The economy of supply (I): the culture of giving

The Economy of Communion, EoC, is an initiative made up of people committed to the promotion and practice of a culture characterized by gratuity, reciprocity and an alternative lifestyle to the current capitalist system.

It differs from the circular, orange, capitalist, communist economies and others in that the EoC makes “the person and the environment grow in a dignified way,” says Edimer Albeiro Pardo Flórez, an expert on the subject and a professor at the University the Great Columbia.

What differentiates the EoC from the capitalist and circular economies, for example, is that the first “is based on profit” and the second “is a proposal based on process engineering,” he specifies.

The EoC “is centered on the person, it describes, explains and analyzes the presuppositions, achievements and implications and perspectives of an experience: The Culture of Giving.

It defends the training of new entrepreneurs and new entrepreneurs capable of sharing their benefits to reduce misery and solve other problems such as exclusion or economic problems, which today affect both individuals and communities.

It is an initiative that the Italian teacher and essayist Chiara Lubich (1920-2008) created as a “response to the social problem and economic imbalance” that she witnessed in Sao Paulo (Brazil) in 1991 and that today is taking place on the 5 continents. .

Entrepreneurs, workers, managers, consumers, savers, citizen researchers and economic operators from Argentina, Central Africa, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Congo, Croatia, Spain, the United States, France, Italy and Portugal, among others, participate today in the EoC.

It is not a welfare or philanthropic initiative, since both conceptions are individualistic, but rather it is based on the very essence of the person who exercises it and who must be of ‘communion’, that is, who shares the ideals that drive the EoC, whose main objective is to show a portion of humanity ‘without indigents’.

For this, this economy “activates reciprocity at different levels: creating jobs to include those excluded from the economic and social system, spreading the culture of giving and communion in different educational and cultural initiatives and intervening in emergency situations with aid and sustainable development projects”.

The EoC invites you to live and spread, from childhood, a new economic and civic culture based on generosity or on what Lubich called ‘the culture of giving’, which is completely different from the ‘culture of having’, prevailing today .

But, any act of giving does not create the culture of giving envisioned by Lubich. An example is when giving is a power to dominate or oppress individuals or peoples or when that giving is self-interested and utilitarian, as in certain current tendencies of neoliberalism where it only seeks individual benefit. The EoC seeks to build and has been building a social fabric for the last three decades because those who promote it are convinced that “it is not possible to cure any form of poverty that has not been chosen without including disadvantaged people in living and fraternal communities.”

Nor, if they are not inserted in “companies and workplaces” because someone with the physical and mental capacity to work will continue to be indigent if they cannot do so.