Goal: This page invites everyone to channel the energy of our time into building local security – with the relationship to people and farms as the real currency.
There are special moments when there is a lot of energy: when people protest, when innovations want to improve the world, when people meet to think about money and value. In such moments it matters to draw attention to a currency that is available to everyone, locally and immediately – everywhere and entirely without a bank: relationship.
At the same time, farms lack successors. Across Europe, farmers are getting older, and many farms find nobody to carry on. People are looking for a future, and the farms have a future to give.
The thesis of this workshop is simple and radical at once: the alternative to today’s system is not a new money that just has a different name from the euro. The alternative is the relationship. Money like the euro and many exchange systems are technical solutions from a mechanical worldview that has worn out us and the world. Whoever is connected with the people who work the land gets food when the shelves are empty. Whoever carries the farm is carried by it. Security grows from this – first for food, then for water, energy, living space and community.
So that relationship does not remain a nice word, it needs a form. The ten principles of the TEIKEI movement from Japan give it that form: planning together, sharing risks, setting the price in mutual accommodation, distributing ourselves, governing ourselves through our relationships, learning from each other and growing in manageable groups. In conversations with farms, these principles become concrete questions – and from the answers grow the local formats a community can carry.
In this way the energy of our time can be channelled into self-empowerment. A revolution from below, non-violent, that does not first demand but builds: many small secure places that connect and together become less dependent. So the patriarchal system can be replaced, and the mechanical worldview can become history.
For economics this opens questions beyond price and exchange: What is value? How do communities govern their commons? And what lasts?
↑ One level up: Workshop: Relationship as currency
Initiated and texts finalised by Felix Schröder (TEIKEI) · pages created with the help of AI (Claude) to save time
Created on 24 October 2026 · Last updated on 24 October 2026
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