Charlotte Shade is a friend of mine and I’ve watched with interest and admiration as her group of housemate/friends have bought a house, had babies and brought them up together in a loving non-nuclear family group.

In this conversation Charlotte and I explore where the idea of buying a house with friends came from, how her group made it happen and what they’ve learnt in the process. Being a lawyer, Charlotte has a unique perspective and set of skills. She created this legal agreement, which enables the group to navigate potentially difficult situations like someone wanting to leave. They have made this agreement open-source so that other groups can use or modify as needed.

I was particularly struck by one thing that Charlotte said:

“I’ve realised that you can just do things differently if you want. You just have to do it. It's not necessarily going to be plain sailing, but when is life ever plain sailing? It's hard. There's going to be difficult things. So why not do something different?”

It struck me that these different pathways are open to us if we have the curiosity to look for them and the patience and confidence to navigate the challenges. It was clear from talking to Charlotte that the gains of energy, time and connection far outweigh the challenges of owning a house with friends. She call her and her partner “time millionaires” and she feels profoundly grateful for her situation.

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits and challenges of co-buying and how to go about it, Charlotte’s house-mate Rupert has written some excellent articles:

This article describes the process they went through to find their house.

This article provides details on the legal and financial side of the process.

This article describes the process of coming up with shared values.

And this article is about having a baby while buying and co-owning a house.

This week the tables have turned. Hannah gets to fulfil her dream of being a podcast host and I have a go at answering difficult questions about my childhood, the economics of my life, why I’ve chosen to focus on home and kāinga, what I hope to achieve in this project and why I feel like a piglet suckling an enormous industrial mother pig.

It was a treat to explore the ideas and epiphanies this project is bringing me. I feel shocked that it has taken me 41 years to begin to understand the ways our economic system controls our lives. Despite my deep desire to connect with community and the whenua, I find myself relying on big corporations for my day-to-day sustenance - supermarkets, banks, oil companies etc. Ironically it feels simpler and less risky to keep suckling at these impersonal industrial entities than it does to do business with friends and family. It seems to me that we’ve lost a fundamental ability to work together and to sustain ourselves from the earth. That feels scary! But I do have hope that by understanding more and connecting more we can start to detach ourselves from the teats of the industrial mother pig and reshape the way energy and resources flow.

I’m very excited to share this conversation with 19 year old activist and student, Anika Green. She grew up in an inner city Christian community called Stillwaters in Te Whanganui a Tara which aims to provide a space of belonging, transformation and faith for anyone who needs it. In her childhood home she was surrounded by all kinds of people who loved and cared for her, including homeless people, gang members, sex workers and refugees. She never learnt to view these people through a lens of difference. By hearing their stories and sharing in their grief and joys she learnt about issues of poverty, discrimination and injustice in a very personal and immediate way. By the age of four she was already a passionate advocate for social justice and her commitment has only grown since then.

I used to visit the Stillwaters community when I was at university for the dinners and services they hosted every Friday and Sunday evening. I remember feeling like I’d come across a warm cave in a bleak landscape when I stepped inside. I was moved by the warmth and generosity with which everyone came together to eat, sing, laugh and chat. The experience cut through a sense of isolation in my life. It was refreshing and nourishing to get out of my bubble.

In this conversation with Anika we explore the economics of her childhood home - how they afforded to feed so many people every week, where the energy and resources came from and how they balanced the needs of their family with those of the community. She told me about the home she’s creating for herself with other young students and her vision for how homes with open doors could provide the belonging and dignity people need to thrive.

I was particularly struck by one thing Anika said:

“When you know you’re loved and belong, it’s easy to be selfless.”

To me, this statement speaks to the heart of economic system change. The Good Energy Project has taught me that alternative economic systems which honour the planet and people are possible - but they require a profound shift in the way we relate to each other. As Bryan Ines pointed out in our conversation last year, we need to re-learn how to work together.

Talking with Anika, I had the sense that she lives in a wider field to other people. She has a huge capacity for service and connection because she receives so much from the people around her. She lacks the barriers, fears and indoctrinated ideas that cause other people to shut down.

This conversation spurred some deep reflections of my own sense of belonging and my capacity to open my door and welcome people in. This has been both inspiring and confronting. I don’t think I could live in a home with an open door as Anika does at this stage. I don’t feel I have the capacity, the skills to establish healthy boundaries or a deep enough sense of belonging to draw on. But I feel deeply inspired by the openness and generosity Anika shows and I want to engage in the slow work of opening up and connecting across difference.

It strikes me that unless we find pathways to belonging and ways to heal our own sense of displacement and shame, we won’t have the capacity to show up for each other or the planet.

After interviewing lots of inspiring and knowledgeable experts it was so lovely to sit down with someone I know really well and embark on a journey together. Hanna is such a great storyteller. I was captivated right from the start by her descriptions of her childhood, her uncompromising teenage passion for animals and the environment and the way she veered off her scrupulously developed life-plan (to become a vet like her Dad) into the chaos, beauty and terror of the world.

This is a beautiful story of the way life reveals pathways and hope where we least expect them.

One of the reasons I wanted to interview Hanna now is that her story aligns with a new focus for my project.

(By the way I have some very exciting news - I’ve been funded to continue the Good Energy Project for another year until October 2024!! I feel like I’ve spent my first year just getting my head around the topics of economics and climate change. In the next year I’m really excited to start to explore how I might be able to contribute.)

One of the focuses for the funding being renewed is speaking to more young people - because our ultimate aim is to support young people who will inherit all these challenges. Hanna is quite young - 27. She wants to be part of a more caring and connected economy and world. But it’s really hard when you’re at the beginning of your career, everything is expensive and none of the obvious ways of making money align with your values.

Another focus for my next year is to experiment with creative ways of working with the ideas and needs I’m discovering - I’ve spent my career devising creative interventions to help bring the humanity back to intellectual topics like science and engineering - things like magnificent science variety shows and storytelling events. I also find myself surrounded by creative people - my wife is an arts therapist, my brother and his partner are puppeteers and writers. I find myself drawn to creative people and I’m convinced that whatever the solutions are to these huge problems I’ve been exploring, they will need creativity to succeed. Hanna is one of my thinking partners for imagining what this could look like.

Another thing I think we’ll need, to bring to life the ideas and possibilities I’ve been talking to people about, is some kind of spiritual or cosmological revolution - something that supports us to change ourselves and our fundamental way of seeing the world. I’m not sure I like the word “spirituality” but it expresses something under the surface that effects everything. Lots of my interviewees have eluded to similar things. Hanna has a nice way of describing this.

So Hanna seemed the right person to help introduce some of these new themes and explorations. She’s also just fun to listen to!

I’m really pleased to be able to share this conversation with Max Rashbrooke - journalist, author, academic and expert on economic inequality and democratic renewal. I’ve seen Max around for years in Wellington. I’m pretty sure I remember him at parties a decade ago having rigorous political conversations. I’ve been stoked over the past year to get to know him and bit more.

I loved this conversation! We went right back to Max’s childhood in Eastbourne and learned about his teenage love of sci fi, his core belief that another world is possible and the values of generosity and reciprocity which he holds dear. We explored the connections between poverty and climate change and Max’s vision for the future.

I was struck by the resonances with my last conversation with Hemi Hireme (& Part 2) - the idea that forty years of market economy has stifled our imagination for what’s possible and eroded our faith that government initiatives can make a real difference in people’s lives. As a result many of us feel overwhelmed and fear that nothing works.

Max talks about the importance of being able to connect with people across society and have real conversations about the things that effect us. He says we need real examples of how alternative approaches actually work - not just visions and values. And that these real-life stories are out there - we need to start sharing them more.

“Now is the time for new ideas and frameworks to bubble up,” he says. “Are we building a nurturing society? And what would it take to make New Zealand genuinely the best place to bring up a child?”

I love these questions. It was a hopeful conversation and a remedy for the overwhelm and hopelessness I frequently feel.

This show is the second part of a two-hour conversation I had with Hemi over Zoom. It felt so rich I wanted to share it all with you instead of doing a separate interview.

If you missed the first half, you can find it here: Decolonising our imaginations - Part 1

I also recommend reading this article which Hemi recently wrote for the Spin-off: “The Sunday Essay: Two waka, three iwi, three hapū”. It tells a beautifully poetic story of his background and work.

Hemi is on a mission to re-establish the Māori philosophy of Ranginui (Sky father) and Papatūānuku (Earth mother) as a foundation for our society. He has spent the past twenty years researching the history of capitilism and colonisation while immersing himself in his own Māori cosmology, which views the earth as a living entity. Hemi has a vision of re-establishing marae as the political, economic and social centres of our communities and seeding a culture that celebrates difference while finding belonging and connection in the land.

Hemi talks about how our modern world is dominated by a European philosophy which separates us from the natural world and from each other. He believes that we need a spiritual and cultural renaissance to shake off old ideas that have colonised our minds and build the unity and strength we’ll need to survive climate change. He suggests that the Māori philosophy of Rangi and Papa offers a remedy to help bring our country together with hope, pride and diversity.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

This show is going to be a bit different. Instead of interviewing Hemi I decided to share the conversation we had over Zoom when we first met. It felt so rich I wanted to share it all with you. It was also quite long (2 hours) so I’ve broken it up into two parts. I’ll post the second half in a couple of weeks.

I met Hemi through Marceline and Tur at the Quatro Trust. As well as supporting The Good Energy Project, Quatro are supporting Hemi to create a book and an online course. Max Harris, who I interviewed a month ago, also recommended I speak to Hemi and admires his work.

Hemi is on a mission to re-establish the Māori philosophy of Ranginui (Sky father) and Papatūānuku (Earth mother) as a foundation for our society. He has researched deep into the history of capitilism and colonisation and pulls stories and ideas from across the centuries and around the world. He’s also deeply steeped in his own Māori cosmology and is passionate about sharing the richness of this, especially with other Māori who have lost contact with their own tradition. Hemi has a vision of re-establishing marae as the political, economic and social centres of our communities and seeding a culture that celebrates difference while finding belonging and connection in the land.

Hemi got in touch with Marceline after reading Tur’s guest blog post and hearing my interview with him. He wanted to express his excitement and support for Tur’s idea that Aotearoa could take a lead in reducing energy-use and waste through nurturing the pride and diversity of our communities.

Along with his email, Hemi attached an article which he recently wrote for the Spinoff called “The Sunday Essay: Two waka, three iwi, three hapū”.

It was reading this article that first drew me to Hemi. I was intrigued by the story he tells of his childhood, moving between worlds that had been touched to a different extent by colonisation. There was Waiotapu, the small forestry village near Rotorua where he lived, Whakatane, where he spent holidays with his cousins and a place called Pāraeroa in Te Urewera (or “up the river” as he called it). This was the spiritual home of Ngai Tūhoe, his mother’s whanau and the place that spoke most deeply to his soul. A place where he says: “Capitalism and the notion of private property had not arrived”.

In Pāraeroa, Hemi describes, “there seemed to be no barrier between adults and children, horses and dogs, whānau and whenua… Everyone and everything came together as one world. Our world. In this world, the connections to the land did all the speaking.”

I was so taken by Hemi’s description of Pāraeroa and the way it seems to have called to him as a beacon throughout his life as he’s come to terms with our history and the effects of colonisation.

Hemi talks about how our modern world is dominated by a European philosophy which separates us from the natural world and from each other. He suggests that the Māori philosophy of Ranginui and Papatuānuku offers a remedy to the crises we face and a spiritual foundation to bring our country together with hope, pride and diversity.

I was moved by how generous and inclusive Hemi was and inspired by his ideas.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Last week I was lucky enough to get 2 hours of Natalia Albert’s time to interview her. (It was supposed to be 1 hour but after the first interview I realised I had forgotten to press record!!!! Arghhh!!! Can you believe it!? Fortunately Natalia agreed to stay for a second take. And I think the second was almost as wonderful as the first - perhaps better!

This interview has a back story…. I first met Natalia in 2015 when I was part of an event she was leading - TEDx Wellington Women. I often tell people that event was my first genuine experience of feminism in action - I can thank Natalia and the amazing team she pulled together for that.During the process of preparing my talk, I was paired with a male coach who I really didn’t vibe with. Every time we met I got a little more lost! I struggled for weeks, but it wouldn’t come. A couple of days before the big event my coach declared my talk was not “TED quality” and advised me to pull out to save my own embarrassment. I was devastated and ashamed - I knew I had something important to say but whenever I was around that coach I lost my confidence and felt paralysed. I remember trying to sneak out of the building before anyone saw me. But Natalia spotted me first. Seeing her smiling face, I burst into tears. She took me aside and through sobs I told her what had happened.“You forget what that man said!” she replied with full conviction. “You’re going to get up there and be fantastic. This is my event and I don’t care what they say.”Oh My God! I’ve never experienced such a contrast of emotions in such a short period of time. Total doubt - that feeling of being entirely inadequate under the male gaze - followed by total belief sweeping in with power and warmth and telling me I was enough. Natalia had given me the central message of my talk - the power of belief over doubt! I went on to talk about how Science is based on doubt, which divides and makes sense of the world. Science is good - but belief is even better. I managed to write my talk in a day (with the help of my Mum) and it was a big success! It was also a turning point in my career where I started to back myself. I have Natalia to thank for that.

I hadn’t seen her much since then so I was delighted to see her face up large on posters as a Wellington Central candidate - I imagine she could hold the same kind of encouraging space in the political sphere as she did for us. Seeing her prompted me to get in touch and let her know how much I appreciated her influence back then. That’s how we reconnected and how this interview came about.

I loved this conversation! I learnt about Natalia’s childhood, growing up in Mexico with her single Mum and moving country several times as a young child. She spoke about how having dyslexia helped her develop a strong sense of self and how her difficulty finding work when she arrived in New Zealand fuelled her passion for accessibility. She’s a passionate advocate for the rights of marginalised groups such as migrant women, disabled and trans people.

Natalia described her big vision of an accessible and transparent government and how making accessibility a measurable goal would improve the government’s impact across the board.

We talked about the idea of fostering lots of different economies that meet the needs and skills of different communities - rather than talking about “the economy” as if it’s one big amorphous thing.

She shared her appreciation for the fierce advocacy groups in New Zealand and the many role models and heroes she’s met here. She also shared some personal thoughts on her relationship with culture and community and how we could become a country that feels genuinely inclusive to all our citizens.