I have been doing a lot of reflection on the power of community and connection for the next phase of my business. In a time when corporations are, indeed, running the world with a questionable moral compass, I feel that how we do business is an important consideration.
Back when my service was running a yoga studio, we only called ourselves “owners” for the sake of language the taxman understood. To everyone else, we referred to ourselves as stewards of the space and the community.
That distinction mattered to us.
We didn’t own what happened there. It belonged to all of us. As stewards of what happened, we had a clear mission. We returned to it again and again to make decisions. And we were surrounded by humans (contractors) who were in business with a servant’s heart. We led with our values as a compass.
There is a tension many values-driven business people eventually run into:
Businesses rooted in service often underperform not because the work lacks value, but because care gets confused with self-erasure. We start to believe that if our work is humane, it should be free. That counting ourselves into the equation is somehow a betrayal of the mission.
It’s hard to operate inside a capitalist system while holding a sincere desire to do good in the world, and it gets even harder when money is the sneaky little place where our worth gets tangled and diminished.
Still, it is possible to create something more human-centered.
It is possible to carve out spaces within capitalism that operate by different rules.
It is possible to create small, intentional havens—what I like to call micro-economies—where exchange exists, but extraction is not the goal.
I learned this in a very real way when I became an early adopter of a pay-what-you-can model, with a clearly stated suggested range, for my Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy work.
Choosing that model felt scary. Not just financially, but spiritually. It required me to trust—my clients, my community, and the values I said I believed in. I worried people would default to the lowest option and that I would not feel valued. I wondered if I was being naïve. And while I braced for disappointment, I chose to take the leap.
Instead, almost everyone chose the top end of the range.
This didn’t happen because they were pressured. It happened because they understood the values behind the option. The result was something I hadn’t fully anticipated: the work easily sustained itself and created enough margin that anyone who genuinely needed to slide could do so—without explanation or shame for them, and without resentment for me.
That experience didn’t make me believe that all people will always act generously. But it did teach me something important: when values are clear and trust is explicit, many people choose integrity over self-interest.
- Over the years, I’ve seen many businesses experiment with similar approaches: Paying employees fair wages as a principle (and sitting with the question: is there enough left for me if I share with everyone?).
- Shared or equal ownership models
- Tiered or sliding-scale pricing that creates micro-economies of redistribution.
- Community funds that offset access for those with fewer resources.
- Time- or skill-based exchanges in place of money.
- Individual and group pathways to the same outcome at different price points.
- Membership models that prioritize the healing of belonging over the gimmick of constant selling.
- Organizational sponsorships that shift cost away from individuals
Each of these models carries a version of the same question:
Do I believe people will act with integrity when given a choice?
And maybe an even bigger one:
If large systems are no longer trustworthy, are small, values-driven businesses being asked to become places of refuge instead?
I don’t believe we’re meant to out-scale corporate behemoths. In many places, that isn’t even possible. But I do think the work of this moment is to build humane alternatives—businesses that are relational, transparent, values-anchored, and (hear me on this) sustainable enough to stay alive.
Little havens.
People want alternatives they believe in—
where people are treated like humans, not transactions.
where money creates opportunity rather than being hoarded.
and where care has boundaries strong enough to make it sustainable.
Based on my experience, this isn’t naïve. It’s adaptive visioning.
And it may be one of the most counter-cultural forms of business leadership available to us right now.