Have and Have Not
The gap between those who have plenty and those who have little is getting wider. If you are wondering who are the ones who have plenty or too much, all you need to do is to open your closet and see how much stuff you have accumulated and how much stuff you don’t used anymore. When stuff is not being used, it is a waste, not flowing into the benevolent exchange of resources.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, in their book Scarcity, called this forgotten stuff “closet castaways” and they “are so common that space, not money, becomes the scarce commodity. People need to rent out self-storage facilities to house all their stuff. Some estimate that over $12 billion is spent annually on self-storage, three times as much as is spent on music purchases. In fact, the United States has more than two billion spare feet allocated to self-storage space.”
What happens if we think of these closet castaways as resources and invest them back into our communities?
Remembering there are many who have nothing, while we have so much extra that we don’t use, should drive us to do something about it if we want to be good stewards. I completed this week’s activities by drawing an imaginary “Exchange Center” through which “those who have” can donate stuff and “those who have little” can get what they need. I imagine it not just being a thrift shop but more a social business in which there can be exchanges of all kinds of goods and services. This Exchange Center may include temporary housing for those who need it and in exchange, the residents offer their currency of time to work at the store.
This is how it might work: The store receives donations of goods hiding in people’s closets. Each item is priced in a range between $0 and the estimated monetary price. Some shoppers who can afford it may pay at a higher rate while those who have no financial resources can take it for free. In any case, the shoppers are then asked to consider other ways to contribute to the ministry in exchange for the items that they receive. This can be done by asking them to fill out a card to describe their offering in currencies other than money. Depending on the gifts and talents of the shoppers, they might offer, for example, to clean someone’s house, or to custom knit a sweater for someone that can be worth “x” amount of money. These cards of offering are then posted on a bulletin board in the store. A shopper might decide to “buy” the custom knit sweater or the cleaning service with money, which would go to support the ministry or he/she might pay with other currencies by offering something else by filling out another card. The Exchange Center provides opportunities for the people who run the ministry to build relationships with the shoppers. Also, the shoppers are getting to know each other in the process of exchanging goods, time, treasure, and talent. The shoppers who can afford to pay with money at the higher range will offset the cost for those who receive the goods free and should provide enough monetary income to pay for the cost of running such a ministry.
Remember to post your colored pictures online using #holycurrencies.