Thoughts on Expanding the Definition of Economy (Ely for Ely: Creative Funding Workshop)

Blueberry Art Festival

Strengthening our economy encompasses more than just increasing wages - although that is necessary and important. Boundary Waters Connect has long understood and noted that our community strength is in each other’s talents and resources.

Back in 2022, Lacey wrote, “we have to build the type of community that people want to live in, and must be able to easily answer why someone should want to live and work in our community.” Our collective talents and the time we are willing to spend with each other is one of the largest and best resources we have – beyond what we do for work and to earn money.

In June, the Ely for Ely Monthly Gathering listened to a presentation challenging us to expand our notions of commerce, community economy and money.

Kandace Creel Falcon, an interdisciplinary feminist scholar, writer, and visual artist, presented one piece from the Springboard for the Arts program on the Business side of Art, titled Creative Funding. 

Opening the discussion with the question “What is money?”, we all pondered our respective answers as well as the ways in which we relate to and use money in our daily lives. Answers ranged from a symbol to an energy exchange, paper and metal to digital, ending with a shared agreement on its value. 

That’s the heart of the definition, isn’t it? We’ve all agreed on the denominations of paper and coin money, the use of a digital currency, and its importance and function in each of our days. It wasn’t always this way, however. 

Kandace reminds us of a time before money when bartering and trading for your needs was the norm. A challenge, they explain, was trading perishable goods and nonperishable goods. The perceived value became problematic. If I trade a bracelet for tomatoes, those tomatoes may spoil before I use them, but the bracelet won’t. 

How do you find equal value when considering all of the factors that contribute to a trade?

As a reminder, this idea has long been at the heart of BWC programming and thought. A blog post from March 6 of this year contained a brief history of the idea of an economy and its etymological origins.

“All of them defined oikonomia as practical household management, but they were also interested in what it meant to manage resources ethically. They thought about how we could manage our appetites, so that we might set aside resources which would be used for public good. Living through the first experiments with democracy, they wanted to explain how to manage communal, as well as personal, resources.”

As Kandace reminded us, economic thought has long been plagued with the same challenges.

How do we assign value to various goods and services? What systems do we use for defining the worth of a product or someone’s service and expertise? Who gets to decide the value of the goods and services in our community, country, society, or globally? How do they earn that job or right?

While all of this may seem larger than the capacity of Ely, BWC posits that it should be us to decide what we value and how much it's worth.

Kandace’s presentation continued, suggesting that a community has the ability to define for themselves what is of value and how to meet their needs. (One example already in place is the Chamber Bucks.)

Because although the value of money was once tied to the gold or silver standard, it is not any longer. Money has transformed into a digital value with implicit agreement from us that it is, in fact, worth the amount we say it is.

We could decide to challenge that.

BWC is not saying we can or should eschew money in the form of dollar bills or coins, or that we should cut up our credit cards and clear out our bank accounts. That would not benefit us. We are saying, however, that we could expand the definition of our local economy to include nontraditional forms of money.

To include trade and barter.

Forms of trading and bartering still exist today. The Trade Me Project on social media is one famous and familiar example to many. Free, Swap, and Sell groups on Facebook is another, possibly, more familiar and accessible example. 

We search for ways to use our talents and ways to access the talents of others. 

Decreasing our dependence on traditional forms of currency includes finding ways to increase the use of our talents and a shift toward a mindset of community abundance. As in, we have an abundance of resources and wealth in our community, both in monetary forms and in the form of talent or expertise among our community members.

Many of us collaborate on projects to access the talents of others. Or we may work together as a way of sharing tools and time resources. Increasing the availability of tools, time, and talents serves to strengthen our community fabric and invest in our economy on our terms. At the end of the day, we get to decide what is of value to the people of Ely and how those values are lived and used by ourselves within this shared space.

So we leave you with this. A small challenge to think about what you could offer the community of Ely in a trade. What are some tools, spaces, skills, or the energy and time to give? Do you have an extra desk in your office space? Power tools sitting in your garage that someone could borrow? Time to spend in someone’s garden? Do you have expertise in fishing? Gardening? Canning? Or marketing and advertising? Would you be willing to trade someone a pie crust for an hour of their expertise? Feel free to comment on the answers to these questions below and start the conversation today.

Redefining what is important to the Ely community starts with naming what we are willing to offer and what we’re looking for.

Then go out and get to know your neighbors. Offer your time, talents, and resources. Find out who lives in this place, because it’s a really cool place to live.