Join us for our February edition of WYD? (What’re You Doing?), an intimate gathering where where members of the NAVEL community come together to share current research topics or artistic projects in any medium.

On Sunday, February 21 at 5PM PDT we will hear from CommonPool, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, Irina Contreras and Celine Kuklowsky. RSVP for free to attend this session of WYD on Zoom.

We ask all participants to uphold our Braver Spaces Intentions during this gathering, please take some time to review them here.

Participant Bios

CommonPool - Nicolas Grenier

CommonPool is an experimental economic framework currently in development. Our objective is a versatile system allowing optimal non-monetary exchanges through the combination of a gift economy, time banking, and communing. We want to set up a network of exchange that:

• is efficient and practical
• has built-in properties that puts into practice values of cooperation, reciprocity, equity, sustainability and citizenship
• functions as a polyvalent toolkit for a variety of independent groups and communities
• unifies all participating communities through a growing network that maintains a compatible system across all groups, and has the potential to scale.

Union of Musicians and Allied Workers - Kohinoorgasm (Josephine Shetty) 

The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) has mobilized thousands of music workers to take part in our first actions around the COVID crisis, and we will continue to organize around issues such as demanding fairer deals from streaming services, ensuring musicians receive the royalties they are owed, establishing more just relationships with labels, and creating safer guidelines for venues.

Josephine Shetty is a queer, South Indian and Irish American musician, audio engineer, music educator, and union organizer born and based in Los Angeles, CA.

Timebank - Irina Contreras and Celine Kuklowsky

In order to enable horizontality, exchange, mutual aid, skills-sharing and collaboration, we are creating a Time Bank that will be open to the NAVEL community and beyond. This proposal has long been discussed at NAVEL and we are excited to get it into gear and create something that serves our community. We begin with the following as a starting point and tentative nexus: 

“What are you willing to give up right now that is in service of reparations for Black and/or Indigenous communities?” and “How can the conversations and actions of abolition and defunding further center the needs of people (especially chronically ill, dis/abled, poor and generationally poor, im/migrant and caregivers or those who are not able to consistently participate?”