currency-less school, and most of the barters seem to be pretty one-sided. It’s more like give-away school with symbolic trade attached.

That said, I’ll take reality over purist theory anyday, and the reality of trade school is that you have squeezed a ton of very different people and very different workshops into a small space without spending much money. You’ve built anmazing little community, developed a movement, inspired many ppl, and helped a few dreams get further.

Also, the reality is, that the barters might not happen directly, but they *do* take place over time, and from other ppl. For instance, b/c of my PRA workshop (though not in exchange for it directly), I got a kickstarter invite from Louise, a pledge of a magnetic map painting from Christine, and potentially some branding work from Julia.

So, it’s working! Not neatly and immediately, and not necessarily being tracked by ourgoods yet, but it is happening.

But let me try to be a helpful hard ass: how could OurGoods fail?
-if no one uses it
-if no one ever reciprocates