The InnerFortune IDEA Currency Game!
How have you experienced the Solidarity Economy? What does it mean to you?
This past weekend I had the sweet and good for-tune of finding resonance with dozens of clearly vibrating humans at the annual Solidarity Economy Network festival in the fresh air Berkshires of Massachusetts.
Day one was filled with loosely planned and elegantly facilitated workshops that included topics like Economics 4 Emancipation and activities like laughter yoga. It was adjacent to the weekly farmers market which brought in a few lovely unfamiliars and blessed us with the opportunity to have the most delicious pour over coffees made by a bicycle-cart vendor. Day two was indoors with a balance of natural and artificial light and lots and lots of skillful collaborative synthesizing activity about how to build and grow what our communities need right now.
In the afternoon I adapted my new game, the InnerFortune IDEA Currency, to the theme of supporting the solidarity economy. Not having much play time with the game yet, I was incredibly grateful for the many opportunities to hear myself think out loud about the intensely condensed time frame (a 2-3 hour game played in 30-40 minutes) with peers and get many valuable insights.
I had wanted to incorporate a period of reflection – after all this is an InnerFortune activity – but our energies had to be concentrated on IDEAtion so I reflected at the end of the first day on what I’d witnessed thus far and came up with about 20 challenges that I solicited support to whittle down to 5 or 6.
And then of course we needed to collectively review the seven cooperative principles:
Before we started to play the game, I hastily led an embodiment exercise. This had me really feeling my experience of time oppression! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could suspend time when we breathe mindfully together? I called this exercise SEE for standing elemental embodiment and invited each person to explore their water bodies as they swayed and jiggled, breathing with the air element moving through the body, reflecting on circulation and digestion fire elements, and appreciating bone and muscle and other earth elements in the body.
Then we sang! I literally woke up at 1 AM thinking that I probably sang too loudly, but it was fun and awkward and different. We saying these beautiful water words a few times:
The river is flowing, flowing and growing
The river is flowing — back to the sea.
Mother Earth carry me, a child I will always be
Mother Earth carry me — back to the sea.
The game was fun! And as each person offered their notes to the person either holding the challenge, or holding the most recent idea generated to address the challenge, we had visceral experiences beginning to unpack our relationship to “money” (which derives from Moneta, the Roman goddess of abundance and fertility, with a root meaning of “to think or use one’s mind” researched by my friend Christian McEwen in her book Legal Tender).
The actual blue paper currency that each participant received in equal quantity just by being their lovely selves, includes the core principles of the Gross National Happiness model, as well as the rules of the idea of currency game. Many of these “rules“ had to be suspended due to time constraints.
Here is a little bit of what we co-created!
For more on the solidarity economy, check out solidarityeconomyma.org
To play the IDEA currency game, send a message using the contact form on this site.
The potential for addressing our relationship to currency and alternative currencies is immense. The mantra I’ve recently come up with is “microagreements help prevent micro aggressions.
The need for playing through — with deep process and skillfulness— our high stakes conversations together is clear and present!
