Common Wallet (BE)

What?

The Common Wallet is a Brussels collective that started in January 2018 among ten artists and cultural workers. They share one common bank account, on which they transfer all their personal income and from which they pay all their personal daily expenses. Every week, the members of the Common Wallet meet to check in with each other, as a form of kinship. “We have expanded the notion of family.” 

Basic values of the Common Wallet are trust, generosity and solidarity. By detaching money from individual ownership, the Common Wallet participants question taboos and injustices within the current financial system. They aim to convert money into a means to enable listening, care, transparency and even joy among people. 

How?

All members have a personal bank card and access to all transactions, but there’s no control on who’s spending what. The basic principle is not to judge others’ expenses. “Aiming at challenging the culture of individualism, competition and antagonism that prevails in our neoliberal societies, the Common Wallet practices and reflects on alternative modalities to relate to each other, to work and to money.” Mortgages are left out of the experiment.

Who?

All members of the Common Wallet are cultural workers and live (close to each other) in Brussels. Some of them knew each other before, others didn’t. 

Their status is different: some work freelance, others have a fixed salary or are unemployed from time to time. Since the start, a few members have left the collective, others have joined. Based on their experience, the collective needs min. 5 and max. 11 participants. At a certain moment also 7 children were involved.