Giving Through Spending - an everyday way to make your community more contributist

How to become a contributist consumer

A few months ago, one of our authors wrote an article called “Giving can (and should) be easy,” which argued that each individual should give in the ways that come naturally to them. They wrote: “As individuals, we should feel more eager and less guilty about finding ways where it is ‘easy’ and natural for us to give, and as society, we should break down barriers that make it ‘hard’ to give.”

In this direction, we at the Contributist Reader have been considering what it would look like to challenge both ourselves and you, our readers, to begin to become intentional givers, in a way that both comes easily and is truly effective. Is there a simple way that we can change our behavior in our daily lives — seeing the world by a clearer lens, playing the game of life by a more generous, more winning strategy — that both brings more joy and meaning to our lives and makes our communities flourish?

The answer is yes — and it comes in our spending. There is a simple way to make your everyday spending a true act of giving, with all of the earned dignity, real impact, and joyful feeling that true giving brings: choosing to be a contributist consumer.

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It can be hard to remember this, but spending is actually a form of giving. The reason this is hard to see is because, in our current stage of capitalism, most of our spending has become so deeply transactional (so emptied of its human and relational qualities) that it often feels much more like mutual taking.

But take a quick moment with me to reflect on what spending may have felt like in societies before our own. In a pre-industrial society, before most of your spending was mediated through large, unfeeling corporate entities, when you bought from the butcher or the tailor or the shoemaker, you knew exactly where your money was going. As you handed over a few shabby bills and/or assorted coins, you knew that they were going into the pockets of the workers who in turn gave you the product of their labor — the money would go to helping feed them and their families, or to procuring their own set of comfy shoes. These were members of your community, and when you gave your hard-earned money to them, you experienced the warm feelings associated with giving — with being a contributing member of a rich and complex community.

In today’s society, we don’t get to experience these feelings very often when we spend. The problem is not that our money doesn’t ever go to our community members; in fact, a large portion of our modern spending still does go to helping our community. Whenever you dine out, or buy groceries, or really, shop in-person anywhere, some of the money you spend goes to the employees you interact with, who are members of your community.

The problem is that we have become accustomed to the understanding that only a small portion of the money we spend goes to helping these workers. The bulk of it goes into the unfeeling corporate entity, and exits out the back to its wealthy owners, who we neither know nor trust, and who we vaguely suspect may even be exploiting those very workers who we would like to happily support. In other words, we have become disillusioned and desensitized in our spending. We have trained ourselves, through the repetition of thousands upon thousands of these unhappy transactions, to become numb to the human feelings of spending entirely. It is telling that one of the reasons we feel good when we tip is that we know that at least that money is actually going to the workers. Remember, that’s the feeling we were once rewarded with simply by making the actual purchase.

Although this picture of modern spending is pretty depressing, it also reveals an opportunity. If we can find a way to ensure that our spending really does go to helping the people of our community, then not only do we make our spending an effective act of giving to our communities (and an effective corrective to the growing problems of wealth inequality and oligarchy), we can also re-sensitize ourselves — we can begin to capture again the warm feeling of giving with every dollar we spend.

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This is both the theory and the promise behind contributist consumption. Your spending can become again an act of giving, a simple and direct way of being a contributing member of your rich and complex community. In order for this to be the case, you simply have to be confident that you are spending at businesses that are themselves contributist. This just means that they are contributing positively to their communities, and are supporting their employees well. (Our ongoing “Reclaiming Business” series gets into some detail about what makes organizations contributist, and why that makes the difference between them having a long-term positive or a long-term negative impact on their communities.)

This is simpler than it sounds. To make it easy to determine whether a business is contributist, we’ve developed something that we call the Community Stewardship Test, which is a simple, three-question measure that you can use to evaluate whether a business is contributist in a few seconds, or at most a few minutes. Here’s the test:

The Community Stewardship Test

Is it locally-owned?

Is it mission-driven?

Does it pay its workers a living wage?

If a business meets two of the test’s three measures, you can consider it partially contributist, and if it meets all three, you can consider it fully contributist.

We don’t recommend that you attempt to make all of your purchases at contributist businesses. Instead, we recommend that you make an intentional commitment to shift some of your spending to partially or fully contributist businesses. With every intentional act of spending at a business that you know meets these measures, you reclaim your spending as an act of giving — both becoming a contributist and reaping, alongside your community, the rewards.

We’ve landed on three recommended tiers of commitment, ranging from super-easy to super-committed, which we describe on the Contributist Consumption page of our new website. (We’re also working on a directory of local contributist businesses!) If you’re interested in what it might be like to be able to spend joyfully — and with a clear conscience — go check it out!