UP! - Interview with Erin Axelrod, Partner/Worker-Owner, LIFT Economy by Willi Paul & Planetshifter.com

LIFT's mission is to create, model, and share a locally self-reliant economy that works for the benefit of all life.

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Interview with Erin by Willi -

I see a constant stream of silos and failed organizations among the permaculture, agriculture, organic and sustainability camps. How do you identify and promote cross-disciplinary cooperation and funding for change?

You are right that siloing (or specialization) is a strategy that works well within the extractive economy, thus we find this to be rampant within next economy organizations as well. So, it's a great question to ask: how do we promote cross-disciplinary cooperation? I think the first step is shared literacy, making sure that those who you want to cooperate with are using similar language to describe the vision of where you are headed. At LIFT Economy, we have a written down 500-year vision for the strategies we are employing to retrofit the existing economy towards one that can work for the benefit of all life. we know for sure that our vision is going to be wrong, however the written document allows us to collaborate with others who are headed in the same direction to come to shared alignment and agreement about where we're headed and to be able to move forward in a non-hierarchical manner. Diana Leaf Christensen in her work researching more than 2,000 intentional communities worldwide distills the importance of writing down an explicitly defined vision and I cannot underscore this enough as an important tool to foster collaboration. Note on this: be as specific as you can and of course recognize that you will be wrong it's not going to pan out the way you write it down.

That said, I want to make a comment about the first part of your question, and that is to challenge the notion of failure among the types of orgs you describe. The way lift economy looks at it it's a little bit different, the problems we observe are not failures, but indicators of courageous individuals oftentimes trying to do something so outside the norms of the business as usual economy. Taking a step back, LIFT often looks at organizations on a spectrum or curve somewhere between hospicing out the old economic system and midwifing in the new. From this vantage point it is easy to see how the old system dominates the metrics we use for success. So often I see "successes" made invisible because the vast majority of us are still steeped in a paradigm of measuring success from an old framework. Does that make sense?

For example, if someone tries out a worker-owned collective where decision-making happens according to a "one member, one vote" process and the collective decides to disband and becomes fragmented, I don't necessarily see this as an inherent failure. Rather, I honor the courageous attempt to doing business differently in an economy that so rarely rewards this. It is rare that we hear the successful lessons learned from this failed attempt, or how it taught its participants how to flex their muscles in democratic decision-making. We've got to remember that we are starting from a baseline of broken and moving up from there. Any effort to change the economic norms and patterns that leave so many people out, is a success in my book. So often, these successes aren't quantifiable by old economic norms and paradigms.

How does one create a "field building" group? Is this a paid consulting venture for LIFT?

Our field building initiatives actually grew out of the question you just asked - "how do we foster increased collaboration for effectively moving our economic system into a place where it can better serve all of life?" it typically does start from some form of self-evident reciprocity but it is much more than an intuitive sensing rather than a prearranged consulting fee. For example our partners at Nutiva sponsored the first of several restorative ocean economies events that we hosted in partnership with the amazing Aimee Vincent of the Presidio Officer's Trust because John Roulac is committed to increasing awareness around the connectivity between our ocean health and the health of our soils and our climate - this spurred the creation of LIFT's Restorative Ocean Economies Field building Initiative. Now The Sustainable Design Masterclass's Neal Spackman and Raleigh Latham have since sponsored a large professional convening we are collaborating on in August with aquaculture professionals to reframe our relationship to ocean restoration activities.

Juxtapose this to how we started the regenerative agriculture investors Network (RAIN), which was done much more intuitively. My business partner Kevin Bayuk and I started convening regenerative agriculture investors because we felt it was needed to increase our shared literacy and understanding of regenerative agriculture. Shortly thereafter we met David LeZaks at the Delta Institute, who came up to us and asked if we would be a part of a grant he was writing which he successfully secured which now compensates the LIFT economy team for our work connecting regenerative agriculture investors, and has turned into the LIFT Economy RAIN Field Building Initiative. You can read more about this initiative here.

What is your assessment from the recent annual Bay Area Convergence? Any reflections about last year's event with some anticipation for this year's gig?

I'm getting very excited about our reconvening in September. I am particularly excited about the focus on diversity and inclusion which is a deep value and commitment of LIFT Economy. We really don't want to recreate the same patterns of exploitation and disenfranchisement that are actually foundational to the core reasons we have such grave ecological and climate challenges. Our exploitation of the planet is really just a symptom of how we treat each other. I really appreciate the Northern California convergence coordinators for keeping equity and inclusion as a central organizing principle of the convergence. I've known Joshua Angelo Silva and Susan Silber and others on the organizing team for almost a decade now so I trust they always put on a thought-provoking event - not to mention it always ends up being a really great party, I value the element of "fun" in what can often seem like so many intractably large and overwhelming problems.

I am working with a beta testing group at "Regenerative Dynamics. Some early best practices for evolving regenerative organizations include worker autonomy, authenticity and purpose-driven decision making. Your feedback?

Wow this looks great I hadn't heard about it before but will have to check it out some more. this is similar to what LIFT economy is doing with our next Economy MBA which launched last year and we've since taught a core cohort of 24 students in related themes including all the basics of business 101, with a next economy flavor: marketing, sales, financial forecasting, goal-setting, HR, recruitment, etc. I look forward to learning more about this group!

What are your strengths and weaknesses as a Business Coach?

My strength as a business consultant is that I am my client's biggest cheerleader. I am really good at slicing through problems to get to the core essential question that we need to address to move us towards next steps. The flip side of that is that my enthusiasm for their success (and my ability to easily envision their success), means I have to work doubly hard to force myself and my client see the pitfalls or potential problems, which is also an important aspect of business. This scenario planning is critical to planning for all potential outcomes. I think the reason this is a weakness is that so many of the entrepreneurs we work with are so visionary and don't like to go towards the negative, that they don't like to look at what could go wrong, and so it is always a challenge to bring them into that space, but I think it is important. Over the past 5 years of doing this, I've regretted the times that I did not due my due diligence as a consultant to help call in the voice of "devil's advocate" to question assumptions around what was being discussed as an "inevitable success". It is a tricky balance to not put a damper on an entrepreneur's enthusiasm while helping them plan for the worst case scenario.

How does the B-Corp option address today's environmental and economic justice issues? Any examples from LIFT clients?

I'll refer you to my business partner Ryan Honeyman, expert in B Corps who is just now finalizing the second edition of The B Corp Handbook to answer this question! There are so many diverse ways to address this, it is really up to the individual business for how they choose to tackle the many problems our world is facing. The value I see of the B Corp is that it truly is a movement, which we see as critical to catalyzing a tipping point where business becomes a force for good in the world. The Force for Good Fund that LIFT Economy founded, a $1.1M fund explicitly designed to invest in women and person-of-color owned enterprises, is meant to increase the aspirational bar and cultivate even more radical models of B corps that are doing more than just "green bling" or mainstreaming recycling, etc.

How will LIFT support the emerging barter / sharing economy over the next 10 years?

Again, it is a spectrum - LIFT has to operate at the economic model because we see ourselves as a bridge-builder translating the permaculture ethics of people care, earth care, and voluntary limits to personal consumption to the more mainstream business-as-usual economy. Our revenue, for example, could be used over time to develop a suite of "next Economy benefits package" including non-extractive permanent real estate co-op housing models for lift Partners that remove land from the speculative real estate market - it will take lots of money to develop these models that we wish to provide for future lift partners.

We also are a worker-owned collective so it is up to each person personally to define what level of the barter/sharing economy spectrum they'd like to engage in. For me, personally, I aspire over time to meet all my human needs (housing, clothing, food, water, energy) via barter and gift economy so that over time I can contribute upwards of 90% of the income I make into building the next economy via investment and philanthropy, but that is just me, personally. I don't want to impose that on any other of my LIFT partners, who each come from different backgrounds and socioeconomic contexts. You can read more about my own personal journey with barter and gift economy and I am even dreaming up a book about this topic.

What are the top three Best Practices that LIFT deploys to help organizations enhance their vision, culture, strategy, and operations?

1. An explicitly defined vision statement including measurable, specific, and timebound goals (written down).

2. Clear operating agreements and ground rules for how team members engage with one another, their values, their role descriptions (written down)

3. Regular and periodic training in collective decision-making

We also do all the standard marketing strategy, financial projections, vision retreats, sales strategy, etc. but the three I listed above are distilled from the recommendations from Diana Leaf Christensen's book on intentional communities called: Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities. Would that all our businesses operated as intentional communities and crucibles for personal growth and development - I believe we'd have a much different world if this were the case!

Thanks for asking such great Questions Willi, it is a pleasure to be reconnecting with you again at this level and circling back since my time at Daily Acts over 5 years ago!

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Bios -

Erin Axelrod
Erin at lifteconomy.com

Erin is a problem-solver, systems-designer, entrepreneur and community organizer. After earning her BA in Urban Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University, Erin worked for four years as the City Programs Coordinator for Daily Acts Organization producing water conservation programs for cities, transforming lawns into food, and helping design and manage a successful greywater reuse education & installation program.

She received her Permaculture Design Certificate with Toby Hemenway and has worked with the Fibershed Project as a contributing author for an Economic Feasibility study for implementing a bioregional-scale regenerative textile mill in CA.

Her consulting with LIFT Economy has led her to a specialization in accelerating the spread of climate-beneficial and land-based businesses in the Next Economy. She does this through a range of initiatives including client work with companies like North Coast Brewing Company, Kendall Jackson and Singing Frogs Farm, among others. She also convenes LIFT Economy's regenerative agriculture investor network (RAIN) and a Restorative Ocean Economies Field-Building Initiative. Erin lives and works on a Grassfed beef and Land Restoration Project, Freestone Ranch, just outside of her hometown of Petaluma. When not working, she loves to forage wild mushrooms, huckleberries, elderberries and bay nuts to make nutrient dense foods for her friends. A frequent public speaker, she has given presentations at conferences including Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP), Permaculture Voices Conference, FoodFunded, Sustainable Enterprise Conference, NorCal Permaculture Convergence, and the CA Greywater Conference.

Willi Paul, Principal, Planetshifter.com
willipaul1 at gmail.com

Willi worked for several City Planning Departments including the City of Minneapolis, the City of St. Paul and the City of St. Louis Park, MN. As a Graduate Student as the Urban and Regional Studies Institute at University of MN - Mankato, he helped invent what we now know as online community with his Electronic Charrette process. He volunteered on multiple community design charrettes with Minnesota Design Team. He holds a M.A. from the Urban and Regional Studies Institute and several multiple planning projects as a employee and PhD student at Virginia Tech.

Currently, Willi draws deeply on the emerging values in the permaculture and transition towne movements. He is creating sound myths based now after an eight-year exploration of myth, alchemy, compost soil and sound archetypes for Planetshifter.com and his experimental sound project, the chaos era. Please discover him at Regenerative Mythology, a new Community of Practice, on LinkedIn. His first album and eBook are available at iTunes.
Willi is a Project Manager with FacilitiesConsultant.com, a Bay Area office design and relocation firm. willipaul.studio, his new regenerative media solutions consultancy, launches on July 10.