By Miki Kashtan
Edited by Maura Stephens
Part 3: Case Studies
One key premise of this mini-series is that education and larger systems are intertwined within any social order: How we live, how we set up our systems, and what collective stories we tell . . . all influence what education looks like, and simultaneously education influences all of them. One conclusion is that this would also be the case for any significant attempt to shift the current destructive trajectory that humanity has been on since the dawn of patriarchy, especially in western Asia and Europe.
In the previous part of this series I focused on some key principles that I believe are essential for those of us who are longing to see humanity realign with life and what that may look like. In that part I was focusing at the level of design principles. In this final section I focus on what it takes to apply the vision and principles of maternal gifting on the material plane, in the nitty gritty of human relationships, in the context of caring for vital functions and emergent needs, in attending to the brutal impacts of power differences, and in multiple other ways. Here, even more than in the earlier parts, I believe that laying out the experiments in some specificity makes evident the overlaps and different meanings that similar actions may have in different contexts of experimentation. As before, my primary focus is on education and on resource flow, although what we do spans many more areas of experimentation.
We have been functioning as a virtual community spanning five continents (no one from Africa, though several of African descent) since 2017. At present we have about 480 people who are directly engaging with NGL (as well as a few thousand on our mailing list), of which 40-50 actively participate in sustaining what we are doing. A similar number engage in other activities related to our purpose. All our experimentation is done without any official funding of any sort, only gifts freely given, and without any legal existence beyond being a collection of individuals.
Education: Seeding a “liberation university”
Although there is nothing official called “Liberation University” within the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) community, and although this idea has mostly been living in conversations about what may be possible in some future, at a certain point it became clear that we are, informally, already on our way. The Liberation University is a way of applying maternal gifting principles, as an orientation towards others’ needs, in the realm of learning and teaching. This means, to us, integrating liberation and learning into all we do and challenging the focus on the lone researcher who is separate from what he (in the classic patriarchal picture) studies. We envision developing criteria down the line for something that is academically rigorous and collaborative, something that currently does not exist anywhere: group PhD degrees.
This is a daunting project which we are taking on in the same way we do everything else: based on willingness, to the extent that it aligns with purpose, and in small steps that are within our capacity. The main form this slow movement takes at present is engaging in experimentation and learning as an inseparable aspect of all we do, thereby also integrating the deep splits between “work,” “play,” and “learning,” with little to no compartmentalizing within what we do. In this way learning happens from within life in the context of solving practical problems. This antidotes abstraction, makes learning relevant, and supports integration and confidence.
As one example, in unschooling environments baking can be an opportunity to learn about multiplication and division when making more or fewer portions than a recipe calls for. Similarly, when people are invited to work out for themselves rather than being told to follow others’ instructions about how to frame descriptions of learning events or how to distribute money from individuals to individuals across multiple continents, they are more likely to have a felt sense of thinking for themselves.
Experiments with truth
One of the cornerstones of active learning is experimentation. Experimentation is what every baby engages in constantly, what academic researchers do, and what Gandhi included centrally within his approach to nonviolence as well as the title of his autobiography. Since “live experiments with truth” are part of NGL’s purpose, we have dozens of experiments going on at any given moment.
Experimentation is our primary orientation to bridging the gap within and around us in relation to the vision of fully realigning humanity with life. Since we are researching ourselves more than anything else, it effectively means that we keep no separation between subjects (those doing the experiment) and objects (those being studied). And we share freely the results of our experimentation even when what we are investigating is our deepest patriarchal patterning.
From clerical tasks to “liberation logistics”
Keeping us going as an online community includes many tasks that few find intrinsically meaningful. Here are a few of many examples. We are continually doing legal research about how our radical experimentation interfaces with the world as it is so that we can exit mainstream functioning more and more effectively. We are straining existing technical infrastructure platforms in our ceaseless efforts to function in distributed leadership and transparency when these very systems are designed to control access. We have dozens of teams, many of which meet weekly. This means scheduling, note taking, sorting out recordings into the relevant folders and attending to tasks that emerge from the meetings. We have multiple learning events, which brings the need to create forms for registration, provide Zoom tech support, connect with people who register, tracking all the tasks before, during, and after an event, and much more. And there are also larger projects, also at technical levels, such as designing and maintaining our Financial Gift Hub, to which I come back in the next section.
All of these areas share two things in common. One is that they are vital to basic functioning, to the point where any community or organization would quickly crumble without them. And the other is that in most places this work is considered boring and made as invisible as possible, and the people who do it are rarely valued for the gifts they provide. As part of that, this kind of work is usually relegated to certain groups, overwhelmingly women, and often brown and black women.
Instead, within NGL we see such tasks as opportunities for empowerment, relationality, and connection with purpose. We strive to have everyone within NGL contribute on the material plane, for everyone to initiate their own experiments with truth, and for everyone to participate in sharing with others about what we are doing, at least informally. We also are actively changing how people are orienting to the work. For example, when people do scheduling, including scheduling meetings with people outside NGL, they engage as full human beings, express themselves, interact with care and warmth, and say what’s meaningful to them about scheduling this or that meeting. This invites all of us to see tasks and logistics as a form of leadership based on full empowerment and care for the whole. Finally, and unlike most organizations, when we don’t receive sufficient gifts to fully care for everyone’s minimum sustainability needs and must make tough decisions about who might receive less than their minimum request, we prioritize rather than deprioritize the needs of people who engage in vital and mundane functions rather than the needs of people who teach, apply, or engage with outside groups.
Weaving “liberation for all” through all we do
Our understanding of the long and painful history that has resulted in humanity’s current condition includes a significant focus on the social divisions that are inherent to the functioning of patriarchal societies. The depth of such divisions requires loving effort and rigor to disentangle two equally significant coexisting aspects of life under patriarchy.
One is that we are all affected by patriarchal systems, and the other is that the impacts differ according to social location. This means that if we don’t attend specifically to power differences, what we do might result in effects that reproduce longstanding societal patterns in relation to racial divisions, colonization, religious persecution, or access to material resources. In this way, living, learning, and teaching nonviolence with a focus on liberation for all are fully intertwined.
We take on a phenomenological and systemic approach to understanding the impacts of power and privilege, which supports us in bringing compassion and tenderness to the patterns, on both ends of any division, inviting everyone into full responsibility and agency, and engaging in significant impact sharing across differences in support of everyone’s liberation. We see this as a radically different approach from anything that might offer momentary relief by imagining something akin to “swapping” those who are stuck in positions that negatively affect others and those who are now suffering the impacts of systems and of others’ (often involuntary and unintentional) complicity with such systems.
We see such a step, even if it were ever possible, as actually maintaining the patriarchal system and rules and only changing who partially benefits and who only suffers while all suffer deeply. We want an approach that can actually care for everyone including those who are currently benefiting from the system, at least in terms of access to resources, and who have been trained to accept impacts on others as inevitable in order for their needs to be met.
Through our experimentation, we are also developing, in baby steps and sometimes leaps, an approach that we believe might support bridging across gaps, divergences, impacts, and deep systemic patterns and coming together to shape our collective future. For example, one of our ongoing experiments is the “Global Sisterhood from the Ground up” program, which now focuses on supporting the leadership of women from marginalized communities and contexts who are active within NGL. This means supporting them to counter whatever inner or outer obstacles may exist to their flourishing and leadership within and beyond NGL. One example is that as I am slowly reducing my participation in teaching courses, I am turning them over to this group instead of people who may have had more experience as a way of inviting growth in capacity.
The learning in this area is dense and powerful and directly feeds into the Learning Packets project, where a whole category exists called “Power, Privilege, and Liberation,” of which three packets are ready; we are actively working on three more to complete an entire arc of learning that includes conceptual understanding (part of “the story”), practical tools for individual and collective liberation (part of “human behavior”), systemic considerations for groups and organization (part of “social institutions”), and elements of how to include considerations of power, privilege, and liberation in educational contexts with a focus on NVC (part of “education and socialization”).
All-ages collaboration
We are deeply investigating how to create the conditions for people of all ages to be co-shapers of how we live and function, including in relation to learning. We are orienting to this in two ways.
One is that we offer what we call an “All Ages Collaboration Learning Lab” whose purpose is “to equip a group of people with vision, determination, and skills to embody radical collaboration with the younger people in their lives in the here and now.” We do this through offering intensive coaching that supports integration of the vision that inspires the lab and strengthens people’s capacity to stand up to the inner and outer challenges that may interfere with their commitment to collaboration with younger people. At present the people who are in the core group that receives coaching are all parents. Our intention is to expand out from there, both to support more adults and also to support younger people to empower themselves, however young they are, to function in care for the whole. Towards that end, we are also in the process of putting together a young-people advisory council for the project.
The other way we are aiming to create radical intergenerational collaboration is in the context of living together. At present this is happening only within community living experiments. Most of what we have learned so far is just how huge the gap is between what is needed and our current capacity. Our goal is to exist in three parallel spaces: “children following adults,” “adults following children,” and “adults and children co-creating.” In the first, what happens is adult-oriented activities which everyone of any age is welcome to join if that is what they want. In the second, children decide what to do, and anyone of any age is invited to the extent that they are willing and able to follow the lead of children, which for many of us is extremely challenging. And in the last, all who are present, regardless of age, decide what happens based on the intention to attend to the needs of all there. However far we are from that being a reality, the dream is strong.
We see this as an indispensable way to realign with life through transforming the depth at which age segregation is drilled into us and has come to appear entirely natural. It is now standard practice around the world that for the first 18 years or so of a person’s life they daily spend many hours with only a small group of people who were born within six months of each other and with extremely few adults. It is much more organic to life and to the maternal gifting paradigm that people are with each other based on activity and purpose. Younger people learn more about life, skills, and themselves when everyone learns and teaches based on what they know or don’t, instead of based on age.
Prototyping a global, maternal gift economy
We cannot at present create anything that is entirely free of market dependence, state control, and patriarchal conditioning — only to take small steps from where we are towards vision. We can consciously choose to shift from “life-style” choices within what capitalism can absorb to microscopic revolutionary action oriented to interdependence. As such, this is at odds with the individualizing force of capitalism.
This is what we have been experimenting with within NGL. We have been leaning on all the principles I named in the previous section as well as others to engage in radical experimentation in the area of resource flow. Our experience has been that within certain conditions, with sufficient vision, commitment, and anchoring of intentions on the material plane it is possible even now within patriarchal systems to restore human capacities that were lost to patriarchy. A key one for reviving the maternal gifting paradigm in this area is relearning to uncouple giving from receiving to be able to effectively care for everyone’s material needs within the community.
Our maternal gifting experimentation is currently most active in two intertwined areas.
Human capacity
We have no coercive structures: no employees, bosses, board, or a legal existence. All the gifting of our effort, attention, ideas, skills, and actions is based on co-discerning with others where each of us has capacity and passion to respond to needs within purpose. We also aim to shift patriarchal patterns of who does what to support everyone to do vital function tasks and to have no one do only those.
We are fully committed to leaving things undone rather than overstretching, seeing our many “voids” as an accurate reflection of collective capacity and as leadership opportunities. We untwist patriarchal patterning in how we function by noticing the edges of our capacity, discerning when to stretch and when to ask others to stretch, asking for support, and growing capacity to be present with complexity.
We do almost everything in teams and very little as individuals, co-hold almost everything we do, and often co-work virtually when doing individual tasks. Where we have nonredundant capacities we form support teams and coach others to increase capacity around us.
Routine decisions are entrusted to teams. All of us are invited to make decisions using a modified version of the “Advice Process” as articulated by Frederic Laloux in his 2014 book Reinventing Organizations, as we integrate input from those specifically impacted, those with experience or knowledge, and those with resources needed for implementation.
The main way we learn is through feedback about what works and what doesn’t, even in areas usually reserved for “bosses” such as capacity to contribute to purpose and to function in line with values.
The results of seven years of experimentation are at once discouraging and uplifting. What is discouraging is how often many of us still act in disempowered ways, commit to something and then don’t follow through, don’t think things through for ourselves, or don’t mobilize in response to needs. What is uplifting is how, iteratively, we find more and more collective capacity to respond from willingness instead of obligation, to take initiative to attend to needs instead of waiting for others to do it or to tell us what to do, to respond from care for the whole instead of individual preference, and to ask for support instead of absorbing impacts and continuing until we collapse.
Money
In our interactions with the outside world we uncouple giving from receiving as much as external constraints make possible. We aim to minimize, although we can’t eliminate, depending on individuals and organizations with whom we have no actual relationship. We invite individuals who offer us services to ask for money based on their need and not an abstract notion of “value” to minimize using money for nonmaterial needs.
Our offerings, online resources, and the process of joining NGL exist without paywalls. We make our needs known and ask for financial gifts to be given without overstretching or resentment. More than half of those engaging with NGL give neither money nor life energy, and others materially sustain all we do.
Internally, we distribute money every four months based on the requests of those whose relationship with NGL and level of integration of the framework fit criteria discerned with collective input. Each person works out what their financial requests are within what we call “liberation pods.” That’s where we look deeply and lovingly at our patriarchal conditioning that could so easily lead us to overlook needs, to make requests that support comfort rather than actual need, or to look for money to care for nonmaterial needs. With each cycle, we shed more of our training in relation to money and discover what it’s like to be part of a group that cares, together, for all of us.
The range of what individuals within NGL have named as their full need is between zero and about $5,000 per month, varying independently of how much life energy we give to NGL. We also set aside money for unexpected expenses, where each of us engages in an advice process to determine, with input from others, whether an unexpected expense is within capacity for our group to take on.
We deeply believe in transparency. When we invite our entire mailing list of several thousand to offer financial gifts, we share full details of what each person asks for and why as well as what we already have access to from previous gifts. We invite everyone to support us financially only with what is within capacity and willingness. And the recordings of the actual decisions about the distribution, made by representatives of the liberation pods, are accessible to everyone within NGL.
In April 2025, for example, we distributed $157,248 to 32 people (of whom 10 of us fully depend on this money for the next four months) and set aside an additional $14,700 for unexpected expenses. Since we are not a legal entity, almost all the money is distributed from individuals to individuals.
The actual decisions about who receives what are made by representatives from each liberation pod. We have never once had enough money for everyone’s full request, and this time we didn’t quite have enough for everyone’s minimum. This means we are continually checking to see how to distribute the stretch.
As tough as this has been, the results are astonishing. One unexpected gift is witnessing a reduction in our collective consumption — which in any event we believe is necessary as part of planetary adaptation. Another is the repeated phenomenon of some people who are eligible to make financial requests choosing instead to give money in addition to their life energy, simply because they have access to enough material resources to do so. Another is that many of us experience a growing capacity to trust life, especially given the repeated miracles over the last four years of money coming to us at the last minute to fill gaps. In April, for example, we would have been even further from the minimum if not for a last minute announcement of a $5,000 gift from someone who had never given to us before. And one other unexpected gift is that as our awareness of becoming one shared-risk group increases, we are beginning to care for each other’s needs as our own spontaneously, within the whole. Outside of specified distribution times, we are now beginning to make decisions together about unexpected expenses.
Practice examples for continuing the learning
So as to drive home the challenge and beauty of applying these principles on the practical, material plane, I am including here three activities that I used in the REC 4.0 talk that gave rise to this article. Anyone reading this is welcome to try any of these with others within their own context to ground, anchor, and integrate the principles that I’ve laid out. They are not suitable for an individual to do on their own.
For educational settings: developing a curriculum based on needs
This activity is a small example that can be expanded if sufficient group commitment exists within the overall project. The most elemental version of this activity is for one person within a small group to name something they want to learn within the project. The group then identifies the specific needs within what this person wants to learn and begins to think about how to orient a curriculum to this which also fits the organization’s purpose and values. This experimentation, done consistently over time, can begin to point towards how we can shift overall how education and learning are approached.
Simulation (education): creating a shared purpose
This activity is a simulation that takes place within a mainstream institution. One person at a time imagines themselves to be a professor and the rest students who are there just for the degree and don’t really care about anything else. The goal of the activity is to discover, through collaborative and honest dialogue among everyone, a shared purpose that would make the learning and the teaching more collaborative than is usual within such an institution.
Simulation (economics): collaborative distribution of a finite resource
This activity is a simulation about how to distribute a finite resource in direct response to needs. At present, for example, if a medicine is in short supply, we collectively sidestep any consideration of needs by giving it to the people who have the money, irrespective of the need. What would we do if we didn’t have that mechanism? How would we confront the possibility of saying “no” to a need where ultimately there would be less impact than if we say “no” to another need? The story “Collective Triage” from my book Reweaving Our Human Fabric is a fictional example of such a situation and can be drawn on for inspiration.
Creating a field of love
Whether in education, resource flow, or any other area of life I deeply believe that to reach the next level of knowledge about how to shift things on the planet we need to come together again and not just continue to function as individuals and work on individual change. No amount of individual change can be powerful enough to counter the immensity of the field phenomenon that bell hooks calls “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” Even when coming together, the prevalence of patriarchal conditioning is overwhelming unless we meticulously set in place the material and relational systems that can support us in realigning with life’s flow sufficiently to where we can become a field of love. Paradoxically, the more honest and tender we are with ourselves and each other about all the places where we are not aligned with that flow, the stronger will be our love field. The image that has been burning like a deep flame within it is one of surrounding the patriarchal field with an even bigger field of love that will melt it — rather than fighting the patriarchal field which, tragically, is a move that is itself within the patriarchal energy imprint.
I see NGL as one such island, and I see one of our tasks (and mine in particular) to tell stories about what’s possible. I am coming back to Joanna Macy’s invitation to us to create alternatives as a key element of our work to bring about the Great Turning. However small our experiments are, and whatever their focus and purpose, we can also consciously focus on learning about the widely suppressed history of what came before patriarchy. We can also reestablish the maternal gifting paradigm, work with the external obstacles and internal limitations that will inevitably arise, and continue walking in love towards realigning all of us with life. We need miracles at this time, and we never know which of our tiny experiments might just be the seed of a global miracle.
Miki Kashtan is a practical visionary exploring the application of the principles and tools of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to social transformation. She dreams of local and global systems based on care for the needs of all life. She is the mother of the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) community, and all she does emerges from and feeds that experimentation. She has written four books and has published articles on many platforms. She blogs on The Fearless Heart.
We invite you to read the first and second parts of this article.
