Simple Living America Website
Mission
Simple Living America is the first national, nonprofit membership organization for the general public centered on simplicity. What is simple living? It means many things to many people, but we are broadly defining it in lay terms as The Satisfaction of Enough. The academic definition and rationale upon which this is based can be found at "Science of Simple Living," including numerous SLA projects.
Description of Work
By providing mainstream America with a means to The Satisfaction of Enough through its new Get Satisfied book, campaign and website, Simple Living America is helping to launch a satisfaction movement in this country. House parties, community events, the member newsletter, and on-line postings are building the momentum. SLA calls for balance in a complex world, in partnership with the popular Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska national public television series.
Director's Bio
Carol Holst is a social entrepreneur down to her bones. After nurturing two children, both born on her birthday five years apart, and founding The Learning Place early childhood education center in the Los Angeles area during the 1980's, Carol realized that fully serving our children's future means working for innovative global change. As the majority of scientific Nobel laureates have stated (Union of Concerned Scientists), humanity is on a collision course with nature.
Carol founded the Ministry for Population Concerns under The CRESP Center for Transformative Action in the early 1990's and wrote grant proposals bringing in $100,000 to fund it. It was the first ecumenical U.S. NGO centered on racial and economic justice in the global population stabilization field, and it operated through the U.N. Cairo Conference on Population and Development in 1994. One of the greatest lessons it taught her was the need to address U.S. consumption if population and environmental issues are to be taken seriously around the world.
After researching the U.S. consumption arena, Carol discovered that there was no national nonprofit membership organization for the general public centered on voluntary simplicity. She obtained the approval of The CRESP Center for Transformative Action to found Seeds of Simplicity in 1996, which in 2006 became Simple Living America, in partnership with the "Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska" national public television series. Despite twelve years of innovative funding strategies and a national network of (frugal) members, Simple Living America has no floor of operational support and Carol has spent these twelve years employed in other fields to underwrite it.
Among the reasons that the simplicity field is generally considered outside-the-box of funding channels to date is that it does not serve people in need in the established sense. While serving the dispossessed is utterly crucial to a just and sustainable world, Carol is convinced that the current paradigm - the desperate and growing gap between rich and poor - is not likely to significantly change until large numbers of privileged people actually want to lighten up on themselves, others and the planet. This is an exciting and immediate application of Transformative Action principles, which replace the traditional us-versus-them approach to social change with cooperation and synergy.
As it happens and in virtually constant affirmation, the Global Consumer Trends 2006 report identified the quest for simplicity as a megatrend in our frazzled society. Certainly the corporate advertisers have gotten the message, and now it's time for the nonprofit sector to tap this enormous yearning authentically and build membership in the mainstream to reach beyond the converted.
Carol believes that reaching the mainstream will most likely succeed from the "self-interest" perspective. While simple living has a strong justice component (Live simply so others may simply live), its power among the majority of Americans (who seem unmotivated by justice concerns) is probably its appeal to personal peace of mind and satisfaction, to its mental health benefits. Among many other activities, Simple Living America is currently collaborating with Virginia Commonwealth University's psychology department to develop the first scientific Simplicity Measurement Scale, defining simple living broadly for diverse perspectives as "substantially free of detractions from fulfillment and sufficiency." Thousands of responses from the public continue to flow through its web site, especially with the publication of its book in November 2007 which Carol edited, Get Satisfied: How Twenty People Like You Found the Satisfaction of Enough.
Social Impact
The returns to investment of Simple Living America's unique work therefore include a definitive way to appeal to a large number of privileged Americans with a highly-sought personal message that ends up leaving a gentler footprint on the earth and its inhabitants. This field actually has the potential to replace materialism with meaning, as each person decides what is really important in life. After all, who does not want to be free of detractions from fulfillment and sufficiency?