Why Giving Back Creates a World Where We All Win | Stephen Brooks

Wow. There is a extremely contagious bug going around. Have you guys heard about it? Anyone feeling any symptoms? Well, it infected me 21 years ago. It's this infection that takes us over and makes it so we can't leave Costa Rica. Anybody feeling it? Anybody feeling the symptoms? It got me deep, you know, and it's so interesting because it wasn't the lush rainforests or the beautiful beaches or the gorgeous rivers or the incredible Costa Rican people. I was actually driving around Costa Rica and I witnessed a playground full of indigenous children get sprayed by a Chiquita banana crop duster. Yeah, it was really heavy, hit me really hard. I couldn't believe it. How could this be happening? How could we be doing this? And I decided to drive deeper into the plantation. And as I drove in, this cable came down in front of my car. And I'm sitting there and all of a sudden these bananas start zipping by in front of me. And I'm just like watching them go by, 20 or 30 of them. And then at the end of that, there's this guy hanging there from the cable system and he stops right in front of my car and he starts staring at me. And he started staring at me deep into my soul. And sitting there and I'm looking at him and maybe it was 20 seconds, but it felt like 20 million years. And we're staring at each other and I'm like, why am I sitting in this air conditioned, rent a car, staying at the hippest, coolest eco lodge, have a reservation at the best restaurant in town. And this beautiful indigenous man whose culture has been respecting all life for generations is living in a toxic hell. How has it gotten to be this way? Why is my culture, why is where I come from doing this to these people? And what could I. 20 year old hippie deadhead, what could I possibly do about it? What can I possibly do about changing this? So when I first started talking to Mia about giving this talk, I was supposed to just come up here and give a debriefing about the give back day tomorrow. And this whole concept of giving back was really just really, I don't know, it was bringing some stuff up for me. Giving back, you know, it's like, how much work do we do that we get paid for and how much work do we do that we don't get paid for? So I was really thinking about it and I started thinking about it and I start thinking about giving back and I start thinking about different words for giving back. And I think of charity or I think of aid. But those words weren't really vibing with me. And then I started thinking back to when I was a kid and I went to Hebrew school. As many Jewish. Any Jewish kids here went to Hebrew school? American Jewish kids, so kind of common thing. Not many. Anyway, in the beginning of class, they pass around this can. It's called the tzedakah box, and everybody puts coins in it. And we were told it's going to be given to people that were less fortunate. So I thought about it and I looked up the word tzedakah, and I found out it actually didn't mean charity, but it meant righteousness and fairness. And I was like, wow, that's really interesting. And then I found out that tzedakah is actually a religious obligation. And I was like, wow, wow, that's really cool. My religion is obligating us to give back. And then I found the word zakat, and that is in one of the five pillars of Islam. In Arabic, it means an obligatory giving of alms. And the Sanskrit word dana, this was the one that resonated the most with me. It meant the cultivation of generosity. Who can relate to that? How we, in our process of the work that we're doing, how can we cultivate generosity? And I really started feeling that. And I was just amazed by how, depending on what language we were looking the word up in charity, it kind of reflected that culture and also how embedded in religion giving back meant. So what I want. I want to do a little exercise here. I want everybody to close their eyes maybe for maybe 30 or 45 seconds and get in touch with your own form of giving back. What are you doing now in your own life to give back? And how are you cultivating your generosity? And how would you like to do more in the future? So let's think about that for a minute. All right? So raise your hand if the work that you currently are doing in some form or another is giving back. This is a very interesting crowd. So I'm not up here as some kind of expert, you know, I'm not an expert in this topic. When I organized the give back days, it was bringing up a lot of things. So I started thinking about, wow, what is my own relationship with giving back and how am I cultivating my own generosity? So now I'd like to take you on a little journey of my personal projects and how over time that cultivation has been taking place and that might, I don't know, bring up some stuff for you in your own process, in your own cultivation of this Generosity. So after seeing the banana plantations, I was so mad. I was so angry. I was so disgusted by my culture. How are we doing this? What are these beautiful people? What do they do to deserve this? So I was like, okay, what am I going to do about it? I started a tour company for kids, for high school and college kids, and I started bringing them down to Costa Rica with the goal to not only show them how beautiful Costa Rica was, but. But I wanted to show them the reality. The reality of the rainforest destruction, the reality of the cultural decimation of the indigenous people, the reality of the multinational agricultural businesses that are just destroying all harmony in their path. And then I didn't want to send them home all depressed. I wanted to try to demonstrate solutions. So, yeah, great, I came to Costa Rica. Now I hate everything. So I started the Punta Mona center for Regenerative Design and Botanical Studies. And the idea was to try to become a demonstration center. I bought a farm that was 85 acres off the grid, meaning there was no road to get there on the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. And I'm a suburban Miami guy, man. I didn't know anything about anything about how to live there. So I started to plant trees and I started to having to build buildings. So I started milling wood right there in the forest from fallen trees. It was just the way to do it there. Rather than try to bring wood in. There was fallen trees right there in the forest. I needed electricity, so installed solar panels. We needed water for drinking and bathing. So I set up my own water system from scratch. I became absolutely obsessed with growing food. Obsessed and collecting plants. Plants that were beautiful, plants that taste good, plants that made us loopy, plant that. All different kinds of plants. Plants that we could build with. And I would travel around the world and I would connect with the cultures that were growing those plants and I would learn from them. And I'd bring the seeds and the knowledge back with me. And then I'd try to share the seeds and share the knowledge with everybody I could possibly. Listen to me. I was just obsessed with it. So I became really, really excited. That's Punta Mona there. It's a dream. It's a total dream. So that was on the physical end, on the spiritual end, on the social end. I wanted to create an environment where people could come and feel something. Wow. I wanted to change the relationship between the employer and the employees. I wanted to change the relationship between the guests and the staff. I wanted people to walk through our portal and feel something deep, that they were part of something bigger. And so we started creating ritual and we started gathering before meals and having circles celebrating the food and the abundance that we were given. Welcoming new people, singing songs around the fire, having parties where you can only wear plants. That's a fun one. You just come to one of those parties. We would celebrate the moon phases. Meanwhile, I'm bringing high school and junior high school and college kids down. Imagine you're 15 years old and you end up at this farm celebrating the full moon, only wearing plants, eating food from. It was a really profound experience and I was really loving it. And for me, the first taste of that that I ever had was in October of 1988 in the Grateful Dead parking lot. Anybody ever been. Raise your hand if you've been sorry for people that aren't American and don't understand what happened with the Grateful Dead. But it was a real phenomenal. They carried the torch from the 60s through the 70s and the 80s into the 90s, and they kept something alive that was profound. It was my first taste of community. And it was a flavor that deeply embedded in my soul and my consciousness and everything that I was. I was blown away by the parking lot of the Grateful Dead concert. And I knew that I wanted to work to create experiences that could offer that knowledge and that taste that I got from community. As much as I loved Punta Mona, and as Punta Mona was growing, I was bringing tons of students down and it was an extreme success. I was bringing 20, 30, 40 student groups a year. That was like a thousand kids a year. And all of a sudden I started to find that by doing business, by bringing these kids down here, not only was I having a lasting effect on them and their reality, but I was also spreading mad amounts of money into communities that really needed it. You know, I was choosing the most authentic hotels and family owned hotels and small local restaurants, and I was hiring local guides and I was finding that it's not like we do business and that destroys the world. And then we, we donate to a nonprofit and that's what we do to make up for it. It's like, holy shit, I'm doing something that's doing both of these at the same time. And it felt amazing. I'm creating experiences for these young people that's transforming them and I'm also spreading the abundance to the. To these communities. So it felt really. It felt really exciting now. Yes, yes. So I knew that Punta Mona wasn't my long term place to live. I knew it wasn't where I was gonna raise my family. I Knew my parents were getting older, it was harder for them to travel there. And I decided, okay, I'm start my own community. I'm gonna start my own community. Why not? And I'm gonna make a wish list of things that I wanted to have. And I started listing those things. I said, okay, I want it to be within an hour of San Jose, because I already did that. Living really, really remote. I wanted it to be easier for my friends and family to come visit. I want to have a crystal clear river that I could lay naked on a big hot boulder and roll into a crystal clear pool and then drink the water. It's my dreams. I'm gonna list all the things and I'm gonna put checks next to the ones that are non negotiable. And those first two are non negotiable. I knew I wanted to be between 450 and 600 meters because I wanted to have cool nights and warm days, but I still wanted to be able to grow all the tropical fruits that I've grown to love. I started looking for the land and I found it in San Mateo de Alhuela, about 45 minutes outside of San Jose, on the banks of the Machuca River. That river runs right by my house, right on our land. And my dad and I raised the money and we put together an incredible team and we broke the property into 43 lots. And now we have people from 24 countries living there. Our roads are made from recycled plastic grates. They're lined with fruiting and flowering trees and gardens. The communal areas, the best parts of the property, we made communal. And we built an amazing infinity swimming, saltwater swimming pool and a yoga space and a community center. And our septic, our shit. We built a methane digester so all of our septic and wastewater actually gets turned into methane gas that then we can cook with. Pretty amazing. And yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing. And on so many levels. It was the dream, like, okay, now what? I've done it, dream accomplished. But I still wasn't feeling fulfilled. I felt like I needed to do more. And I'm gonna come back to that. In 2001, I first went to Burnin man, who's been. If you haven't go, it's a serious growth Spurt. So since 2001, I've gone 13 times since. This year was my burn mitzvah simintov and mazel tov. And mazel tov. I go with my dad. That's my dad there, and my wife and my dad's been 10 times. And burning man blew my mind. I couldn't believe the transformation and the effect it was having me. I couldn't believe humanity could be so freaking creative and could do such amazing things. And from absolutely nothing, we can all come together and create the most magical reality in the history of the world. And I started bringing my Costa Rican friends down there and I wanted them to be able to taste Burning man, you know? And then I started realizing, wait a minute, this is. Maybe I don't need to keep bringing Burning man, my Costa Rican friends to Burning Man. Maybe I could try to bring Burning man to Costa Rica. So with an amazing group of friends. Sophia, you out there in the back of Sophia's yoga studio in Dominical. We started the Envision Festival and the Envision Festival last year. As Mia said, we sold out. For our first year we had almost 7,000 people there. And it's basically a factory of transformation. Thanks. Lot of work. Yeah, it combines music. It's right on the beach. I mean, every day the sunset is a dream. And it combines music and yoga and movement and art and community, most importantly, community, where people come there and they have that same transformation. It was amazing. And after Envision that year, I traveled over to Punta Moto with my friend David, who's a very well known dj, known as the Polish Ambassador. And I'm hanging out with him. Yeah, he's amazing. And I'm hanging out with him and he's like, we're both talking about the success of Envision, his success as a DJ as he's touring internationally. And he looks at me, he's like, stephen, I don't want to just play the soundtrack at the party anymore. I want to give back. He left Punta Mona weeks later. He started the Permaculture Action Tour. He did a 33 city tour. And the day after every show that he played, he did a Give back day. And he had 3, 4, 5, 600 of his fans showing up and taking over city centers, Portland, Denver, all over, and literally planting fruit trees and building cob ovens and working at schools. And it just shows you, no matter what your work is, there's ways that we could give back. And it inspired last year after Envision. Last year after Envision, we did our first Envision Give Back Day and we had 200 volunteers and went to three schools. This year before Envision, we're doing five schools. And it's just like, how can we cultivate our generosity? How can we do more? How can we raise the bar of the change that we're making. So as I was thinking about this, there was three simple ideas that I had about giving back. And I just want to share them. And one, the first one is, what is the work that you do and how can you share that with somebody that maybe that needs it but can't afford it? And for example, my wife's an herbalist and she often does her herbal consultations. And it's all done on a sliding scale. People could pay what they could afford, or if somebody's really in need and can't afford anything, she does it for free. Same at Punta Mona. We often are scholarshipping local Costa Ricans that we know they need the knowledge, but they come to our farm and we give them full scholarship. Another thing, no matter what you buy or whatever service you pay for, figure out where your money's going. Try to keep it at big corporations. Do your best. Doesn't mean you never go to Costco or Target again. You still need band aids. You still need a contact solution. But how can we keep money in the hands of small companies and small business? Vote with your dollars. Vote with your colonists. Do your best. Really tune in. Really hone in on where that money's going. You know, shop at farmers markets, stop going to the big box food stores, stop going to Starbucks every day. Go to a local coffee shop and bring your mug. Because one of the best ways to give back is being an environmentalist. The last one is give time. It's not just about donating money to some charity dinner or writing a check to an ngo. But how can we give our time to a cause, whether it's an orphanage, whether it's planting trees in an area near your house. How can we incorporate this and donate our time and our love to making a difference? So last year at a fest, I was given the opportunity to speak. And it was the first time I ever shared this idea. And I want to go back to why Ecovillo didn't feel like it was enough for me. And the reason why was because my workers are some of my best friends and they never could live there. Why? Because it's all middle upper class people. They could never live there. So I was like, what do I need to do? Talk about cultural hacking. Why is it that some people can live in abundance and live in having so much while others have so little? How can we do that? So I started this project. It's called Alegria, and it means joy or happiness. And it's a model for designing land. And it's about cultivating food on broad acreage. It's about processing food and creating brands and creating food tourism. Why are things the way they are? They don't need to be that way. We could hack them, we could change them. Where we live and where our food comes from can merge. And so Alegria, the first Alegria that I'm looking at. I'm sorry, I'm cutting off your clapping. I'm like looking at the time. The first Alegria that we're looking at, we're looking at a 400 hectare property right now. That's a thousand acres. And the plan is to do a cacao farm, chocolate factory, Willy Wonka style chocolate themed hotel, minus the Oompa Loompas, and create a community of several hundred families. More than half of those families coming right off the plantations, the banana and the pineapple plantations. The other half are people like us, me and you. And we can live together and we can share in the abundance and we can cooperatively run these companies. We can't be out there pruning the fruit trees and chopping the land. That's not our skill. We can do the marketing, we can do the branding. And together we all win. Can we create a world where we all win? Can we? If we can't. If we can't, who can?