Nourishing Futures

Our Ways With Money

At Nourishing Futures, we are engaged in ongoing inquiry into how to live, work, and play with money. We recognize that resources are needed to support our work, and seek to engage with money in ways that:

  • Build trust through incremental change
  • Encourage resource flow based on needs and reparative action
  • Encourage gifting 
  • Eliminate coercion 
  • Increase transparent & collaborative ways with money


With these principles, we engage in a practice of helping resources, including money, time, energy, power, and expertise, move freely from where they are sufficient and abundant to where they are needed, allowing for greater flexibility with the distribution of resources. This is reflective of the biological and ecological process known as diffusion, where concentrated resources move from areas of higher concentration to areas of lower concentration/higher need. Nonviolent Global Liberation’s Needs-Based Resource Flow Model has been a profound inspiration for this practice.

“Money is like water. Water can be a precious life-giving resource. But what happens when water is dammed, or when a water cannon is fired on protestors in subzero temperatures? Money should be a tool of love, to facilitate relationships, to help us thrive, rather than to hurt and divide us. If it’s used for sacred, life-giving, restorative purposes, it can be medicine. Money, used as medicine, can help us decolonize.” 

– Activist and author Edgar Villanueva

With these principles in mind, and doing our best to meet ongoing individual needs, we engage in needs-based resource flow, hourly compensation, salaried and stipend compensation, fee for service contract work, administrative percentage agreements, gift, and hybrids of some or all of these systems. 

At the organizational level, Nourishing Futures operates as a worker self-directed nonprofit. Collectively, NF Core Projects share responsibility for maintaining the health and financial viability of Nourishing Futures, sharing the gifts, risks and responsibilities of the organization. Projects give time and/or monies according to their operating budget and capacity. By working together to raise or otherwise cover the general operating costs, we nourish the core which in turn supports projects to bring their work forward into the world. 

We believe there is power in not settling into a single way of working with money, and remain in an ongoing inquiry. 
We join our hearts, minds, and actions with efforts that engage in agreements and practices around money that prioritize regenerating and reclaiming cultural ways that support all life. 

Regardless of the quantity of money moving through Nourishing Futures, we engage in reparative economics, redistributing some portion of time, expertise and/or funds toward people and places most impacted by ongoing oppression, insecurity and limited access to financial and other resources. 

Questions that are presently guiding our inquiry:

  • What timescale are we operating on? How do both include the immediate needs of this season and the potential needs 20, 50, 100, 500 years from now?
  • What steps can we take to liberate resources for where they are needed most?
  • Where are resources not flowing? What can we do to unblock the flow? 
  • What do our current economic systems uphold and support? 
  • What are our class backgrounds and life experiences? How do they influence our values, practices, real and perceived needs related to money?