Millennials Promote Community-Owned Banking Platform at Popular California Music Festival
Lightning in a Bottle Festival is no ordinary gathering. It is an intentional space where people converge to celebrate life, model new ways of living in community, learn about sustainable practices, connect with nature, and dance. What better place to plant the seeds for the imminent launch of Good Money, a consumer banking platform structured as a customer-owned cooperative? Enthusiastic young people collect email addresses while giving out free Acai sorbet from a psychedelic double-decker school bus as deep bass music thumps in the background. Young tech-savvy creatives, discontent with the world they have inherited are creating their own future right now by utilizing crowd-sourcing models for collective transformation. This time they are targeting the heart of our economic system, the banking system.
Collective intelligence emerges when diverse people have an opportunity to share ideas in a safe and celebratory space. The traditional music festival has evolved to incorporate aspects of ceremony, workshops, yoga, think-tanks, and forums along with other community practices. Living Culture Village curates this experience for festival-goers at the heart of Lighting in a Bottle Festival called the Compass.
For the past 5 years Lightning in a Bottle has hosted Unify to present a globally-synchronized meditation which is broadcast online. Unify has held guided meditations that focused on gratitude for water, the power of seeds, visualizing solutions to climate change and more during this time. When large groups of people all over the world focalize their intention on healing specific global issues via meditation, or ceremony it creates a wonderful incubation for ideas and a shared commitment to create a better future.
This year Good Money is a co-sponsor of the global meditation and their playful marketing team is spreading the word about their venture over a free bowl of Acai sorbet. The front page of their website states, “Banks are owned by bankers, Good Money is owned by you. Good Money is the world’s first digital banking platform where we make every customer an owner and allocate 50% of our profits to social and environmental impact. No greenwashing. No BS.”
When, in the course of human development, existing institutions prove inadequate to the needs of man, when they serve merely to enslave, rob, and oppress mankind, the people have the eternal right to rebel against, and overthrow, these institutions. -Emma Goldman
Funding sustainable ventures, social impact, global goals has been a focus in many of my previous articles. Please take a look at Small Businesses Make Big Impact on Sustainable Development, along with Impact Investing, Philanthropy, Humanitarian Aid, and Blockchain, and How to Fund Impact: a Systems Architecture for Success to see the larger community of people participating in this conversation and movement. Good Money appears to be an integral part of this unfolding movement to empower networks of people who care about community and the future of our planet to collaborate for positive change.
If you’d like to sign-up to learn more and become a shareholder of Good Money, just enter your email here. If you’d like to participate via social media for a chance to win a pair of tickets to next year’s Lightning in a Bottle, post a photo on Instagram that expresses you vision of a better future with the hashtag #goodmoney. Keeping in stride with current trends, this is a participatory movement that grows in strength as the word spreads!
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution. -Emma Goldman
The future is decentralized, the future is crowd-sourced, the future is collaborative, the future is organized around shared community values. Greed, centralized and corrupt establishment structures have brought the well being of our planet to the brink of global collapse. Rather than waiting for someone else to fix these problems, a new generation led by their own brilliance are providing the solutions we all seek. Best of all they are dancing, celebrating, and having a great time in the process!