 Great. Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. It's really great to be here. Keira and I were just commenting that the vibe in this room just feels super nice. So thanks for curating that vibe for us. As Mark mentioned, I'm from the business network and community in Spiral. As you might be able to tell from my Kiwi twang, I'm also from the far flung former colony, New Zealand. A lot of the speakers at Meaning Today, we heard a bit from Kate, and I'm sure we'll hear more from Vinay later on, are talking about the very scary reality that we are all living in. That is on our doorstep and that stretches as far into the future as it's humanly possible to imagine. I'm going to say that this scary reality does not occur in a vacuum. It is not the result of other people out there. The scary reality isn't some invisible monolithic corporation. It is us. Toxic human behaviors that are propelling our demise as a species are essentially cultural. It is me, it is you. Through my own experience and from thinking of many other theorists, I'm going to say a place to change some of these toxic behaviors, these toxic cultural and institutional and structural behaviors can be in community. It really feels funny to be a cis white girl standing on a stage at a conference about meaningful business from relative privilege, talking about community like it just went to Burning Man and discovered it. But given that I'm in the mother country of dry ironic humor, thank you, I'll just put that over there as my kind of ironic self-awareness caveat. Yes, I know community, been around for a while. But I do think there is something about refinding it, especially in the West, so-called developing cultures, developing countries. I don't think they're in the same place of extreme isolation and loneliness that we seem to be over here. So what I'll do today is talk about a few stories from my own experience with some crazy misfits, way out on the edge at Inspiral, developing new structures for working, new businesses, but also new ways for relating that support kind of working and having fun and flourishing in a new economy. So this is the premise of this talk today, doing business in community. And community can really form in the most unlikely of places, a social business group. And I think it can do several things. It can help us look inwards and start to work on our own crap, our own neuroses, our own egos, our edgy angles. It can help us have new ways to organize, to collaborate, to get along. And it can also produce tools and businesses for livelihood and to help other groups, other people organize in new ways. That's a little bit of what Inspiral does, and we'll get further into that very shortly. Within the Inspiral universe, I also do do some work. I don't just go around to conferences and talk about my opinions. I work on a startup called Greater Than, and we have some software called CoBudget. So I'll talk a little bit about that today as well. So Charles Eisenstein, one of my favorite writers and theorists, brings forth this notion that community and people really flourish when we actually need each other. And that's a really important notion for CoBudget. The idea that when you put money in the middle of a community, of a business community, you make livelihood very important, there's something to group around. That's more than just a common purpose. In society, we do have a pretty big lack of community. We have extreme isolation. In the 1980s, 11% of Americans responded to a survey saying they sometimes felt lonely or isolated, or they frequently felt lonely or isolated. In 2010, that number ricocheted up to 45%. 45% of people saying, yes, I frequently feel lonely, and I frequently feel isolated. And loneliness is this feeling of no longer being needed, and no longer being able to call on someone to help you out. But it's more than just getting, it's about reciprocity. You need to be able to give as well as receive to not feel lonely. And the disintegration of our social fabric has many, many causes, and I'm not going to go into them now. But we spend less time with each other. The internet, social media, key to this, we buy most things now as services that we used to just do for each other, that we used to just provide for each other. Now, we order it on our app. So this is really, in my opinion, a big part of disintegration of our social fabric. We do not need each other anymore. One place, however, which thankfully we still spend a whole bunch of time in, is work, for better or worse. I think the typical career is, there's a number out there, it's about 80,000 hours. Maybe a little bit less in Spain, maybe a little bit more in America. But around 80,000 hours, that is a bunch of time, fairly substantial. And I'm really one of these people who's an advocate of the idea that the workplace can be more than just a place where we get our labor appropriated from us, or we sell it for as much as the market can bear. The idea, the workplace for me is a place we can really grow as people. We can do a lot of the self-development. We can work on our stuff. And there's many, many theorists and writers who write about this stuff, from, you know, Frederick Leloux to Keegan and Leahy to Ricardo Semler. It's almost becoming mainstream. Okay. Maybe that's going a little bit far. But I, my premise is also that we can't do this work of growing as people in isolation. And we can't do it when we're constantly in flux. So I think there's also a stat that says these days it's pretty common for a worker to change jobs seven times in their career. I think this is really low. I think it's about, you know, from anecdotal evidence, probably more about 15. And when you think about the typical freelancer or entrepreneurial career, it's, you know, it's 30. We go where the sun shines or where there's more startup capital or where there's lots of leverage. And in the old world, where most people still do their work from, we have a lot of hierarchy. We have a lot of isolation. People are in organizations experiencing individualism and disengagement and a lack of collective intelligence. So it's not, the old world of business is not a place to build these new structures and new behaviors either. So business and community. To me, a community is smaller than a network. It's about 100 to 150 people. Dumbass number. You can actually know everyone and that kind of grouping. And it is, it can be the perfect setting to start to focus on some of our own cultural behaviors and work on those things. In a business community, you can have a diversity of age. We do, it's not just yuppies and millennials. We have people who are 23. We have people that are 65. You can have a diversity of gender and hopefully ethnicity. A business community is a place to pioneer, as the meaning tagline puts it, to be pioneers and make doing this work of social enterprise and kind of systemic social change not unapproachable. You can go there if you're not privileged and you can go there if you're not extremely naïved if you're doing it in a place of community. As my colleague Rich Bartlett from Inspiral and Lumio says, in small committed groups, we can choose the behaviors that we want to encourage and we can choose how much time we want to spend working on these new habits together. Doing business in community is like a long-term friendship. You see the worst of people. You also see the best. And it does take work. It's like any relationship work worth having. It takes a lot of work. So for me, key ingredients of business and community is self-management, which I'm hoping a lot of you have heard about. This kind of theory that we can have a lot more autonomy in the way we work. We can have a big focus on really knowing each other and bringing our whole selves. And there's also this concept that I'll talk about today very quickly, cooperative entrepreneurship. A thing that we're playing around with right now at Inspiral is this notion of a livelihood pod. And this is like a new structure for organizing where a bunch of freelancers get together and start to kind of collectivize and try to get around the precarity of the gig economy that so many of us are working in. And key also for me and for our team is collaborative finance. So these are some of the things I'll be quickly talking about today. So often when we do talk about working in these new ways or social enterprise or social impact business, we talk so much about the what. What are we doing? And why are we doing it? And how much impact are we going to make? And I really think that we need to focus more on the how. How are we doing this? And where? And I don't mean where in a geographical sense. I'm not talking about everyone moving down to the bottom of the world. I'm talking about the where is in the conditions and the environment that we create. So Inspiral is a network or a community of 150 people distributed around the world. There is many different businesses within the network and there is also a big contingent of freelancers and we're all working together and paying commons, paying money to the commons of Inspiral. There is a high, a very high population of web developers at Inspiral and we are also united by a common vision or purpose which is more people working on stuff that matters. This is vague enough for people that are very obsessed with autonomy to find their way through it but kind of tight enough to hold us, to hold us in something. So key to a lot of what we do at Inspiral is this concept of self-management because I think it's really, you're kind of letting a lot escape if you have a bunch of people together and you don't get them to focus on self-management. One second. So yeah, without a focus on personal development and ironing out our issues, we're just going to recreate some of these toxic structures of society. Most of the noise that happens in the world of self-management is about autonomy and agency and collaborative decision-making but a key part and what I've learned and what a lot of us have learned at Inspiral is a very key part is about relatedness and connecting to others. One of my, the reason that I get so much value from being in a business community like Inspiral is this concept of stewardship which we kind of, we took actually from a theorist and then we've been experimenting with. I have constant communications with about eight or nine people at Inspiral. So every kind of week or every day almost, I'm on the phone or having coffee with someone who is my friend but also knows a lot about our business activities. Ants is a very good friend of mine. We've been working together a lot these last five years. He really knows all of my kind of strengths as well as my weaknesses and he's not as afraid to point out these to everyone that I work with. And I'm not saying that this is new or a revelatory that we can have friends that we work with but I think it is really, really powerful when someone really knows you and has seen you at your very worst, breaking down at the end of a hard day but can also talk to you about life outside work. And here we're not actually talking about sandwiches. We're talking about how we kind of intermix life and work together every time that we talk. So one of these key things of Inspiral is that we're constantly playing with new structures for organizing. So right now I'm in my kind of third startup and I'll talk about it a bit more later. A business developing software for collaborative finance. This subject area is way out on the fringe like many of the businesses and startups at Inspiral. Without the constant support of eight or nine people that really, really love and trust us and support what we're doing. I don't think we, many of us at Inspiral would be approaching the kind of the fringe or the radical nature of what we're doing. So people at Inspiral will get up on stages at conferences and talk about what we're doing. They'll send us leads. They'll, you know, anytime we need support or advice, they'll be on the phone willing to answer. So Inspiral began its life as a big collective of freelancers. People were using the foundation or the business at the middle of Inspiral to invoice and to win work. And that was kind of, kind of how it existed for about two or three years. Then after a while new businesses began to form in this network. We have a lot of web developers. We also have designers, accountants, lawyers. So a lot of these necessary skill sets and mindsets to actually just start new businesses. After a while though, what we've been noticing is that this, this grouping, this collective, the number was too big, lots and there was not enough kind of high trust and connectedness between the people. So that started to break down. And the new kind of organizing structure that is replacing that is this notion of livelihood pods. So a livelihood pod is three to seven freelancers who are grouping together and sharing work, sharing income. So the, the, the livelihood pod I was part of, which is called Golden Pandas, we collectivize all of our income, everything we made, we put it in the middle. And every month we would have, have an honest conversation about what we needed. And, you know, I was in this pod with a woman, Susan, who's 20 years my senior and who's earning powers a little bit more. But we would just sit down every month and say, okay, these are my needs. These are yours. This is what we got. I'll take this. You take that. Often it was actually quite communistic, a bit scary. And so the, the kind of nature of the pod ecosystem at Inspiral is that there's five pods now. And we have this little pod ecosystem where one pod, the Golden Pandas will get work for some of the developer pods, protozoa and root systems. And a very, very, very key focus of being in a pod is doing deliberate development. Not, it's not just about work, it's not about money. It's about how can we support each other to look inwards and start to change some of the toxic human behaviors that we all have. This other key concept, cooperative entrepreneurship is a very strong pillar of what we do at Inspiral. And this is this notion that starting systemic social businesses is pretty scary. And in order to do it and even consider doing it, it's quite helpful to have this sharing and abundance mindset. Rather than the kind of keep it close, don't tell anyone, destroy the competition, charge as much as the market will bear. Yeah, I think kind of starting something that is, you know, trying to be systemic and doing that in isolation is a little bit crazy. I think that being in isolation actually reinforces a scarcity mindset. And a little story to explain what cooperative entrepreneurship is. Lumio, who is probably the most renowned Inspiral business, which is participatory decision-making software, they're kind of four years ahead of our company, which is called Greater Than. And we're doing kind of similar-ish things. There's more about decision-making in business and organizations. Ours is more about money. But they're four years ahead and they've learned a lot of lessons that are very, very valuable for us to know about. We have calls with them and we're like, hey, what are your conversion rates? And they're like, oh, they're really bad. And that makes us feel really good about having all this information that's so accessible. As we go through some of the same challenges they went through two years ago, we get on the phone and ask them about it. Similarly, we get up on stage and pitch them at conferences. It's www.lumio.org. Great participatory decision-making software. And even earlier this year, we got them a huge custom development gig. They'll send out updates about what we're doing to their entire customer list. We're different businesses, but we're really cooperating in order for a more abundant outcome for both. Perhaps one of the best ways to explain cooperative entrepreneurship is to tell the origin story of co-budget. So co-budget is a tool that enables groups to spend money together. Like all good apps, it started as a spreadsheet. Because in Inspire, we were re-diverting surplus revenues to the commons of Inspire, and we needed a way to spend it together. So a bunch of people, Alana and Derek, got up, started the spreadsheet and then got up a basic prototype. After a while, they realized they weren't necessarily interested in doing it. So they've kind of given us the code base and the permission with no equity, not saying, okay, we're going to keep a whole bunch of this, just saying, go out, do what you came with it, do a good job. We trust you. It's a pretty kind of beautiful scenario. So community is the result of many things. Some of what I've talked about. A really key thing, I think, from what I've seen in many of the communities, business communities and networks I see around the world, is actually having skin in the game. Making something, putting something there so you can't just walk away. So you can't just, you know, get on a plane as a digital nomad and head to Bali, which might sometimes be preferable. Anti-Nazi spy, theologian and theorist Dietrich Bornhofer put it really well. He who loves community destroys community. He who loves people creates community. So this is the notion that if we're just doing community for community's sake, it's a little bit laughable. It's a little bit, you know, I better not be offensive, but you know, like religion or patriotism, making community around that just for the sake of it. What can we do that actually holds us, put income, put livelihood in the middle, have a shared purpose, have a shared mission? Charles Eisenstein is, I think, the most vocal and eloquent proponent of this theory that human relationships are being taken away from us and sold back as services. Many of us live in this, all of us, I think, live in this hyper monetized system where, yeah, everything we do becomes a service, becomes a commodity. But I think there's something around putting money in the commons and decentralizing decision making power about it, around it, that needs to be held along a shared vision and a shared purpose. So co-budget is a software tool where members or people in the group receive funds in their account, and they can allocate this money to support projects and things that they care about within a group or within a community or within a business. So by putting money and livelihood in the middle and distributing decision making power, we're really enabling people to truly participate, to really have a say, to actually be part of the community, rather than just the community on some stuff and then no power on the things that really matter. So this is the premise of our company greater than, of which co-budget is part, that tackling resource allocation and building software and infrastructure for this is super important if we're going to see more communities grow and actually have this network effect. So in Inspiral, through co-budget, we've seen in Inspiral, we've seen new ideas get enough money to get through to building a prototype. So people have raised buckets, you know, $5,000 to get the wireframes up to start their new business. And at some stage, after they've been paid for their time to do this work, they get in the position to actually raise capital. So it can kind of be like this bridging, this bridging tool. There's an amazing network called the Embassy Network based in San Francisco. It's kind of like a cooperative housing layer. They use co-budget too, and they've been doing some super cool projects like buying books for prisoners. So with their collective money, they've decided, okay, we've got some surplus. And another one is providing funds to subsidize rent for people in the Bay Area because I've heard it's a little bit expensive there. There's an amazing, brilliant digital tech co-op called Outlandish based in London. They're a big user of co-budget. This year in the lead up to the UK election, they co-budgeted money and themselves built some of those amazing web platforms showing the effect of the NHS cuts and the school cuts, showing the effect of austerity. They use co-budget to, so they've re-diverted funds from their margin, their profit margin, use co-budget and paid themselves their market rate as web developers to build this tool. They also use it for some other amazing projects like a year's supply of biscuits and super serious stuff like that. So there's lots of, yeah, super cool companies all around the world doing this experimentation with commons management and we're trying to support them through co-budget. So yeah, I think I'm getting towards the end of my time. Julianna, my co-founder and I will be doing a workshop where we actually do some live simulation of what a co-budgeting experience is like, so join us if you can. But the kind of key premise of my talk is that toxic behaviors are propelling our demise as a human species. It's not others out there, it's us and we are part of the problem as well as the solution. We can start to work on these behaviors and the best place I really think through my own experiences to do that is in community with people that aren't going to walk away, that see us at our worst of times, that see us at our best of times and who we actually truly need. So thank you so much for having me here. This is a really beautiful conference and it's such an honor to be up here talking to you all. So yeah, thanks so much.