“Gone to the Dogs,” Paul Higgins’ canine-friendly café in Carlisle, may seem an unlikely place to look for inspiration in transforming the ways we think about funding for social change. But through ‘pay-it-forward’ fundraising and ‘creative up-cycling’ to re-use resources, Higgins has made the café a center for community in which money builds connection instead of division - a radical reversal of the inequalities that lie at the heart of big philanthropy, foreign aid and government contracting.
Here’s how it works: the café’s customers write their donations on post-it notes and stick them to a cupboard on the wall. Anyone who comes in can use these donations to get something that they need, without being asked to prove that they are ‘poor,’ homeless or whatever – it’s a trust-based system: “they are just people,” Paul’s partner Julie told me in an email, “we don’t feel we have the right to vet them.”
The pay-it-forward scheme has led to other initiatives like a free soup kitchen that utilizes surplus food from the café and the city’s supermarkets, an alliance with a local animal charity to provide training and work experience to those who need it, and a furniture restoration business housed in the barn of a café customer (one homeless person who used the scheme turned out to be a skilled French polisher). That’s ‘creative upcycling’ in action - re-using spaces, skills and materials in ways that nurture ‘communities of making and sharing.’
