With Selene Aswell and Alper Süzer
A 3 part course: Sept 2026 - October 2027
Part 1: Noticing and Coholding Scarcity
Every other Saturday - September 12th to December 19th, 2026
10 am - 12 pm Eastern Time (ET) US
(find your local time here)
Note: Due to time changes happening in these weeks your local time might shift. See below for the time conversion for each session.
We plan to record the sessions and anyone who registers for the full course gets access to all the recordings.
We encourage you to register even if you are unable to attend the live sessions.
Photo from Marek Piwnicki on unsplash
🌱Are you experiencing challenges in attempting to engage in the Gift Economy or sharing resources on the basis of needs?
🌱Are you in a Liberation Pod? Are you struggling to support each other? If you are not in a Liberation Pod, are you curious about experiencing one?
🌱Are you aware of feeling blocked when you share or receive resources? Are you longing for more support in how to do that or in what comes up for you?
Practicing the gift economy while living in a world based on exchange and extraction, backed up by systemic violence, is extremely challenging. Practicing the gift economy as an individual is even harder. This course comes from 7 years experience in designing and participating in Financial Gift Hubs within NGL. Over the years, Selene Aswell and Alper Süzer have observed the ways patriarchal conditioning is revealed by stepping out of the exchange economy, even as this conditioning continues to perpetuate our reliance on the exchange economy. Join us as we explore areas of liberation we have found that support us to live the gift economy while staying present in the world as it is!
By deepening our understanding of how scarcity, separation, and powerlessness shows up within practices of the gift economy, and by sharing how to support each other’s liberation within a Liberation Pod, we believe people who take this course can increase capacity to actually practice the gift economy– both within NGL and beyond.
Here’s some of what we anticipate you will witness and experience in this 3-part journey:
Increased awareness of types of patriarchal conditioning that impacts our ability to practice the gift economy, including more capacity to notice when they are likely playing out in thoughts, words, and actions
Practices to support yourself and others to shift this conditioning
Live demos modelling how to “cohold” these forms of conditioning
More ideas for types of support requests you might make
This course touches on how to support your own and others' liberation (and how that is different from offering empathy). Although there is a primary focus on resource flow, each form of patriarchal conditioning we intend to explore affects other parts of life. The liberation information shared translates to other support needs. If you are interested in supporting your own and others' liberation, within any topic, we also invite you to take this course.
This course is designed to support Resource Flow Liberation Pods to function.
🌱 We invite people to participate with their Liberation Pod. If you aren’t part of a Liberation Pod, the first session is geared towards forming Liberation Pods.
🌱Sessions are designed to demonstrate what to do in a Liberation Pod, with practices for Liberation Pods to explore.
🌱We offer opportunities to integrate and practice the material in breakout groups or with your Liberation Pod
🌱We offer opportunities for self-organized learning outside session times within each Lib Pod to build collective capacity and for mutual support
This course rests on a foundation of NVC. We believe taking this course would support deepening integration of NVC. At the same time, you don’t need prior NVC training to take this course.
This course has multiple pathways for learning to fit a wide range of learning needs, including stories for inspiration; framing and foundational principles in support of conceptual integration; practical tools and tips to give guidance about how to apply what we cover; and vision to pull us all forward towards imagining new possibilities
This is a three part course exploring moving from scarcity, separation, powerlessness to trust in life, togetherness, and consciously stepping towards flow.
Sept - Dec 2026 - Noticing and Coholding Scarcity
January - May 2027 - Noticing and Coholding Separation
July - October 2027 - Noticing and Coholding Powerlessness
We believe that this course would be supportive both for people who are totally new to these topics and for those who are familiar with them.
Come ready to actively participate and bring an openness to being stretched beyond your comfort zone!
10am - 12pm ET (find your local time here)
What do we mean by “trust in life” and how has it been impacted through the rise of patriarchy? Through patriarchal conditioning and socialization we have gradually lost trust in life itself, in ourselves, each other, and communities. In this session we intend to explore what is a Liberation Pod and what we imagine they do together.
10am - 12pm ET (find your local time here)
What is the phenomenon of scarcity? What does it have to do with patriarchy and how we perceive and respond to the world? As part of our exploration, we intend to also look at what we call “scarcity thinking” and how this influences our decisions by limiting our creativity in finding strategies. What is the difference between scarcity and a natural limit? How does scarcity show up for each of us? We intend to offer a practice to co-hold “scarcity thinking” within Liberation Pods.
10am - 12pm ET (find your local time here)
What is the patriarchal conditioning that we call “catastrophic thinking”? How does this influence our capacity to engage in the gift economy and how we understand and respond to the world around us? What does this phenomenon look like within ourselves? What would support us to notice our own and others’ catastrophic thinking? We intend to offer a practice to co-hold “catastrophic thinking” within Liberation Pods, with a demo of a real Liberation Pod exploring this topic together.
10am - 12pm ET (find your local time here)
What do we mean by “liberation”? How to co-hold each other’s liberation within a Liberation Pod? We intend to explore how to create practices where people are stuck – so that Liberation Pods can create their own liberation practices for any of the patriarchal conditioning we share about here.
10am - 12pm ET (find your local time here)
What is “attachment to strategy” and how does it relate to how we understand and respond to the world around us? What is the relationship between attachment to strategy and our attempts to control life, people and situations? What does this phenomenon look like within ourselves? Here we bring a more classic NVC perspective into practicing gift economy. We intend to offer a practice to co-hold “attachment to strategy” within Liberation Pods, with a demo of a real Liberation Pod exploring this topic together.
10am - 12pm ET (find your local time here)
What do we mean by “accumulation” and what does that have to do with the start of and perpetuation of patriarchy? What does accumulation look like now systemically and within our local and personal contexts? What is our vision? How can we care for each other without accumulation? And how can we meet needs currently, while in the structures we are in? We intend to offer a practice to co-hold “accumulation” within Liberation Pods, with a demo of a real Liberation Pod exploring this topic together.
10am - 12pm ET (find your local time here)
In this session we intend to explore the practice of impact digestion – why this is useful for a Liberation Pod and how to support each other to digest impacts within a Liberation Pod. We see this as an important part of supporting liberation.
10am - 12pm ET (find your local time here)
How does scarcity influence our choice to give? How might leaning into trust in life support our capacity to give? What might life look like if resources were in flow? We intend to offer practices to support co-discernment of whether and how much to give in response to the real needs of NGL’s Financial Gift Hub, with a demo of a real Liberation Pod exploring this topic together.
For those who might like to start earlier or go deeper, you are warmly invited to explore these resources, aligned with each of the themes within the course.
This course takes place every other Saturday from September 12 – December 19, 2026.
10:00 am - 12:00 pm US Eastern Time (ET) (find your local time here*)
*Please note that there are time changes happening at different dates around the world, you can find the time conversion link to your local time under the title of each session.
Anyone who registers for the full course gets access to all session recordings.
We encourage you to register even if you are unable to attend the live sessions.
We are offering this course entirely as a gift! We are committed to not charging for anything we offer. At the same time, we completely depend on financial gifts given to us freely to sustain our capacity to do what we do and to continue offering what is ours to offer. (We provide more detail about all this here.)
Any step you take outside of considerations of "market value" will support a gradual shift towards needs-based distribution of resources. Which direction will this stretch you toward: Giving more than you imagine such a course would otherwise "cost" (generosity) or giving less than that amount (receptivity)?
Overall, our sense is to ask for about $25,000 to come to us through this course, and, as always, we release into mystery about what will actually come.
We want to repeat: we take genuine pleasure in knowing that many people who do not have the means to give us gifts are regularly attending our offerings – usually about half the people don't give anything. At the same time, we depend on others who do have the means to do so to give us financial gifts to keep doing what we are doing. Each time you participate in one of our offerings, we invite you to reflect anew on this request.
*Making your decision about whether and how much to give*
Ideally, you would take time to think through for yourself how much makes sense for you to give to us. We know this can feel unfamiliar, and sometimes challenging, especially if you are not used to engaging in the gift economy. As a result, we are offering you guidance in choosing how much to give – please use it only if it is helpful.
If the options below feel confusing or are a barrier for you to join, and you would like to contribute a different amount, please choose the amount you give. This is actually our preference – that you choose your amount from within and not based on what we say below.
For those who have the means: $1000
🌾 Many people will not be able to contribute anything, and if there are some who give significant amounts, it makes it easier for the entire group to sufficiently attend to our needs
Average sustainability estimate: $250
🌾 If approximately 200 people register, this would mean an average of about $125 per person. However, since up to half of participants typically do not contribute anything at all due to lack of capacity, this would mean an average of at least $250 per financially contributing participant for this course, to support our sustainability. We are more than happy for people to make monthly gifts over time, even beyond the end of the course, to make this easier.
Increased Accessibility: $15
🌾If you are from a marginalized group, or part of the global south, regardless of where you live, and would like guidance on how much to give, this amount is 6% of the amount above that we just estimated would be generally sustainable for us.
Just a reminder again that the above are just guidelines to help you navigate, and if you are clear that none of these work for you, then please choose your amount, including, again, zero.
Again, more detailed information about our needs and our approach is offered here.
You are warmly invited to click here for more details and to register for the first part of this year-long journey together.
Curious, but want to give it a try before registering for the full first course?
You are welcome to sign up for the first session without any commitment.
Selene has been practicing gift economy for 20 years, is currently holding the Resource Flow System within NGL, offers Resource Flow (gift economy) coaching, and is working to cofound an NGL and NVC-based in-person community in Maine, USA. Selene is an NVC trainer certified by CNVC, with a Bachelor of Arts in Community Studies. She loves to grow and play with medicinal plants.
Alper is exploring what it takes to live beyond the patterns of patriarchy through purpose and Nonviolent Communication. NGL has been his primary place of learning, where he has explored community, collective liberation, and resource sharing as a lived practice rather than a romantic ideal. He is especially interested in how vision can gently find its way into everyday life through the choices we make, the agreements we create, and the way we care for one another. Originally trained as an aeronautical engineer, Alper lives in Ankara with his partner and four children, and is part of the Turkish-speaking Nonviolent Communication community and the CNVC Certified Trainers network.
If you have questions, please reach out to us at rf-course-support@nglcommunity.org.
