What Exist Differently means
Matt Birkhold provides examples of how people can make the non-material and material needs of communities and organizations equally important
Four Black kids are throwing rocks at passing cars. One neighbor says, “Call the police.”
“Don’t call the police,” Paul, another neighbor, says after thinking about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black victims of police brutality. “Rhonda and I are trained in conflict resolution. We might be able to intervene.” Paul and Rhonda go talk to the kids and end up teaching them to play cards. The police aren’t called.
Kim, a woman who works at a non-profit and really loves her job recently had a baby and needs more money. She knows the organization’s budget is tight. Rather than ask for a raise she begins to explore other jobs. She tells her CEO, Robin, that she’s looking for a job because of her new needs and asks for a reference. Robin says yes and asks Kim for a couple of days to see if she can come up with another solution.
“Can we talk for a minute?” Robin asks Kim a couple of days later. “What if we gave you an $8,000 raise just because you have new responsibilities?”
“That would be great!” Kim replies. Over the next six months, Robin restructures the organization’s pay structure to reflect two factors, salary parity with the larger economy and the amount of people each employee has to support.
Both of these situations are examples of what it means to exist differently. Human beings have material needs for food, water, shelter, and anything else we need to survive. These needs require money to be satisfied. We also have non-material needs for things like community, love, recognition, and purpose. Non-material needs have to be satisfied in order for us to thrive.
The economic nature of our material needs makes it really easy to neglect our non-material needs. Calling the police to protect property and letting workers go to protect the bottom line are examples of how problems get solved when we prioritize material needs and neglect our non-material needs. Yet, faced with the need to make important decisions, Rhonda, Paul, and Robin all made decisions that prioritized non-material needs as much as material needs.
Rhonda and Paul cared just as much about the welfare of the children as they cared about property and physical safety and instead of risking a potentially life-threatening encounter with police, they sacrificed their time to build community. Robin cared just as much about the experience of her whole team, the conditions that shape their experience, and their overall needs as much as she cared about the company’s bottom line. Instead of just replacing Kim, she explored how to reorganize the company’s pay structure in more thoughtful ways.
When we learn to equally emphasize our material and non-material needs instead of prioritizing our material needs at the expense of our non-material needs, we start existing differently than human beings have for the last 500 years. When we create organizations and communities that equally emphasize material and non-material needs, we create systematic opportunities to exist differently.
