So, what if the market won’t pay what we’re worth? Do we give up on the idea of a regenerative career or right livelihood?

My recent post on why it’s okay to make a living inspired some great discusions! Among them were several versions of the statement above, especially from artists, activists, regenerative farmers, permaculturists and researchers in cutting edge technologies on sustainability and natural health.

If we are doing work that is important and life enhancing, but the market doesn’t seem to support it, the reality is we may need some extra life design.

Since Transformative Adventures is informed by Permaculture, lets look at Bill Mollison’s response in this situation: “yield is only limited by imagination.” Taken alone, that reads like “believe it to achieve it” or some version of “the secret” and positive thinking. But it‘s really a challenge to view our problem as a design problem, and to think creatively about a design solution.

Mollison also provides this insight: “yield isn‘t limited by the number of elements in a system (products we can make), but the connections between them.”

Since Transformative Adventures is about taking ACTION, creating right livelihood is all about building the right connections, in a systematic way.

Our key processes in creating right livelihood, think of them as journeys if you like, are all about building resilient connections:

Key Adventures for a regenerative career

1. develop a holistic life design,

2. Seek transformative investments,

3. Stack your incomes, markets, and talents,

4. be a community organizer,

5. Design to be lucky.

These are things that all of the most effective and successful community transformation leaders and earth warriors have in common. All these journeys will build connections to increase our yields, but let‘s start with getting lucky.

This is a much bigger topic than we can cover here, but one element to getting lucky is that we need a plan to support our work. As we seek transformative investments, we will need to see our main work as a high risk/high reward investment (farming and art are always high risk endeavors), and we will need some low-risk moderate reward investments that will give us the stability to support our work. (Note: we also need to understand how to make our high risk investments high reward!)

Stability doesn‘t necessarily mean a day job. In fact, IMO, the world needs your work, and your work deserves professional attention.

Which brings us back to the most direct form of connection building, **stacking**. For example, if we sell paintings for $200/ each, and that isn’t a living wage, we might find ways to stack products from that same amount of work. For example we could also make prints for $20. And we might do limited edition pieces on special materials like clocks or antique doors for $2,000. Find something where people are already paying a good price, or can even access financing for, like doors. That’s **stacking markets**.

Or do a subscription series of prints on a topic like foraging or magical herbs for $500. **Stacking skills,** we might sell our herbal subscription with an herbalism course, with medicines made from the herbs, or with a set of herb seeds. We might find that this extra bit of affinity and niche is much more valuable to a market passionate about that idea.

We can do this with farming, health, massage… whatever our regenerative career path. Thinking in stacking, investments, and community organizing is how I transformed my struggling Permaculture Design business and homestead into a viable business overnight.

In our Transformative Adventures programs (like the upcoming fundraiser PDC, 🤷‍♂️) we give tools and quests to help go DEEPER into all of these areas than I can on Facebook, but the point is we need not just accept the market rate for our product as a limitation. We can see it as a design challenge.

When we do these quests together on our journey to become “FREE”, Financially Resilient/Economically/Ethically Empowered, then we can really become empowered to put our energy into things that truly build a beautiful life and world. And a regenerative career.

This is such an important part of our program that I’ll post a link to our free money class here.

And you can watch this overview of our livelihood development programs, here:

Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/EDfJnVL6pRAJa-pnSyzbJ2p_HnMh1ksuY6bIni5yRnxKHIxz0bbzzN89mqbd8UFi.J7zhdFSMjimcEZo_

Access Passcode: +!f5eRK0

(If this article has helped you, I hope you’ll support our emerging organization by sharing it. 💚)