By Gerald Wheatley

 

The Arusha Centre’s library has resources for Calgarians who want to make a living advancing justice work. Whether it’s voluntary simplicity, social entrepreneurship, or career change, there are resources at Arusha.

Reducing consumption allows for reducing work hours, increased community involvement, or increased self-reliance. The Tightwad Gazette collects thousands of tips for saving money, from putting tape in the bath to mark the level to fill up the bathtub or a recipe for making crayons out of laundry soap. In terms of career change, Your Money or Your Life, and Making a Living While Making a Difference provide ways to balance income with getting a “conscious” job. Using online support groups, multi-step programs, and discussion forums, readers can learn the skills to take control of money issues and be more invested in themselves and their careers.

Duane Elgin’s book, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, draws on Eastern notions of conscious living and advocates for the Western movement based on reduced consumption and increased mindfulness. Voluntary simplicity draws spirituality, mindfulness, environmentalism, reduced materialism, and cultural evolution into an overarching world view that can foster more deeply satisfying lives. Voluntary simplicity adherents are a subset of a larger group of people, potentially one quarter of the American population, called “Cultural Creatives”. Cultural Creatives are early adopters of a lifestyle which includes reduced consumption and spiritual development. Each of these titles support the different types of changes necessary to support a lifestyle of activism.

Titles available in the Arusha library include:

Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money & Achieving Financial Independence by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin

The Ecology of Money by Richard Douthwaite Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich by Duane Elgin

Making A Living While Making A Difference, by Melissa Everett

The New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future by Jeffrey Jacob

Community and Money: Men and Women Making Change by Mary-Beth Raddon

The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World by Ray, Paul H, Sherry Ruth Anderson

Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision by Kirkpatrick Sale

Good News for a Change: How Everyday People are Helping the Planet by David Suzuki

Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth by Marilyn Waring