One of the many interesting things about the Fellowship is the rise of a small economy here, hopefully operating along community-building and ecological lines. At the financial heart of it is the Hall rental business, providing money for maintenance, repair and upgrading the Fellowship building and grounds. It would be great to operate without money by using barter and volunteers, but it’s hard to get the likes of PG&E, EBMUD and Pac Bell over to that viewpoint. We hope to gradually move away from the likes of PG&E toward a more independent source such as solar; but for now we are stuck with decisions that were made long ago when things were different – energy was cheap.

      Rental is a kind of business here -- and we’ve been harshly criticized for charging any money at all to use the Hall. However, I believe we’re running this rental business in a conscious way that respects the interests of the community over mere money making. Many worthy groups who complain about being discriminated against at other halls get a big welcome here. These groups include peace groups, Africans, Latinos, gays, groups serving the homeless, anarchists, communists, workers, radical environmentalists, etc. Our fees are sliding scale, so groups that have little money but provide a big community service can still use our Hall: for example, Food-Not-Bombs and the Oakland Emiliano Zapata Street Academy. The Academy (familiarly known as “Street School”) is our local high school art magnet. Incredibly, it doesn’t have an auditorium so the School is extremely grateful to use our Hall at little cost. The African groups, however, are fairly affluent as well as generous so they are happy to support us at near market rates. Much of the money that isn’t taken by PG&E and the like, is given to activists and Fellowship members to do maintenance and repair work here. These people might ordinarily be economically forced to squander their time and energies working for the rich but they are grateful to work here instead at lesser wages.

      This policy of paying people to work here is something that I’m responsible for because maintenance of our Fellowship building had basically stopped under the prior all-volunteer program. And we simply wanted to help people who legitimately needed money and wanted to support us. We also believe we could create an alternative work environment where people had as much freedom as possible. So people working on our building and grounds come and go when it suits them, prioritize their own jobs, make as many decisions as possible about HOW to work and even WHAT work to do. We also decided to employ people who were extremely worthy of work but not desirable to conventional employers. We are not put off by an intelligent and compassionate person who wears a mohawk haircut, who lectures people on vegetarianism, or who is past retirement age. And we are happy to give second chances to people who have made mistakes in their lives, though they will be held accountable for any problems that they cause here.

      The free food operation is another big part of our little economy. People barter their labor by cooking the fruits and vegetables that are donated to Food-Not-Bombs from local farmers. They get a free meal and the satisfaction of serving food to people in People’s Park. These volunteers enjoy a friendly, relaxed, and non-coercive environment “far” from the horror and humiliation of your local fast food restaurant. Hopefully, this communitarian model will spread.

      Other parts of our small economy include recycling, vegetable gardening, and composting. Future exciting possibilities include guiding our garden toward permaculture, using rain-water runoff, installing solar panels on our huge south-facing roof, running a bio-diesel operation, and creating a movie theatre (“Movies and Smoothies”). Bio-diesel is fuel made from vegetable oil gathered from fast food restaurants. It would allow us to break our ties with oil companies and give our money to something more environmentally benign. These ideas might be hard to realize; but why not have dreams and try to realize them? And why waste your time in the rich man’s economy, serving the lords of industry, when you can spend it someplace beautiful and peaceful like the Fellowship?