Composting "business as usual" and growing a better world, with anti-capitalist biz coach Emily Eley

Plus, a behind-the-scenes look at the business side of In Tending

Oct 23, 2025

— Emily Eley

Over the past six months or so, I have come to the startling realization that I have become a small business owner.

Here’s the damning evidence:

I write this free-to-low-cost newsletter, offering insights on the intersection of mindfulness and care, which is supported by many very kind subscribers now (maybe even you!).
I offer low-cost, donation-based caregiver circles once a month, and in 2026, I’d like to offer more, in a way that remains financially accessible to a wide range of folks.
I offer cohort-based group containers, workshops and consulting services for a wide variety of helping/healing organizations, from schools to reproductive justice nonprofits. I plan to keep doing this as a way to supplement my income from the first two things.
I’m finishing up a yearlong meditation teacher training, which has me thinking about offering 1:1 support as well. This would also allow me to tailor sessions to the specific concerns of folks in this community, such as combining mindfulness practice with parent coaching for new parents and people with kids in K-12, executive function coaching for neurodivergent caregivers and their kids, caregiver burnout prevention for folks who tend adults, and trauma-informed care for the many folks who find traditional mindfulness techniques and/or communities hard to access.

It has been obvious to many of my loved ones, for quite some time, that all of this adds up to a business, and I am its founder. Many have throttled me with some version of the sentiment, “Just own it, girl!”

But this new reality has been hard for me to accept, because nothing about the words “business” or “founder” feels like home to me, even if this career structure actually…does.

Business as usual often means pricing offerings like the ones above in a way that makes them inaccessible to the people who really need them. Business as usual means under-valuing the labor and expertise of caregivers and creative people, while over-valuing the kinds of work that produce gains in stock value, and fostering animosity instead of solidarity between them. Business as usual means under-paying women and people of color, while over-paying men in a way that pushes them to define their self-worth by the size of their paycheck, and stunts their ability to connect and care for others. Business as usual means that some people hoard more resources than they need while others go hungry, creating fertile ground for violence and hatred to take root.

I don’t want to own any part of that, girl. The fact that so many founders still desperately do is, in my view, a big part of the problem.

In my early 20s and 30s, my aversion to capitalism led me to avoid money in general. I’ve tried growing my own food, only buying clothes secondhand, boycotting Amazon, and bartering my services whenever possible. I still really enjoy these things and think they’re worthwhile.

Running a fledgling business has taught me that when it comes to making money vs. spending it, avoidance is not an effective anti-capitalist resistance strategy. Choosing to under-sell my offerings and to manage my business books badly doesn’t hurt capitalism one bit—it just hurts me. It also makes it more likely that I’ll abandon my effort to create something better and go back to grudgingly accepting the status quo.

So, what’s a girl to do?

Enter: Emily Eley, anti-capitalist business coach.

Emily is a born-and-raised Vermonter, a mom to two kids, and an activist and organizer. She also knows her way around a spreadsheet like nobody’s business. Emily’s work is rooted in the belief that small business can be a tool for liberation, and a way to practice the world we’re trying to build: one grounded in care, interdependence, and enoughness.

Emily is currently helping me work through In Tending’s awkward growing pains. As Emily explains in this interview, her approach to “anti-capitalist business coaching” is not one in which people do not make money. It’s one that prioritizes healthy reciprocity and exchange over cancerous levels of growth and exploitation. It’s not a return to the Stone Age, but a re-imagining of previous ways of being in community that are more equitable, and that do a better job of actually taking care of people and our earth than this current economic system. And it’s an approach that has helped me to replace my anti-capitalist avoidance of money with compassion, curiosity, and a newfound sense of agency and creativity. It has helped me to cultivate a sense of wise hope and newfound confidence in the ability of conscientious caregivers like me to begin building a better world for our kids in the present moment, without going broke.

The conversation between Emily and I that follows here offers a rare glimpse into the ways in which the proverbial sausage gets made around here, as I try to make it according to the recipe above. It also, I hope, offers a galvanizing glimpse into the care-centered future that Emily and I are both trying to create.

Before we jump in, a bit of housekeeping:

Please be sure to mark your calendars for our next donation-based circles for caregivers: Holding Space for Grief on Tuesday 10/28 at 10:30 EST, and Burnout Prevention on Tuesday 12/2 at 10:30 EST. If you haven’t already signed up to receive our Zoom invites for our circles, please click here to do so.
If you live in Central MA, please come meditate in person with me on Sunday evenings in November! Click here for more info and to register.
Starting on Tuesday, Oct 28, I’ll be facilitating a 6-week container for healing from pregnancy loss, via the organization RTZ Hope. We’ll meet each week at 6:30-8:00 pm EST (3:30-5pmPST) from October 28th to December 2nd, 2025. To sign up, please click here. Equity spots available. For more information on RTZ Hope and this unique, transformative cohort-based experience, please click here. If you know someone who needs this information, please share this post with them.

Ryan: Where did you grow up, and what else grows there?

Emily: I was born in Burlington, Vermont, where I am right now. Now, we live in the New North End, just above downtown and the Old North End of Burlington. We’re also on the land of Abenaki people here.

I had grown up in the South End, where the houses are very big, and very tall, more Victorian-looking. Meanwhile, in the New North End, it’s a bunch of tiny little ranches. It was traditionally a very blue-collar, working-class area, and has also been the most conservative district in Burlington. It is the least steeped in wealth out of all of the districts in the area. And now it is slowly flipping and turning over. It’s the only affordable place left to buy a home, though recently, it’s become less-affordable.

So here, you’ll see a family with young children like ours–I have a two and a five year old–and then a neighbor like ours, who is right next door is 95 and lives alone. She’s actually in transition to moving into a supported living home. There’s a lot of that out here.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the spread of homesteading across Millennial households as well. So the other things that grow here that are really top of mind right now are stone fruits, as I am slowly trying to acquire them on our little plot of land. We also have a chicken coop, and my goal right now is for every other inch of our yard to be covered in something productive and something edible. And yet in the next yard over, it’s like, there’s nothing. It’s just grass. A lot of grass that is way too green, and shouldn’t be that green. And so it’s a very interesting neighborhood right now in that way too. It’s a lot of “what used to be” next to a lot of “what is now.”

Ryan: That’s such an evocative image: the green “perfect grass” next to a lawn that is riotous with stone fruit and chickens and kids and other edible plants.

Emily: Yeah. And decaying sunflowers. Some people here were like, “You need to pull those nasty, ugly, decaying sunflowers down.” And I was like, “Oh, no. The birds and the squirrels come in and eat the seeds.” The kids and I have had so much fun watching the squirrels climb up; the stem is leaning over, and they’re pulling the seeds out as fast as they can.

Ryan: I’m wearing a shirt that has mushrooms on it, because I share this view that there can be a lot of beauty and connection and nourishment in decay. And yet our culture doesn’t like to see that. That’s also something that I would love to talk to you about.

Emily: Moving into this neighborhood and into this property five years ago forced me to confront some classist ideas that I myself had internally about that. This was our first year of really gardening and growing food, and I realized I had a lot of class-based ideas around what beauty looked like in landscaping. Like, how, why and when do things need to be neat or organized? Why and when do things need to be composted or pruned or removed?

For example, this year, we’re not raking. And there’s some neighbors that are like, “That looks so messy. Why aren’t you raking?” We also don’t mow our grass very often. The things I used to think were really important, and really signified beauty, have drastically shifted since becoming a homeowner out here.

Ryan: I have a whole thing with leaves as well. I know that I’m leaving them on my lawn because they make sense here, from an ecological perspective.

Emily: Yeah. There are tiny little organisms who lay their eggs there, and they give the trees nutrients, as their decomposing bodies provide food for the ground.

Ryan: Yes! But then you have people who have their own, as you said, sort of hierarchical ideas about what’s “good” and what’s “not good.” And they’re out here judging.

The pesticide economy and the chicken-and-peaches economy

Ryan: This leads me to a question I’d love to ask you, which is: how do we have a respectful conversation with our loved ones and neighbors, in a sort of heterogeneous economic community like the one you’re in or the one I’m in, that are respectful, about the different ways in which we engage with our shared ecosystem? Both in our literal natural ecosystems, as well as the human economic systems we exist in? Because I know I don’t want to engage in that same kind of judgmental, hierarchical way that someone might be bringing to me. Like, “Oh yeah, you think you’re better than me because my lawn looks messy? Well, I think I’m better than you because I’m not destroying the earth.” That’s not helpful. So I sit with this one all the time.

Emily: Well, I think what I’ve found across time, whether through activism or organizing or my role as a business coach, is that basically no one ever wants unsolicited advice, right? No one ever wants to be told to do something differently when they haven’t sought that out or asked for information on how to do that differently. And so I think a lot about where I’m placing my energy when I am explaining something, or when I am offering alternatives to doing something in a certain way, whether it’s economic or otherwise. I’m choosing my audience pretty carefully.

So, for instance, there’s a man two houses over who I would guess is in his late eighties. His name is Ned. He is a very sweet man. The amount of pesticides he is spraying–it’s stunning, honestly. It’s scary. But then in the same moment, he’s bringing two Tootsie Roll pops over for my two kids, right? With folks like that, I’m constantly putting feelers out there to see if there’s room for a conversation. And if I feel like there really isn’t room for a conversation, I’m not going to try. I’m not going to waste my energy there. I’m going to go find someone where there is room for the conversation.

I think there’s a surprisingly large amount of people out there for whom there is a lot of room for conversation around these topics. But I think sometimes we identify or pick out–and I know my partner does this–the ones that are never going to budge. And we push and we push and we push and we push. And a couple different things can come out of that.

One can be a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s like, “See, I tried, and it didn’t work, and they didn’t listen, so what’s the point?” We can become nihilistic that way, right?

It can also kind of make us more dogmatic in our own beliefs and create even moments of separation between us and someone else.

So I think it’s important that we see that whether as a business owner, or as an activist, or as an organizer, or as a parent, there’s so much room for movement, but it requires patience and intimacy and time and repetition.

Here I think of my parents who are Boomers. My mom is turning 80 next month, and my dad’s 81. They have always been registered Democrats and liberals. I remember four years ago when I first started calling myself an anti-capitalist, my dad had asked a few times what I meant by that. We come over every Sunday for dinner with our boys. We go to their house and they cook. And one Sunday he goes, “I think what you mean is conscious capitalism. I don’t think you mean anti-capitalism. I think what you mean is that there can be a good version of capitalism.” And I was like, “No, Dad. There isn’t a good version of capitalism.”

And now, fast forward four years of this constant conversation every Sunday around politics, around economics, around justice, and he’s like, “I think we need to be socialists.” And I’m like, “Yeah, Dad, we do.”

I also can’t tell you the amount of times I have to introduce myself and people are like, “What do you do?” And I’m like, “I’m an anti-capitalist business coach.” And then it’s always like, “What is that?”

For example, I went to a networking event last week, and there was this woman who was in her 70s, and she was so perplexed by what I was saying. But if you can find the kernels that connect to them, you can start to explain your viewpoint. For her, I know she’s a business owner. I know that she had a brick and mortar shop downtown for 25 years before being pushed out by things like Amazon, online shopping, fast fashion, and all that jazz. So that’s an opportunity that I can grab. I can just ask questions like, “How did that affect you, having all of these chain stores all of a sudden move into Burlington? What was that like for you?” So asking questions, being curious, finding those points of connection: that’s how we bridge that gap.

And of course, you can have the argument that we don’t fucking have the time to do this, right? Like, the planet is burning now, so we don’t have time to build these relationships and slowly convert people. And I get that. I think that’s why our organizing has to be multifaceted, right? There has to be some element of direct action.

But we can’t be defensive and snarky. We can’t set out to make people feel bad or feel small. And I think sometimes, the Left can be that way. They can be kind of like, “I’m smarter than you, and I’m gonna make you feel like an idiot, and I’m gonna prove my point that I’m right.” And that doesn’t usually get anyone anywhere in any type of relationship, you know?

Ryan: I think you’re right about that. And so, in thinking about a one-off cocktail party conversation, I’m hearing that there might be a moment of mindfulness inherent in this, where we’re attuning to ourselves and to others. We’re saying to ourselves, “You know, unless this soil is already very soft and ready to go, I’m probably not going to plant anything successfully here. It’s probably not a good use of my digging energy.”

Maybe in that situation it’s about finding a different point of connection, as you said. Maybe the way that we approach work isn’t going to be that point of connection, but maybe we can talk about our kids, or maybe we can talk about the food at the party, and have a moment of connection regardless. By prioritizing connection, we’re still pushing back against this impulse to sort every person we’re talking to into an hierarchy, ideally one where we’re on top.

What I’m also hearing is that there’s another way we can approach relationships in our lives that are more important and enduring, where this foundation of connection has already been laid. Relationships with your childhood friends, your older relatives, the person who lives on your block. People who don’t need to be canceled, but whose causes and conditions are just so different from ours in this moment that of course they would have different views. I’m hearing in this instance that the conversation becomes more about gentle repeated exposure to each other’s ideas, and cultivating a stance of mutual receptivity.

Emily: Yeah. I agree.

“I think it’s important that we see that whether as a business owner, or as an activist, or as an organizer, or as a parent, there’s so much room for movement, but it requires patience and intimacy and time and repetition.” — Emily Eley, anti-capitalist business coach

And, I also think there are certain things that it’s okay to just stop doing. Like, in previous years, we’ve been invited to go to a Dartmouth football game at Dartmouth by my mother-in-law. This year I was like, “There’s just no element of that activity that is in alignment with who we are. Not the sport itself, not the Ivy League institution that we would be going to, and not the conversations that are going to be had there. That’s not interesting to me anymore. And I think it’s okay for us to just stop doing that altogether. Even if it does mean seeing family, we could see family in a different way. We don’t need to participate in that. Especially if there’s money involved. I don’t want my money going there either.”

So, I’m always looking for room to shift class consciousness in any capacity, anywhere I am. And sometimes, there isn’t room. And I’m just going to be done with that. And that’s okay too. Because I’m not trying to martyr myself all over the place. I’m not trying to keep every relationship alive and well, if that relationship is no longer a representation of who we are in the world.

Ryan: Right. We can let it be the sunflower that is out there rotting in the back. It’s still going to feed somebody. It’s just no longer serving us in the same way.

And yet, maybe for some of us, there’s still a fear and aversion to allowing certain traditions or relationships to be composted.

Emily: We have been facing that. For example, we stopped celebrating Christian-based holidays in the last year and a half. It’s been really, really tough, because my partner’s side of the family are Born-Again Christians. For things like Christmas, or even Thanksgiving, surprisingly, it’s been really tough to find a version of these holidays that work for us as our immediate family. It’s also been hard explaining to my five-year-old why we no longer celebrate Christmas. Unfortunately, he has enough memories of Christmas to now feel like he’s missing out and losing out. Which really is just about the gifts, which is just about consumerism, which is, again, rooted in capitalism.

So we’ve been working on evolving our approach to how we do ceremony, and how we celebrate the passing of time. And that’s tough when you’ve got family members that are like, “Um no, absolutely not.” I feel like we’re moving into the part of the year where we walk a really delicate line between our family and my partner’s family.

Ryan: Absolutely. And I know so many other caregivers feel that. In the In Tending community, there are a lot of caregivers who really deeply resent the cognitive load that comes with high levels of holiday consumption. They resent the overstimulation that comes with being in the environments where that consumption takes place. They resent the performative aspect of it. Many of us who are neurodivergent really chafe at anything where the performance is different than what feels real inside.

Emily: That’s an interesting way to explain it.

Ryan: I mean, I think many principled people feel that way, but also, if you are living in an environment where your brain is telling you one thing is true, and then you see people performing in a way that undermines what you sense to be true, it creates a sense of hyper-vigilance and almost panic, or irritation and crankiness.

So, I think a lot of us are trying to find, during this season, a way to right-size traditions and ceremonies and rituals, without losing traditions and ceremonies and rituals. I think rituals are just a really important part of being human.

For example, we too have skipped Thanksgiving in the past, but we didn’t replace it with anything–any sort of communal celebration of fall. We had a normal day, ate our usual food, though we did fill the bird-feeders to thank the land. This was during the pandemic where we could kind of do that kind of experimentation. And it felt good to divest from a holiday where, as a former history teacher, I’m not fond of it anyway.

At the same time, it felt like there was a missing feeling of a more rich, communal, seasonal ritual. And I do think that that was felt by my family members. My son was too young to really have a framework of expectation, but it felt like I had taken something away without putting something else in its place that felt right.

I think what we’re touching on is a dilemma that many of us face as we’re looking at the pesticide lawn economy versus the chickens-and-peaches economy. Like, okay, I know I don’t want to participate in the first one, but what’s like, Step One to get to the second one?

Where do we start to plant something new?

Ryan: To bring this all back to anti-capitalist business practices: It is really hard out there for people in our community who have to get that next paycheck to keep a roof over their kids’ heads, but who absolutely do not want to keep giving their energy toward the thing that they’re making the money from. The one positive aspect of this sense of dissatisfaction is that it’s softening the ground, creating the conditions for the kind of conversation that we’re having to really take root in those people’s lives. These are the people that are like, “Show me, Emily! How do I get from the pesticide lawn to the chicken-and-peach lawn—while also still ensuring that I also still have a house to live in?”

Emily: What you’re describing is the question of, “How do I be anti-capitalist while continuing to exist in a capitalist system waiting for socialism to come?”

Ryan: Yes.

Emily: That question can look like,”In my business, how do I do those pieces?” But as we’ve discussed, it can also appear in my friendships, in my relationships, in my life.

I was actually just commenting to my partner about a networking event I attended last week where this came up. I was really surprised, because there were maybe about 20 women in the room, and every single one of them was a health coach in some capacity. Every single one of them. And I could see for many of them the kind of the panic they were experiencing, as each person introduced themselves to the group. Like “Oh f@#k, I’m another health coach. What am I going to say? How am I any different than all of these other people?”

One of the things that many of us are missing at that moment is that there’s a reason that room was filled with health coaches. There’s a reason that they are all women, or women-identifying. There’s a reason that we’re seeing this trend or balloon in solo-preneur women who are drawn to caregiving work. It’s because this work touches all of the spaces in which capitalism is inherently built to hurt and fail us. The things that capitalism cannot provide, these women are identifying these holes and trying desperately to create businesses out of those needs. But unfortunately, our economic system is still not set up to value those types of businesses in a way that would be necessary in order for them to fully provide financially. Does that make sense?

Ryan: Absolutely. And I think that’s a hard pill to swallow. For me, and for many others who are exploring this kind of work.

Emily: It’s a hard pill to swallow. And so what I am seeing is I’m constantly getting client inquiries, from women specifically, that are in these kinds of health and wellness spaces. Sometimes their work is helping people set boundaries. Sometimes it’s helping people create better habits. Sometimes it’s around nutrition. Sometimes it’s more around therapy, massage, or acupuncture.

In a post-capitalist world, these things would be provided for regularly, right? And it wouldn’t be something that costs thousands of dollars to access. These would just be the basic necessities that all of us have access to, in order to make us well-rounded healthy beings.

The problem is we don’t live in that society yet.

So, we have all of these women trying to provide these services, but the people they are trying to provide those services to don’t have the disposable income to purchase those services. And so then we then get kind of stuck. Like, “What do I do with that? I see the need, I see that people are ill and unwell. I think I can help in some capacity. I feel like this is my gift to give, but there’s not really a ‘market’ for it.” If we were to use that term.

“There’s a reason that we’re seeing this trend or balloon in solo-preneur women who are drawn to caregiving work. It’s because this work touches all of the spaces in which capitalism is inherently built to hurt and fail us.” — Emily Eley, anti-capitalist business coach

There are a couple of ways that we can go that I suggest.

One is being really pragmatic and pulling in a part-time job. Like, is there some sort of W2 or 1099 work that’s not super painful for you to engage with, while you take some time to experiment with this idea that you have?

I think for some reason, for a lot of folks, that feels like a failure, or embarrassing, or like you haven’t been able to cut it. But I just celebrated eight years in business, and I’ve taken on a W2 position twice during those eight years. There’s no human out there that has said, “You have to be fully self-employed 100% of the time, all the time, in order to be a business owner.” Like, that’s just absurd. That’s not the economy we live in anymore. That was true for my parents. Both my parents were solopreneurs. They grew great businesses. But they didn’t have to multitask multiple jobs while doing that because nothing cost that much then. They had no student loan debt. They didn’t have medical debt. We just live in a very different time.

Purely from a business creation standpoint, it’s very hard to be creative and come up with something unique when you’ve got this huge weight of finances just looming over you. This feeling of, “Well, you better produce something with that, quick!” And so if we can remove, or alleviate, or shift that pressure at all with a part-time job, that can be really helpful. At that point, the question then becomes, “How do we make those two things work together?”

The other thing is—and I don’t know how much I love this advice, but the advice is true regardless—we do have to figure out a way to make the business feel unique enough, and clear enough, and needed enough, to justify paying for it. And that’s hard. That’s what I spend a lot of time doing–helping clients figure all of that out. For example, I have a client right now who’s doing really well, and it’s because she’s niched down so far that there’s not a lot of other humans doing what she’s doing.

I still struggle with this idea that everybody has to be unique. That’s probably a version of individualism, if we were to dig into that. Which is the problem. And, yet, if our offering is not unique, it becomes swept up with the rest of it. So there’s this push and pull that we’re working with there.

Capitalism requires us to constantly be handling painful truths and deep contradictions all the time, every day, and I think that’s one of them. That at this moment in time, it’s not enough to just have an idea, and just want to help. We also have to figure out, “Is it financially sound? Are people really going to engage with this? And exchange money for it?” And that’s tough.

Ryan: What I’m hearing is that some of this stuck-ness that some of us are feeling is actually a powerful sense of intuition about the realities of capitalism. Why would I leave my secure day job in order to not make money, doing something that, as you said, may not be rewarded by capitalism anyway? We might not like this reality, but we are clearly seeing reality, based on what you’re saying.

Sometimes, there really isn’t ground to plant this thing that I want to plant. Even though the thing I want to plant would be very beautiful, and I can see it all growing tall in my mind. The ecosystem that we have is not going to nourish that vision sufficiently.

What I’m also hearing you offer is a way to simply work with what is, right now, with present-moment awareness. You’re saying, “Okay, well, what else can you grow right now? Can you spend a few seasons growing this other cash crop that’s going to prepare the ground for the next phase, and that’s also going to feed your family right now?”

At the same time, you’re also offering a way out of a false binary that keeps many of us trapped in this place where we’re very fixated on what seem to be the only choices: Door Number One, or Door Number Two. Stay at my job, start a business. When in fact, in my own experience, if I sit with the actual reality of things long enough without succumbing to that kind of narrowed vision, often, it’s Door Number Three that opens gently, off in the periphery.

I’m hearing that one potential Door Number Three is, you could move to doing the same thing you’re doing, but doing it 75% of the time, or 50% of the time.

And of course, you’d still have to work that out, with your partner or whoever else is interdependent with you. This is why you have people look at their personal finances as a part of being ethical small business owners. Step One also involves getting real about what your life actually costs.

But assuming you have some room to move a few numbers around, rather than making a drastic change, maybe you can spend 25 percent of your time building this thing that feeds you, or could feed you, or that simply brings you joy and meets your need for beauty, in the world that you already live in.

I do think that that also takes us back to the question of, “How do you get from the pesticide-filled lawn to the lawn filled with stone fruit and chickens?” What I’m hearing you say is, “Well, not overnight. So can you just focus on learning how to build a chicken coop without ripping the whole thing up?” Because that is how that kind of change actually happens.

Emily: Yeah. If you look at the last eight years that my business has been alive, there have been so many versions of the business that all had to happen in order for me to get to where I am today.

A lot of the time I try to help folks find part-time work that is adjacent to the thing they’re trying to plant. In my case, I worked as a bike lobbyist in New Jersey, writing copy to lobby for bike infrastructure in a state that hates bicycles. To me, that was at least adjacent to my desires for affordability and environmentalism. And, I love being on my bike. I bike every day, everywhere I go. I’m about to hit a thousand miles on my new e-bike that I got this year. A thousand miles I wasn’t in a car. It’s just amazing. The work itself sucked, and I struggled with it. My manager was very difficult, and, as many nonprofit spaces are, it was chaotic. But it paid enough, and my partner made enough, to kind of float us, between those two things. We were able to give me almost a year to figure out what this thing was that I wanted to do.

That thing, my business, has evolved multiple times since then. And there have been other times, like I said, that I’ve had to tap back into some W2 work, or take on more consulting work.

I also tried becoming a business coach for people trying to scale to six or seven figures. That was what I was counseled to do by my own business coach. That’s where the money is, right? But I was like, “I hate this. I don’t want to work with these people. I don’t like their problems. I don’t like their desires. I don’t like anything about it.” So then I was like, “Okay, well, the people I like don’t have any money. So how do I work with them?”

This led me to learning that if what you want to offer is something that people either can’t afford, or can’t yet justify paying for, you can also look to see, “Is there someone else that would pay for it?” Because most of my clients have experienced either generational poverty or are financially insecure. I know that about them. And I know that those are the people I want to serve. So my question became, “How do I get that paid for?” That sent me down a long line of asking for sponsorships, asking for donations, and finding grants to apply for. And I eventually found a state institution that will support a lot of my work.

Another thing I have found is that even though I target myself to folks who are financially insecure, given enough opportunities for sliding scale, a lot of those folks pay. They’re like, “Yeah, I’m in. I will do this. I don’t have a lot, but here’s what I have.” And I’ve created structures that make it so that that’s enough. They don’t need to pay more than that for this to work.

“Stop exploiting your own labor"

Emily: I really love thinking about the term post-capitalism. It’s like, “What comes after the economic system we have right now?” For some of that, we can find answers in previous versions of civilization. Capitalism is only a couple hundred years old. It feels innate to us because it’s been around as long as we’ve been around, for anyone that’s alive right now. But it’s really not old in terms of an economic system. Whereas commerce has been around for thousands of years, right? People were bartering and trading and finding different ways to move goods and services around, well before capitalism. And they were doing those things in many ways that were much more egalitarian, and much more useful to the common good, than we are now. So we have those examples to pull from.

But then we also have our imagination, right? We can think about Octavia Butler, and using our imagination to create fantasy-fiction worlds that allow us to dream of what we could be. So I encourage us to also be thinking, “What have I not thought of yet? How else could this work? How else could I get my needs met, and meet the needs of the people that I’m trying to serve?”

One issue is that clients will come to me and they’re like,”I’ve been doing everything pro bono,” or “I’m giving everything away for free,” or “I’m doing everything sliding-scale and everyone’s choosing the very bottom of the sliding scale.”

Ryan: Right. I see this all the time.

Emily: And then they’re burned out, and they’re exhausted, and they don’t have any more to give, whether from their person or financially. They’ve just gone all the way down to the bottom. And I think if we think of a post-capitalist economy, if we think of anti-capitalism, anti-capitalism is not anti-money, right? It’s not anti-commerce. It’s anti-exploitation. And that means exploitation of you, too.

So, post-capitalism also means stop exploiting your own labor. We’re not going to exploit other people either. We’re looking for solutions that meet my needs and meet the needs of the people that I’m serving. Not just one, not just the other. Both of us together.

Ryan: That makes so much sense. This also makes me think of so many of my peers who are writing here on Substack about care-adjacent topics. For example, in food, you’re supposed to be doing it for the joy of it. In education, you’re supposed to be doing it for the love of the kids. What that really means is “We don’t have to pay you.” Even when we leave these environments, this ethos has socialized us to accept less money for our labor than our white-collar peers in other career fields might.

One person I really admire who is tacking against this trend is my friend

Hillary Dixler Canavan

, a former Eater editor who writes the brilliant newsletter

What Are We Having?

here on Substack. She has so many great contacts, so she has all of these recipe developers contributing to her newsletter, and she turned on paid subscriptions immediately after her launch, so that she could pay them. She broke even on her costs very early on and has reached 1,000 subscribers in the first year of this project.

I would love for this project to consistently be contributing to her own family’s well-being, because she’s not commissioning these beautiful recipes just out of the goodness of her heart. This is her work. And yet it’s hard for me to accept that other people might also want this for me as well.

So, for people like me who are trying to follow Hillary’s example: When do you start asking people to be in reciprocity with you, through paying you or even bartering with you, versus just giving everything away for free as a way to build your email list? When do you tend to see this free-to-paid shift happen for the folks you coach? And how have you helped folks to find ethical ways to talk about that, to make that invitation to folks in their audiences in ways that feel aligned with the generous ethos they’re already trying to bring?

Emily: I mean, for me, I would probably want to get that out there as quickly as possible. Because the longer we go on offering our labor for free, the harder it can become for people to shift and understand paying for that labor. I think we can bypass that by being very explicit and transparent around the labor that goes in, and why we’re expecting some sort of compensation for that labor.

For example, there’s a whole section on my sales page on my website for my coaching that explains and breaks down why the pricing is what the pricing is. It explains where that money goes. It explains what that money covers. So the move is having a lot of transparency around what you are asking for and where that money is going. Like, basically, why do you need it? We’re trying to justify that exchange.

And then, ideally, we have tiered approaches. I love it if a business always has something for free. I think that’s really helpful. Not just from an accessibility perspective, but also purely from a marketing perspective and a business strategy perspective. It’s smart to have a way that people can engage with you and your business with no risk, basically. It can signal trustworthiness. And then hopefully we’re backing that trustworthiness up with real trust.

Then, I love to see something that is either sliding-scale or lower price point.

After that, I love to know that you’re also covering your needs, whether that’s a third tier of your services or product, or an audience that is large enough for that second tier, the tier that is low cost or sliding scale, to support the needs of your household.

So I think for folks who are getting ready to do this, I would encourage them to come up with an email campaign timeline with the aim of starting to expose what goes on behind the scenes, and the labor that goes into each of these things. Then I would start to prepare folks. Like, “Hey, this transition is coming. This is what I’d like to ask of you. This is why. And this is the start date of when I’m going to start asking for that.”

And then, trust that yeah, you’re going to lose some folks–and that’s okay. It’s possible that those folks that have already been there aren’t gonna pay. But that doesn’t mean you can’t start instituting a pay structure and attracting new humans who are paying, you know? Sometimes we have to be okay with letting go of what we built a little bit, in order to step into what we’re ready to build now. And shift to welcoming new humans coming in, with the expectation that there is going to be some sort of financial trade.

Ryan: This goes back to the thing you were saying about traditions and relationships, right? Where sometimes, the effort that goes into maintaining relationships that might not be sustainable would be better put towards building new relationships that are going to be more sustainable, or where there is going to be more ground for reciprocity.

Building the confidence that we can survive big change

Ryan: I know that for some reading here, there may still be much inner resistance to what we’re saying here. We don’t like grief and loss in our culture. It sounds like you are somebody who allows that flow, and that change, and who has a pretty powerful practice around working with impermanence and uncertainty. So, how do you work with those things within yourself? And how do you guide clients just to be with the grief of change?

As I’m asking this, I’m realizing I mean this in both a macro and micro sense. As the Buddhist scholar and ecologist Joanna Macy would say, we seem to be entering what she calls The Great Turning, in which our culture must make a shift: we have to change the way we’re relating with each other and the land, or risk destroying it all.

So, how do you walk alongside people in that? And then, how do you walk alongside individuals with these smaller pivots? Like, yeah, as part of the Great Turning and the building of a post-capitalist future, you might lose your five most engaged commenters. And for a while, maybe you won’t have those same engaged commenters because some of your posts will be paid ones. How do you work with the grief and fear that arise with change, when these forces are impacting us at such huge levels and also on such daily, frustrating levels, without getting overwhelmed by it all?

Emily: I struggle with the word “abundance” because it just feels very woo woo and weird and trite, but I do think a lot about the question of, “How do we build confidence?”

I actually had a new client start yesterday, and we’re doing a confidence-building activity together before we really dig into a lot of the businessy work. And so for the next 14 days, at the end of the day, she’s going to write down three to five things that she did well, or successfully. I told her, “It can be whatever the f@#k you want. It doesn’t have to be business related. But it’s nice if you can get a couple in there.” Because studies have found that confidence is created by having successful experiences, right? So the more successful experiences we have, the more our brain says, “Oh, another successful experience is possible.”

In business, what that transfers into is the understanding that we need to have enough successful experiences in the business world to believe that more successful experiences are possible. This is harder for some. For me, I’ve been doing this for eight years, and if I can do it for eight years, I sure as hell can figure out next month. I sure as hell can figure out whatever this next hurdle is. Like, look at my track record–I’ve got this! I can do this.

Also: There are more people out there. There are more ideas. There’s like, 8 billion people in the world. That seems like a lot of humans to me. There are literally limitless ideas and ways that we could go about building the business, or people that we could find to engage with.

I also believe there is truly limitless money out there. We do not have a money problem in our world. There’s plenty of f@#king money. Where it’s being allocated is a problem, right? And that’s something we can work on. But we don’t have a supply issue.

Similarly, there’s plenty of readers out there. We just need to now set up a framework that allows for the right readers to be coming in.

Ryan: I love that. And while I know we’re coming to the end of this interview, I’m going to embrace that sense of limitlessness, because I also feel like there’s limitless opportunities ahead for us to dig into these ideas you have even further.

In the meantime, I’m so grateful that you’re blazing a trail for those of us that are asking ourselves, “Where is the distant valley that doesn’t suck so bad? Does it exist?”

Emily: It does.

Ryan: I hope so. And as you said, finding it doesn’t just involve looking to the future for novel answers. Freedom dreaming, in the parlance of folks like Robin D.G. Kelly and Bettina S. Love, is so essential. But navigating changes in our business and economic system also means really knowing our past, and our lineage, and drawing from the roots of our prior successes and growth, and then growing forward. It’s all here.

Emily: It’s all about coming up with solutions for today while we also come up with new systems for tomorrow, you know? Because we also got to keep the lights on right now.

Ryan: Yes, we do. Somehow.

Want to chat with Emily about your work/money situation? Here are a few upcoming online events where you’ll find her:

How to Price Your Services Workshop: Fair, Sustainable Pricing for Service-Based Businesses (Nov 5)
Free anti-capitalist office hours (Nov 6)
Liberatory Finance Workshop (Jan 8)

And here are Emily’s ongoing offerings:

Anti-Capitalist Business Coaching: One-on-one support for building a business that sustains you and your community. (Note: Business Coaching for Vermonters is often fully covered by VSAC grants for non-degree programs.)
Office Hours: A monthly drop-in space to share what you’ve been working on, get support, and be witnessed.
Free Workshop Library: Replays and resources from past sessions on pricing, marketing, planning, and more.
Newsletter: Weekly reflections on anti-capitalist business, community care, and organizing.
Let’s Chat: Book a 30-minute call to connect about your work or ask questions.
Emily’s website

Have a question for me or for Emily about being an anti-capitalist business owner? Please feel free to post it below. We hope to have her back to answer more of your questions at a future date!

In Tending