Money, Self, and Community

Money is often taboo – something worldly and uncomfortable to talk about. Yet money profoundly shapes our lives, our relationships, and our communities. We’ll explore our personal and ancestral histories with money, how this shows up in our relationships, and choices we can make as we let our lives speak. “We need to have a…

Workshop Description

Money is often taboo – something worldly and uncomfortable to talk about. Yet money profoundly shapes our lives, our relationships, and our communities. We’ll explore our personal and ancestral histories with money, how this shows up in our relationships, and choices we can make as we let our lives speak.

“We need to have a conversation about money.” What feelings would show up in you if your spouse, a family member, a friend, a stranger, approached you with this? Anxiety? Fear? Relief? Money isn’t often talked about, it can be taboo. This is understandable. Money can bring up shame, our sense of self-worth, experiences of not enough or too much, and much more. What results when a topic that molds our lives, our relationships, and our communities, is not talked about? What happens to our lives when not informed by its conscious discussion? How does it move in the background when hidden?

It’s framed as a personal issue when in many ways it’s a community issue. Money crowds the spaces between our gifts finding expression and our needs getting met. On a societal level this hardens into class structures. When we open our door to the stranger, what can we offer beyond kind words and a listening ear? Money is a story about our connection, or disconnection, with others. Framed as freedom, our hopes and dreams, safety and security now and in the future. If it can be freedom and independence, it can also mean servitude, with racialized, gendered, and other particular manifestations. Uncomfortable questions plague the money discourse. We aim to co-create a space where we can hold these questions with awareness of the different histories and experiences which still somehow bring us together.

At the same time, money appears as a worldly topic. It is dirty. Jesus “cleansed” the temple by casting out the money changers. Is our only recourse to retreat to a monastery in the woods to wash our hands of this? Do we render this unto Caesar? But it is not money itself but the “love of money” that is “a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). The Light shines here too. Friends are fortunate to have meetings for worship with attention to business, which shine the Light into “the workplace of Spirit within” and also outwards to our wider community. What other practices make this relationship between money and Spirit explicit?

We’ll explore the questions above during our time together in this workshop. Brought to you by Right Sharing of World Resources, grounded in Spirit we’ll explore money as a personal and communal story. We’ll reflect on how our ancestors navigated its uses, remember our own initiation into money’s rites and passages, and explore how it manifests in our lives in the present. We will then look into the future, discerning choices we can make led by Spirit and enmeshed in community. Through worship sharing, discussion, and a mix of experiential activities to loosen up our imaginations, we will consider:

• Our personal formation with money and how the past connects to the present
• Where our relationship with money aligns with our faith, and where we encounter edges for learning
• The way we practice with money can foster connection or lead to separation
• How our faith informs our relationship with money and the economy
• How money can help us live into our beliefs, as individuals and as a community
• With Right Sharing of World Resources and a global perspective in mind, how our choices around money ripple out across the world

There are no advanced readings nor is there need to bring anything other than your whole selves. There are no extra costs.

Leader Experience

Emily works in the world of money and has always been fascinated by its movements and how it frames our relationships, and has invited others on her journey of curiosity through her facilitation of this workshop with Right Sharing of World Resources in her role as a board member. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota and is part of Twin Cities Friends Meeting of Northern Yearly Meeting.  

      Nathan has facilitated experiential workshops on conflict transformation through the Alternatives to Violence Project for ten plus years, in-person and online, in prisons and in the outside community, with older and younger folks. He is also trained in facilitating Kingian Nonviolence workshops (facilitating this inside prison only). Through his work at Right Sharing of World Resources, he facilitates various kinds of workshops online and in-person. At the 2024 Gathering, Nathan facilitated a short workshop in the Quaker Earthcare Witness Earthcare Center and in 2025 he co-facilitated the workshop Practicing the Testimonies: Self and Society. In addition to these and other workshops, Nathan is currently co-facilitating monthly Death Cafes, conversations around death and dying, where he lives in Iowa City, as a member of Iowa City Monthly Meeting of Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative).