Real Wealth of Nations Action Blog

The Real Wealth of Nations: How to join our research team

YOU are invited, as an individual, or as a voice for your group, to participate and partner with us in this action research project based on our reading of The Real Wealth of Nations by Riane Eisler.

Our basic research question, at this time, is What is your experience and what does it mean to live in a partnership "economy" based on concepts and practices of caring?

We assume concepts and practices based on caring are, ultimately, more effective than concepts and practices based on individual or group domination of others and the environment.

Recommended reading: The Real Wealth of Nations and any of Eisler's work. Also for the method of inquiry used by Lived Learning, see John Heron's Cooperative Inquiry. More details on method will emerge as we, as a collaborative, agree how to collect, analyze and publish data. Many participants are highly skilled in many arts and our methods will emerge co creatively hopefully.

The easiest way is to participate by sharing your actions and how RNW or any of Riane's books, inspired or validated your actions. Thus we do action and reflection, share them out into a reflective community and hopefully over time become more and more effective.

If you would like to have your data, actions and/or reflections featured here as a central posting you can go to www.rianeeisler.com or www.livedlearning.net and request to have your data featured.

Please add us to your feed system to stay attuned to what others are doing and what just may inspire you to help the paradigm shift to one of caring from one of domination.

You may also comment and submit "data" at any time on a posting here.

If you want to submit "data" your data can be in many forms, whatever your imagination calls you to document. Poems, stories, pictures, collages, interviews and on and on. AND whenever possible include a picture of some form (.jpg for photos and .gifs for graphic designs.

The typepad system handles almost any format so legal mp3s, .pdfs etc are also invited. The format also has a very nice photo album component that we hope to put up soon. A model, I, Nancy, like a lot can be seen at www.smallfarms.typepad.com Tana is a long time activist who especially cares by supporting and photographing small farms, chefs and grace in eating together. (Check out her Chefs Map!) Her site has won awards and she has been offered work from its spred. How lovely! Do check out her site.

THE WHOLE POINT HERE IS TO READ AND ACT TOWARDS CREATING A CARING ECONOMY. Riane's work does so much to give us much excellent fuel. Now we begin to practice together becoming practical fuel. Welcome!

As this is all experimental; your patience, your partnership and participation are appreciated.

  

From Rossi in Chicago: Partnerships Alive @ The Beach Cafe July 11

Dear Friends,

I really love how we are reading The Real Wealth of Nations, taking actions and sharing :)  Our partnership is wonderful and I am very energized by it! :)

By such wonderful synchronicity,  I am experiencing being part in more partnerships than probably at any point in my life! The Real Wealth of Nations seems so amazingly timely, providing the context to my own and other people's experiences!  And what better way to learn and transform than through personal experience and Action! :)

Right now it is a beautiful 80 degree weather and I am heading for the cafe, my source for much inspiration :)  That place is truly a place for all. 

It is kid friendly, dog friendly (a bowl at the entrance), gay friendly, elderly friendly, and absolutely Family friendly :) Everyone is there, talking to each other, having conversations that otherwise may never have conspired! 

And to attest to the spirit of cooperation and partnership I see Orlando, who is Frank's (the owner) high school friend of 25 years. Orlando comes and helps out for free! Here is a photo of him and his daughter who is visiting from California where she goes to school!

   

The second is a photo of a mother and her child; this is just so poignant to me.

 

My last photo for this post is the lady who was having a chocolate malt shake and sitting with me and Orlando's daughter, Alex, and having a most delightful conversation!
 

I can tell so many stories like these of the people of this place wonderful community place!   

I was also very touched that  Frank used my photos for the promo materials :)   

I completely agree with a recent email comment that the RWN is more like an encyclopaedia, a much needed one, one where head and heart converge :) 

I think being in touch with people in order to share what they are doing in their own lives will be a great step towards the action portion of The Real Wealth of Nations site that we have talked about!

Have a beautiful day, Friends!

Rossi in Chicago

How it pays to care: Dollars and cents/sense

I woke this morning and as I am working later, I had the luscious experience of delving into Eisler's The Real Wealth of Nations Chapter 3 It Pays to Care: Dollars and Cents.

Eisler helps us learn to notice more than "anecdotal" evidence and provides an amazing amount of inspiring stories AND statistics as to how companies, countries, people and places who dare to value caring as much as making money, are in fact making more money. More money, respecting and treasuring lives and the environment AND increasing quality of work produced. What a lovely way to start my day!

Then of course, being a good social scientist and realist, Riane sobered me up by beginning to move into just how illogical most of what we call "economics" is presented and imaged out to the world. Disasters and war are equated as profitable. Just read her report of the Exxon Valdez episode and how entities actually make money on destruction. After all, bombs and clean ups and endless suffering in illness and all the adjunct problems make money for those who are in that business.

So my morning started out cheerily, noting her succinct writing and clear sidebars on The Cost Effectiveness of Caring (p. 56) but then the child-like optimist in me had to sober up and dig into Hiding the Costs of Uncaring Economics (p. 63). Tomorrow or soon I will plunge in to Chapter 4 The Economic Double Standard. I am betting that this is a topic that I know something about as I am woman, a wife and a sister with far too much education and far too little income....more reporting to follow soon.

Forgive the quickness of this posting. Do enjoy Chapter 3; I am off to work with a company, Monterey Institute of International Studies who uses appreciative inquiry. Besides their multiculturalism, that is why I am there! This is one of the conscious ACTIONS I have taken to promote a caring world economy.

Riane Eisler and David Loye's works have effected all our lives and we don't even notice it. I am grateful to know their work and live in an area and place that also know the value of caring. Join us! Read and take actions to enhance your life, the life of your community and our lovely blue green planet and all her beings.

Photo courtesy and copyright of Rossi. Enjoy more of her gifts of vision by going here: http://peace4.zenfolio.com/ 

Welcome to a Real Wealth of Nations Action Blog

Welcome to a blog, provided by Nancy Peden and Lived Learning in Monterey CA and by Rossi Dimitrova, an artist and community activist in Chicago, IL.

Please JOIN US in reading, discovering and practicing ways of valuing that will enrich us, our communities and the environment. Your active participation through comments is invited. You may also visit any of Riane's sites to learn more.

This web log is intended as an on-line point of connection for communities based on learning, engaging and developing practices for the essential emerging trend in economics. That trend is towards an economics that is reality based on actual value, that benefits more than individuals in the world of finance.

We agree with Riane Eisler, who so lucidly teaches us in her new book, The Real Wealth of Nations, that economics must develop, if we are to survive and thrive long term, economic models and measures that are more complete, based on a logic that is sensible and realistic for the good of the many rather than dominated by the powerful few.

While many of us are now and have been for some time, writing of new paradigms based on partnership, participation and now, sustainable economics, no one may be doing this work  more eloquently and usefully than Riane Eisler .

We believe that we have all been influenced by Riane's work, beginning with The Chalice and the Blade. Now Eisler continues to build on her seminal work in partnership done over many years with her husband, author and scholar, David Loye (who also has a newly released book).

We invite you to participate and to partner with us by reading The Real Wealth of Nations, and developing an understanding of economics, not just through theory but through making economic choices based on measures that value.

Send us your comments on your reading and your experiences of working in partnership with your community and the environment, building a sustainable world that works for all.

This is your invitation invited to read, write and participate in practical action research of value.

In our view, cynicism is, indeed, not an option. Join us in daring to care.