Improving Life With Circular Economy Foundations (Draft #1)

2nd March 2024

(If you don’t see this whole post in your email, it is because it is quite long, click on the link and go to Substack to read it.)

For a PDF Download of this article click here.

One of the greatest challenges that humanity has faced for millennium is solving the issues of poverty, and improving the lives of the bottom half.

The planet earth is filled with abundant land, abundant food, and abundant natural resources, which sustains life. The sunlight provides the planet with an unlimited energy input occurring 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which through the miracle of photosynthesis powers all plant growth that feeds the animals and humanity, provides numerous herbs, medicines and resources, and provides oxygen to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is plant food, which through the miracle of sunlight and photosynthesis creates all plant growth and abundant oxygen, the two greatest essentials for all life.

The sun also helps to maintain the climate in a temperature zone that is optimal for human and animal life. While the climate is constantly changing, as it always has throughout history and always will, (climate change), mankind’s greatest skill is the ability to adapt and survive.

So, no matter if we live in the hottest deserts on earth, like the Sahara, or in the coldest regions, like in Antarctica, or in the regions in between, we use our collective intelligence to adapt, to survive and to thrive.

Our planet has an abundance of land, space and natural resources for life. People often think our planet is over-populated because we live in crowded spaces. But for today’s population of 8 billion, if each person were to stand in a space of one square meter, then we could fit them all into the tiny island of Tasmania below the Australian continent.

Poverty is not a natural state. Poverty is a man-made phenomenon. It is primarily created by monopolies, which denies access to land, food, and resources. This includes political monopolies, monopolies on land, monopolies on resources, the Money Monopoly of international bankers and central banking, and Monopoly Capitalism used by the multinationals, which today are a global cartel known as the World Economic Forum.

Monopoly, monopoly, and more monopoly.

Humanity has over thousands of years been constantly subjugated into monopoly systems, which today has now become global. Monopoly creates the distortions and imbalances of our economic, political and social sectors, which leads to greater poverty.

Today we live in an economic system that has created the greatest wealth and income inequality in history. According to Forbes magazine in 2018 there was $400 trillion dollars of wealth in the world. $400,000,000,000,000. That is an average of $50,000 US$ for every man, woman and child on earth. But it is very unequally distributed. The top 1% owns 46%, the next 10% owns 39%, the group in the middle, the next 34% owns 13.7%, and the bottom 55% owns only 1.3%, literally the clothes on their backs.

I believe that the root of all poverty is the current economic system, which not only is rooted in monopoly, but it is based entirely on the Money Monopoly system, which is all money is created by the debts of central bankers printing money and lending it to governments, and the creation of money through the credit that banks create and loan into the economy, both of which are with interest added which extracts the wealth of the many and transfers it to the bankers.

This is the root cause of all poverty. It is the lack of access to land, food, and resources, which is created by both the excessive reliance on the money economy, and the lack of access to earn money, which creates most of the poverty we see today.

I would like to propose that one of the ways we could improve the lives of the majority is by using what we may call Circular Economy Foundations, which can utilize the inputs of the money economy, with the addition of an internal foundation based credit system, which focuses on empowering the energy of those in need to help them to help themselves, and to a circular economy where the inputs and the energy of those involved creates a growth system which sustains itself and continues to grow and to provide opportunities that helps lift the standards of living of those it seeks to help.

This would be a means of helping those that lack the access to resources, by providing them with work and opportunities to use their own energy to contribute to meeting their costs of living, which not only lifts their standards of living but helps to improve their dignity as well.

But first let us look at the broad definitions of poverty, explore the meaning in deeper terms, and consider some of the obstacles that prevent the poorest in our nations from helping themselves, and look at the limits of the welfare model. We will also look at some of the forms of self-sufficiency that have been used throughout history, and are still in use today. And lastly we will consider this concept of the Circular Economy Foundations, and how it can be used to create opportunities to improve the lives of the bottom half, and we will see that there really is unlimited opportunities for the application of this concept.

What Is Poverty?

According to the website Investopedia: “The term poverty refers to the state or condition in which people or communities lack the financial resources and essentials for a minimum standard of living. As such, their basic human needs cannot be met.”

For extreme poverty the World Bank calculates the international poverty line, (IPL), as a monetary threshold, which for individuals living below this level they are considered to be living in extreme poverty. The IPL is calculated by considering the poverty threshold for each country, and calculating the value of goods needed to sustain one adult, and converting this to U.S. dollars.

In 2023 the international poverty line was updated to $2.15 per day. The World Bank has estimated there are about 719 million people worldwide living in extreme poverty, with more than 100 million being forced down into this level of poverty since the Covid-19 pandemic began in early 2020.

But the greatest problem with the World Bank’s definition is it vastly underestimates those living in poverty around the world by using such a metric.

For example in the United States the federal poverty line, FPL, was estimated in 2023 at an annual income for a family of 4 of $30,000, or about $82 dollars a day, or $20.50 per person in the family. By this standard there are nearly 40 million people in America living in poverty. But by the World Bank’s definition there are no poor people in America. This is incorrect.

In almost all discussions about poverty at the international level, or the national level there is a tendency to define poverty by measuring it with income thresholds, with little regard given to any forms of self-sufficiency. This suggests we need a new way to measure it, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Is Poverty Increasing?

The international community has long been obsessed with ending poverty, but has so far utterly failed to budge the needle. In fact there is a very good case to be made that poverty has vastly increased, especially when considered nation by nation, because if we use the poverty line of each nation, which is a more accurate measurement rather than using an international metric like the World Bank’s international poverty line, we see that poverty worldwide has likely increased greatly.

In fact the Forbes 2018 figures show us that 55% of the world’s population has only 1.3% of all the wealth, the clothes on their backs, and that is more realistically the true number of those living in poverty today, which is about 4.4 billion people.

The ugly and inconvenient truth is that the global inequalities are reaching close to the peak levels reached in the early 20th century, which was celebrated by the wealthy as the Gilded Age, reflecting their lives of luxury, while ignoring the misery created for the majority.

In fact poverty has been systematically increasing as the wealth and income inequality continues to grow generation on generation

Reflections on “Poverty”

The definitions of poverty that are used worldwide reduce everything to a monetary value. I would submit that this is not only misleading the true measurements of poverty, for example by underestimating real poverty in developed nations, but it also leads us to focus only on the solutions which can be measured by using money as a value. Let us look at 3 simple examples to illustrate this point.

The Sentinelese

On North Sentinel Island, one of the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Indian Ocean, is an ancient tribe called the Sentinelese. It is one of the most isolated tribes on earth, which has vigorously rejected all contact with outsiders. Their island is about the size of Manhattan, well forested and surrounded by an abundance of marine life. They are a hunter-gatherer tribe, who make small boats, and use bows and arrows to hunt on their island, and to fish in the waters surrounding it.

From what has been observed from a distance the Sentinelese tribe are clearly extremely healthy and thriving. If outsiders approach their island home the Sentinelese will often fire arrows at them to drive them away.

This tribe lives in balance with their nature, and meets their daily costs of living through their own efforts at self-sufficiency by finding all they need from the natural environment. If we look back in history far enough, the majority of humans, before the invention of money, lived in exactly the same way.

A Thai Village

Some years ago I was visiting a family in a Thai village in northeastern Thailand, in the region called Isan. The elderly grandmother of the family complained to me she was poor. I asked her a series of questions to explore the idea of her being poor.

She told me she owned her own home. No mortgage. She had chickens, which roamed freely around the yard, and gave her fresh eggs every day. Sometimes they killed them and ate them. She owned her own small farm. No mortgage. The family grew enough rice each year for their household needs, and to sell some to create

some cash income. In her garden and in the village neighborhood there were many herbs, vegetables and fruit trees growing, which meets a lot of their needs. There was a village dam stocked with fish, and a large swamp in front of the village, that was a source of many wild foods. Around the home were large clay tanks that collected the rainwater, free. The family cooks on a stove outside powered by charcoal, which was produced locally and very cheap.

In truth her family’s cash needs each month were really minimal, as she met the majority of her daily cost of living through self- sufficiency. After I asked her these questions I asked her again if she was really poor, and she smiled and said to me: “I can always use more cash.”

Urban Poverty

If you contrast the lives of the urban poor with the lives of the Sentinelese tribe, and families living like those in the Thai rural

villages, even though both of these are what we could call cash poor, the urban poor clearly have a much more difficult existence.

In an urban setting there is no access to a pristine environment to hunt and gather food, and there is limited space to grow food and raise animals. The urban poor are almost always dependent on the money economy. If they don’t have enough opportunities to earn money then they do not have enough to meet their daily costs of living. The majority will have to pay rent. If they do not have enough income to pay the rent they will find themselves on the street and homeless.

For rural residents whose livelihoods have been destroyed by conditions beyond their control, for example droughts or conflicts like wars, they are often forced to migrate to the cities in search of work and opportunities, and these people often end up in the slums, and urban poverty.

It is the urban environments, which are devoid of opportunities for self-sufficiency, where we often find the greatest poverty.

Redefining Poverty

If we consider that an individual or family’s cost of living includes the activities that they do in self-sufficiency, as well as any activities they may do to earn income, with which to pay for the goods and essentials they need, then there are always two broad ways that we all meet our cost of living for a minimum standard of living.

• Money economy: All activities to earn money, through having a job or business, and to use it to pay for goods, services and the resources that are needed to meet ones daily costs of living.

• Self-sufficiency: All of the activities that help to meet the daily cost of living that are done with ones own energy, time and resources.

From this we see that there are 3 broad ways that people will meet their daily cost of living, which will either be exclusively through self-sufficiency, which is extremely rare today, or it will be a mixture of self-sufficiency with the money economy, or entirely dependent upon the money economy.

“Poverty can be defined as the state or conditions in which individuals or families lack access to the opportunities and resources that are needed in order to meet their minimum cost of living for a minimum standard of living, whether that is a lack of access to self- sufficiency, or a lack of access to earning income, or a combination of both. As such, their most basic human needs are not met.”

Meeting the Cost of living

In order for people to meet their minimum cost of living, which will provide them with a minimum standard of life, they need to meet the following factors, through self-sufficiency, the money economy, or a combination of both.

• Amenities: Access to the minimum of necessities needed to help meet ones daily life’s needs, e.g. cooking utensils.

• Clothing: Access to adequate clothing, and access to what is needed to keep it clean and functional.

• Education-the 3Rs: Adequate levels of reading, writing and arithmetic skills, which facilitate participation in modern society at the most basic levels, and allow people the ability to read and improve one’s life with self-education.

• Energy: Access to adequate energy needed for daily life.

• Food security: Access to adequate food.

• Health-care: Access to the minimum requirements needed to

  maintain ones health.

• Housing: Access to housing of adequate standards for good

  health and hygiene.

• Money – Access to earning sufficient money to meet one’s

  daily cost of living, meaning access to opportunities for work

  or self-employment.

• Self-sufficiency – Access to meeting ones cost of living

  through self-sufficiency, meaning the activities that one can

  do to meet ones daily needs through one’s own efforts.

• Transportation: Access to affordable transportation that can

  be used to help meet ones daily cost of living needs.

• Water: Access to sufficient clean water.

  If we reflect on the fact that every healthy person in the world wakes up every day with a tank full of physical energy, which can be used to meet their cost of living for their daily needs, the only reason that many are impoverished is because they lack access to

land, food, natural resources and to the money economy. The true causes of poverty are structural and systemic obstacles to access.

It therefore makes sense that one of the greatest keys to improving the lives of the bottom half is to provide individuals and families with increased opportunities and access to resources to meet their minimum costs of living, especially for food and housing, through providing not only increased opportunities for self-sufficiency, but also increased opportunities where they can work in exchange for the resources they require, which helps to improve their dignity as well.

The Welfare Model

The vast majority of all efforts to help poor people, and the unemployed in the developed nations, rely on aid and charity, both in the public sector and the private sector, which is the welfare model.

Welfare tries to address the poverty issues across the world which are often created by oligarchy, monopoly capitalism, excessive debt and credit, and the increasing lack of self-sufficiency as more and more people move from the rural areas to urban areas, often as a consequence of government policy. All of this creates structural imbalances, which are often not adequately addressed by the money-based economy, which in fact relies on systemic unemployment to keep a supply of workers in reserve for the corporate sector.

Into this gap we have developed the western welfare model that has governments handing out taxpayer’s dollars for impoverished or needy members of their nations. This is in fact simply a nationalized and forced charity system, where the government takes tax dollars off citizens in the productive part of society, and hands it to citizens that are not self-sustainable, which apart from circulating these government welfare handouts, which benefits the corporate sector most, the welfare beneficiaries are for the most part doing nothing to add to the health of the economic and social systems of society overall.

Apart from that, the government welfare model is unsustainable and over generations helps to impoverish the majority of citizens in a given nation, which is exactly what has been happening in the western nations since the rise of Neo-liberalism in the 1970s. This is insanity.

The very worst aspect of government welfare, or aid and charity systems that rely on this model, is that it utterly robs men and women of their dignity by reducing them to accepting handouts, as opposed to using their own energy to work, or to do business, in order to meet their daily cost of living, and therefore at the very least feel the satisfaction of having earned their keep, as well as the pride of being self-sustaining.

The welfare model takes money, which comes from both the taxpayers and people making donations, and uses it to channel goods and services to people in poverty around the world. Almost all of the world’s aid and charity programs are based on this welfare model.

There are a number of systemic structural and undesirable problems with this system. Quite apart from the lack of dignity that this creates, there is a second massive problem, which is the greatest structural problem, which is the problem of sustainability.

The welfare model system is based on a never ending supply of inputs, which flows out to the recipients, and is consumed, and then the needy are still in need because it has not solved the issue of their poverty. So the welfare model requires an endless flow of inputs to keep the system operating.

And worse than that as the impoverished group of humanity increases, as we have seen recently since 2020 with the Covid- lockdowns, then the need for inputs grows, and this always lags the needs of the impoverished, and so they suffer terribly.

Think of the example of one of the great charity models, the soup kitchens that are feeding the poor and the homeless in many cities around the world. These charities take inputs, food, money and volunteer labor, and create meals for the hungry and needy, which consume them, and are then lining up again the next day for their next meal.

Now while the people who are creating these enterprises, and working in them, are some of the greatest humanitarian and kindest people on earth, the model that they are working with is creating a rat race of constantly begging donations and inputs. And when their funding runs short, as it often does in times of economic

crises, it creates hardships for the needy and those that rely on their services.

The welfare model creates several problems, so let’s summarize the main issues that plague this model.

• Dependency: The welfare model creates dependency, which often creates laziness – a reliance on handouts mentality, which we see in Australia, Britain, and many other nations.

• Dignity: The welfare model creates a lack of dignity by making people reliant on handouts.

• Economic Crises: In times of great economic crises, at the very point that the numbers of those in need skyrockets, the welfare model fails to help the majority.

• Financial Insatiability: The welfare model is a system that needs to have constant inputs; the more poor people in a nation, or in the world, the more demands are made on taxpayers and donors.

• Money: The welfare model does not solve the lack of access to money for those in need.

• Resources: For the majority of those in need, the welfare model does not solve the issue of a lack of access to resources and opportunities to meet ones own cost of living.

• Self-Sufficiency: The welfare model for the most part does not create self-sufficiency.

• Slow Response: The welfare model does not respond quickly to the needs of an expansion in the poverty stricken population. People literally starve to death, which is illustrated by all great famines.

  I believe that the welfare model is on the whole a failure, and that we must revise our strategies and create solutions that work for the majority. There is an ancient saying that says:

“If you give a man a fish he eats for a day, but if you teach a man to fish then he eats for a lifetime.”

I believe that the most effective strategies and focuses for increasing and creating prosperity for all people, which means helping lift the standards of living of the bottom half, relies on the philosophy embedded in this simple saying.

Increasing Prosperity

In order to focus our collective efforts to help to increase prosperity, which helps to reduce poverty, and to lift the standards of living of the bottom half, our efforts must be dedicated to helping those in need to use their own energy to contribute towards earning their daily costs of living, which as mentioned increases

their dignity and pride through self-reliance, and this can be summed up as these 3 focuses.

1. Self-sufficiency
2. Money economy
3. Circular Economy Systems

The first focus must be increasing opportunities for self- sufficiency, which many great foundations and efforts worldwide are focused on, even as the majority of aid and charity is dispensed based on the welfare model.

The second focus is all of that that which creates opportunities for work and small business ventures, which creates access to the money economy. Again there many great foundations and efforts being made worldwide that are focused on this. But as we have discussed above, the money economy is not solving the needs of all people. We need something extra.

The third way, I want to suggest, is to create a new type of foundation, a Circular Economy Foundation.

This concept would rely on a new type of credit system, not the money printed by governments, but a credit system within the foundation that acts just like money.

You can imagine it as coupons, a credit-debit card, or money chips like we see in casinos. The foundation creates its own internal money system that is used to create opportunities for needy people to work in exchange for foundation credits, which are a store of the work done, and the credits can be exchanged for goods, services, and products provided by the foundation.

If the inputs coming into a foundation, which are financial inputs, goods that are donated, and volunteer labor, are combined with the energy and efforts of people in need, and the overall system creates more value than it expends in terms of the original financial inputs, then it acts as a circular economy. This closed economy system will not only provide opportunities to improve the lives of people, but it will be self-sustaining, and can continue to grow in value. It can become a self-sustaining, and long-term social benefit. Indeed there is such an example of a community-based system of self-help that has raised the standards of living and has proven sustainable over more than the last hundred years.

Israel’s Kibbutz

There is a model for building communities, within nations, which both contributes greatly to the economic and socials strengths of society, but also relieves the government of the burden of funding welfare programs, which strips wealth from the taxpayers of the nation.

This model is the Israel Kibbutz.

All my life, I have been an admirer of the Kibbutz of Israel, and I consider this to one of the great secrets to how the nation has not only settled many millions of Jewish people in its lands, but has at the same time developed a strong, prosperous nation with healthy, well educated, and resilient people.

The Israeli Kibbutz, which started in 1910, are intentional communities originally based on agriculture, where members live and work together, sharing resources and responsibilities, and meet their costs of living in this way.

The communities are based on communal and interdependent living through self-sufficiency where the entire community works together to pool their skills and resources and meet their costs of living. We can think of them as a self-sufficiency community. While they started with agriculture as their primary focus, many Kibbutzes today include other economic activities like industrial plants and high tech industries.

In 2010 there were 270 Kibbutz, and while the total populations of these communities has vastly reduced numbering only 126,000 at that time, their factories and farms accounted for 9% of Israel’s industrial output, worth US $8 billion, and 40% of its agricultural output, worth over US $1.7 billion. This is an average GDP per head of $76,984 for each person living in a Kibbutz.

Israel’s Kibbutz are its secret sauce, and have helped to resettle Jewish migrants throughout its history, and also helped it to feed and house those people, and to make the nation an economic superpower. Israel punches way above its weight for the tiny

population of just 9.364 million people.

The Kibbutz is in fact a model for self-sufficiency that could be copied worldwide.

The Israeli Kibbutz model for communities could be used to help solve the problem of assisting people to meet their daily costs of living. This is a model that could be implemented around the world, and help to solve not only the issue of poverty, but also provide a backstop for the money based economy, so that when the economic cycle swings down and creates unemployment and hardship, there is a space where people can retreat to and meet their cost of living, through self-sufficiency.

Thailand’s 1997 Financial Crisis

Another reflection on the value of self-sufficiency to society is provided by Thailand, which due to the 1997 financial crisis had a massive implosion of the economy. It was like the Great Depression in the western nations in the 1930s, with one big exception. In 1997 most of the families in Thailand were still farmers. And so for the masses of migrant workers who were working in tourism, in the big cities, and in the industrial sector, when the economy imploded and they were unemployed they went home to their rural villages, and lived with their families in self- sufficiency. They did not require handouts from the government. Their safety net was their family’s village home and farms. The Thai economy recovered in record time by 2001, and had paid off the nation’s IMF loans by 2003, 4 years ahead of schedule.

Rethinking Money

Let us now reflect on what money really represents. Money is simply a medium of exchange that has made it convenient for people to exchange goods, services and assets by using money. So money really represents a form of stored energy. It is the energy that is earned when we participate in work or from doing business.

If we cook a meal for ourselves at home using the vegetables from our own garden, and perhaps a chicken from our chicken pen, which we use to make a chicken and vegetable meal, we can do the meal for ourselves, or our family, by doing it all with our own energy. No money is involved.

But if we go to a restaurant and buy our meals then we need money to exchange for the meal. Our money is now paying for not just the energy required for the chef in the restaurant kitchen to prepare and cook our meal, but to pay for the expense of maintaining the restaurant business premises, the shop, the staff that are hired to work there, the electricity bills, the cost of buying and shipping

food to the restaurant, and the costs of paying for the removal of waste as well. All of this is built into the price of our meals.

When we exchange our money for the restaurant meal, our money represents the amount of energy, which is determined by the price, which the restaurant owner has calculated is a fair price for all of that energy, plus a profit for the business owner in exchange for providing the service to us.

We can conclude that money is simply a representation of energy, and it is a store of that energy, and we use it to exchange goods, services and assets.

One of the fundamental economic truths about money is that the more there is in the economy, generally the more work and employment is created. This means the more transactions there are between people, the greater the economic activity, and the less transactions there are, then the less economic activity there is.

Economic transactions, which are based on the modern money system, represent the majority of all economic activity today. The majority of people rely on money to meet their daily costs of living. GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is the sum of all money transactions in a given nation, and provides us with a measure of the total economic transactions.

People with high incomes, and large disposable incomes, have the highest standards of living, and the most luxury lives, because they have a lot of excess savings, which are beyond their minimum cost of living needs to sustain life and to be healthy.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, people in poverty, have the smallest incomes, or no income at all, and therefore are unable to meet their minimum cost of living to maintain a minimum standard of living.

Circular Economy Foundations

A solution that can help to reduce poverty, to empower people, to increase self-sufficiency, resilience, and prosperity is to create a new paradigm for foundations, charities and non-profits, by using a circular economy model.

The circular economy model would rely on being a model that receives inputs in the form of donations, goods and energy from work done, through the energy and efforts of both volunteers, and those the foundation seeks to help, which would create more value than is paid out for the exchange of work done, which helps it to become a self-sustaining and growth orientated economic model, very similar in fact to the Israeli Kibbutz.

The circular economy foundation will have its own form of internal money, which we you could imagine as say credit-debit cards, coupons, or money chips like casino chips. The foundation will supply and create opportunities for those it seeks to help to work in the foundations businesses, or for any other type of

activity it creates, and will provide payment in the form of the credit-debit cards, coupons or money chips.

And then the recipients of the foundations money will be able to use that money to pay for goods and services that the foundation supplies. It also creates a form of stored energy and therefore savings. The key elements of a Circular Economy Foundation include, but are not limited to:

• Foundation structure

• Inputs – financial donations, goods and services donated, and

  sales of the foundations outputs.

• Internal foundation money credits

• Labor: volunteer labor and labor paid for with foundation

  credits.

• Enterprises that create value.

• Retail outlets that provide goods and services in exchange for

  foundation credits, and money.

• Expenses – all costs to maintain the system.

If the system is managed and balanced so that the value created by the system, and financial credits retained in the system, are greater than the costs and expenses incurred by the system, then not only does the foundation create work and opportunities to help lift the standards of living of the needy, and through a dignified opportunity to be more self-reliant, but the system has the potential to build on itself. Which also means that all the inputs donated into the system are retained and their value adds to the system and grows it.

In order to try and understand this concept in more detail let us look at how it could be applied to re-imagining the soup kitchen model used to feed the poor.

Model: Farm, Shop, & Restaurant

Imagine an urban foundation that is established with a business model that includes an enterprise to create goods and services of value in the economy, which for this we will use the example of a farm on the outskirts of the city, with a retail shop and restaurant business inside the city, or town.

The shop, which initially would start as a small operation attached to the restaurant itself, would offer goods that were obtained by the foundation through creating them, purchases, or donations. This could include food items, household items, and other goods. The sales of these goods are also offered to the general public, marked up from cost to create a profit for the foundation, and are available for purchase by those that participate in working for the foundation for foundation credits, which are marked to the value of the labor exchanged.

The restaurant is run in the same way. It can offer good meals to the general public, which would pay in money, and those meals are also offered to the people who work for the foundations credits system as well. The general public is inspired to eat at these restaurants, as they know their money is helping to create work for those in need.

The farm can be run by a combination of volunteers labor and those that work for foundation credits, and the permanent paid staff of the foundation. The objective of the farm is to create products that can be used by the restaurant, and offered for sale in the shop.

The inputs coming into the foundation are represented by financial inputs, which include donations and sales to the general public for money, and it includes the collective energy of volunteers, and those working for the foundation credits, and all of the activities that the members do that adds value to the foundation.

Unlimited Potential

This model of the Circular Economy Foundations has many great strengths. The greatest advantage is that by creating a circular economy the foundations taps into the energy of the people who are seeking to improve their lives, and their contributions not only help them to lift their standards of living and to improve their dignity, but also help to add value to the foundation and to maintain and improve the value and retained wealth of the foundation, which enables it to expand and to create more opportunities for others.

This is a virtuous cycle, which is based on harnessing the pent up energy in people who want to use their own energy to meet their daily costs of living. And that improves the dignity of all those that

participate, which lifts the dignity of mankind as a whole. This model can be applied in multiple ways, some of which are as follows.

• Self-sufficiency communities (Kibbutz)

• Farming

• Housing

• Manufacturing

• Restaurants

• Second hand stores.

• Self-sufficiency communities like Kibbutz

• Small business opportunities

• Soup kitchens

The S.M.A.R.T. Challenges

The challenges going forward to developing the Circular Economy Foundation concept include but are not limited to the following:

• Creating a system for internal credits

• Creating the right foundation structures

• Creating sustainable business models

I believe that the Circular Economy Foundation concept has unlimited potential, and while it would initially start as small efforts, the seeds planted with this model have the potential over time to grow into massive benefits for society and mankind as a whole.

The key to starting this challenge, and making it grow is what we can call the S.M.A.R.T. challenges – which are Small Medium And Resilient Transformations. This suggests that SMART enterprises will start small and grow into resilient and transformative vehicles for creating real resilience to the social and economic shocks of the modern money based economy, by creating additional enterprise systems that unlock and empower the energy of people who want to fulfill their daily cost of living through their own self-reliance.

This is the meaning of the concept: Circular Economy Foundations.

I welcome any feedback.