Smart Economics Center Love and Our Eco-Relationships
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Dear friends and lovers,
Your interest in wonky matters of economics does not exclude matters of love. The word oikonomia, now economics, is rooted in the management of our homes, our lives and our relationships, including business ones. As cabaret singers like to sing: money, money, money makes the world go round. And more recently from The O’Jays: For the love of money, people will steal from their mother…will rob their own brother.
If you find you’re so busy working to make money that you haven’t ample time for the small and grown people you most love and admire, do make finding joy with them a special effort this month, this year. Our literal survival depends on love and its living, transformative power.
I’m indebted to the late-great bell hooks, who often taught us how important love is. In her book All About Love: New Visions, which includes her own experience with men who suffered from “patriarchal thinking” and sexist gender roles, she said that four letter word, love, wasn’t simple — unlike that other four-letter “f-”word used far too often these days.
hooks wrote: “Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.”
Wall Street’s secrecy and obfuscation attempts to block our knowledge and undermines our trust. Yet we humans persist in our loving and learning, holding on to our responsibilities and relationships. We keep on doing the sort of things that say I love you, even when misunderstood. That requires generosity and often sacrifice — including but not only just with our money.
Late last month, more than a dozen beautiful male legislators, for the first time in US history, created a Congressional Dad’s Caucus. It’s wonderfully stereotype-smashing, the way they are organizing around traditional “women’s issues” like childcare, the child tax credit, and family leave. Some might find it “queer,” as if that were a bad thing. But clearly, women’s voices are not the only ones that care with commitment. Theirs are the voices most often overlooked, and thankfully, lots of dads and brothers and uncles just won’t stand for it. Our families and precious children depend on all our nations’ grownups.
So, here’s to us lovers, who have no patience for Wall Street’s four-letter disrespect that diminishes our families and our planet and everything we most care about. Keep on with your loving!
With love and more love,
Rickey Gard Diamond
AEOO Founder
Together, We Can Advance a New Economy — One That Cares for Us ALL.
An Economy of Our Own wouldn’t be here but for the investments we make in each other. While the knowledge of a growing circle of partners we respect has been central to our shaping, we are particularly grateful for those of you who have taken time to join our Zooms of Our Own and Learning Circles, completed our surveys to help us improve our work, shared our social media posts, sent us notes in response to our letters — and yes, those who could, who put their money into our non-profit efforts to bring you practical women’s voices.
Show us some love this month. Join our Giving Circle by making a monthly or one-time tax-deductible gift in support of our work to advance a caring, feminist economy.
PS: It is not lost on the AEOO team that women, whose purses are thinner than men’s wallets, are mostly supporting this work. This month, send the men in your life this Valentine and invite them to join us and our Giving Circle, if they can!
Updates from the AEOO Community
Exploring the Power of Partnership. One of our closest allies, the Center for Partnership Systems, announced this month its new Power of Partnership Podcast,
hosted by Cherri Jacobs Pruitt. It will be launched April 1 and will air episodes on the 1st and 15th of every month, and each episode will feature guests who are applying CPS Founder and AEOO Advisory Board Member Riane Eisler’s work and a partnership model in ways that are leading to a healthier, more harmonious and sustainable world.
We can’t wait to start listening. And in the meantime, if you’re interested, you can reach out to get involved! The volunteer podcast team is looking to expand.
Find out more here.
Ecological Perspectives on the Economy. AEOO Advisory Board Member Didi Pershouse, author of Ecology of Care and founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative, taught an in-person daylong workshop on Feb. 6th in Lewes, England on Climate Recovery and Resilience Through Land Management: How Nature Regulates the Climate and How We Can Help. She’s initiating regional working groups in the UK by harnessing the processes of water, plants, microbes and the living matrix of a healthy “soil sponge.” Climate is more than just carbon, she says. Effective local water cycling plays a huge role.
The Land and Leadership Initiative is also offering a live online discussion course on five Mondays — beginning tonight, Feb. 20th, and continuing through March 20th. The Soil Sponge: How Biology Regulates the Climate and Provides Flood, Drought, and Wildfire Resilience will include reflection on lived experience, small and large group discussions, living systems frameworks, journaling, slides and hands-on activities and videos. Sign up to Zoom in here.
Welcome to Black Policy Day! AEOO conversationalist Katonya Hart, a national NOW board member and also part of the WV Black Voter Impact Initiative, invited Rickey Gard Diamond and AEOO to Black Policy Day at the West Virginia Statehouse on Feb. 15th. We were so honored to be included!
The event resulted from a remarkable volunteer effort that packed the halls with people and events and passionate speakers, who care about economic justice, racial and gender equity, and a healthy and welcoming future. Its theme was Civic Engagement through Collectiveness, and their organizing bore this out. Other partners in the effort included Black by God; West Virginia Black Voter Impact Initiative, CARE (Call to Action for Racial Equality), and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority of West Virginia. You can support the program and learn more here.
Fostering Restorative Economic Justice. Another AEOO conversationalist, Farah Tanis, launched a new vision for the future of Black Women’s Blueprint, an organization serving Black women and survivors to heal from trauma and violence.
“This Black History Month, we are centering love as power, love as healing, and love as the rhythm by which we live,” BWB’s National Director, Sevonna Brown, said at the event announcing Restore Forward — “a sanctuary for healing and a site to repair harm, where all people can achieve wholeness,” located on 300 acres of Indigenous land in upstate New York.
Restore Forward is dedicated to repairing harm and creating paths to peace and reconciliation, featuring a farm, food, and medicinal foraging and medicinal workshops, yoga, tea ceremonies, stargazing, counseling and other activities for healing and health. This month they’re even offering a raffle to win a Two-Day/Two Night Retreat for you and a loved one! Enter the raffle here.
What We’re Watching This Month
Nikole Hannah-Jones made history with The 1619 Project, first published in The New York Times Magazine in August of 2019. That date marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival and sale of more than 20 enslaved African in the English colony of Virginia. Nikole said it was finally time to tell our nation’s story more fully and truthfully, since no aspect of our lives has been untouched by the enslavement of Africans and African Americans in our country.
In a new six-part streaming series on Hulu, Nikole movingly combines her own personal story with the eye-opening perspectives of scholars she consulted for her project.
Economics is at the root of it, now baked into US attitudes and expectations, and affecting all of us. Learn why “race” had to be invented to counteract common law that made a man’s child his heir. Learn why 24 percent of African Americans have European DNA. So why are rock-bottom wages, skyrocketing student debt, and skinflint support for mothers tolerated here? Capitalism and slavery are closely wedded. It’s way past time Americans live up to who we say we are: We the people, endowed by our Creator with the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
British singer/composer Ru Mundy will break your heart, in a good way, with “Love in the Time of Coral Reefs.” We love this beautiful song — thanks to our good friend Chris Wood, who founded Building a Local Economy (BALE), a community resource center in Vermont, for sharing it with us!
