Generosity Economy

Recently visited the restaurant Taste of Himalayas in Berkeley. They had the Karma Kitchen going on.

What does that mean?

Imagine a restaurant where there are no prices on the menu and where the check reads $0.00 with only this footnote: "Your meal was a gift from someone who came before you. To keep the chain of gifts alive, we invite you to pay it forward for those dine after you."

Karma Kitchen is run by a group of volunteers that assembles at the restaurant
each week to practice generosity through the simple act of serving a meal. It is slightly different than the pay-as-you-wish restaurants which have come up in the past couple of years.

Charity Focus says gift economy is a whisper in the ear of the collective, a whisper insisting against the odds that there is another way of encountering this world and each other: through generosity.

At its core, gift-economy is a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance, and isolation to community.

Whenever we give or receive unconditionally , we participate in a quite, no-strings revolution where act acts serves as its own catalyst - and as a movement from isolation to community, from scarcity to abundance.

What a fantastic concept! Was glad to be a part of it and actually see it working.