Generating Wealth as a Collective Beyond the Financial System

Money, in any of its forms, stipulates a hierarchy of values, which creates separations between people as well as between humanity and the environment. Thus money is counter to the principles of the sacred which promote unity, collaboration and peace.

On that note, the Green Papaya Collective was launched in Auroville in March 2019, in collaboration with the Auroville organisation SEA (Social Entrepreneur Association), with the goal of creating a thriving alternative moneyless economy. The intention is to be a collective of free peoples weaning ourselves off the financial system, and working together to generate alternative kinds of wealth for our network of participants.

We are a fully inclusive group and we want to expand participation. The initiative is an ongoing experimental work in progress, and participants can help define it and fine tune it.

A new contract between people

Our model is a model of participatory economy; a shared economy, partly in the gift and partly through other reciprocal means (checks and balances). It is an informal economy based on new agreements as its structuring principle. An economy of solidarity where cooperation is more important than competition, where quality (health) is more important than quantity and thus planned obsolescence is replaced by planned prevalence. It’s a movement toward sustainability as a collective venture that is intended to feel empowering and celebratory.

At the heart of the collective is service – that commitment of working together. It is the base of security and the creation of wealth in the economic and ecological survival sense.

Recently we agreed that hours contributed to the Green Papaya Collective can be counted as Auroville Service hours. It means that Auroville has a moneyless group that can benefit from any interested Newcomer, Volunteer or Aurovilian. This is a huge step forward!

The Green Papaya Collective provides a blueprint and new contract between participants. We have a 10 point agreement with the following objectives:

• To provide participants with some of their needs

• To act as an avenue for people to better learn about themselves (inner and outer experiment)

• To ween the collective off the financial system and become self sustaining

• To develop a sense of bonding with others through a commitment to generating communal wellbeing

We ask participants to write down all the things they feel they need or want that they pay for, with cash or maintenance. This list includes goods and services and should be as exhaustive as possible. Participants’ needs and wants are then shared within the group. Together with this, we ask participants to list their skills and passion. Each participant is committed to a number of hours per week to work with individual exchanges and/or towards one or several of our collective projects to meet the needs of the group.

Exchanges taking place

A basic need that all participants share is food, hence one project is a collaboration with AuroOrchard and another is gleaning at various places (we come to harvest and share the harvest 50/50). Housing is a need for many of us, therefore one project collaborates with Jorge at Terrasoul working on a 3D printer to print walls for buildings. We are in contact with ALOT (Auroville Library of Things) and are hoping to collaborate with more units in the future. On an individual basis, we have a wide range of exchanges such as graphic design, food gardening, yoga, baking and massage.

What about Green Papaya?

The name is symbolic. We have a lot of green papaya here in Auroville, it’s in abundance and often overlooked. You can easily use green papaya instead of, for example, carrots – it is used in a similar way and has similar nutritional values. Yet most people still tend to go for carrots. Carrots are annual plants that take some effort to grow. They’re not local to Auroville, and the seeds are not easy to produce yourself. In contrast, papaya is local, it gives fruit again and again with little effort, and the seeds are easily available inside the fruit. This example of how we continue to use carrots despite the benefits of papaya shows we are enslaved to our habits and the financial system. We simply need to give some thought to what we are doing, why we are doing it, and ask ourselves if it makes sense.

Anyone is welcome to play in the Green Papaya Collective!