Why the Returning Circle is donation-based

Every time I've considered charging a fixed price for the Returning Circle, something in me resists it. I've thought about this long enough to understand why.

The circle is not a product. It's a practice. It exists because I believe in it, because the women who come need it, because something happens in those rooms that doesn't happen in rooms where a transaction has already established the terms of the relationship.

That last part is the bit I would underline, because it is easy to read as a nice sentiment and it is actually quite a practical observation.

A price does not only decide who can come. It decides what the room is.

When somebody has paid a set amount, a reasonable thing happens. They start to assess whether they got it. That is not greed, it is just what buying is, and it is the correct way to behave towards a service.

But assessing and settling are not compatible. You cannot be quietly working out whether this was worth the money and also be fully in the room.

Making it donation-based means the woman who can give £20 and the woman who can give £2 and the woman who can give nothing are all in the same room. This is intentional. The healing that happens in genuine community, across the full range of life circumstances, is different from what happens in a room where everyone has pre-selected for ability to pay.

A fixed price sorts a room before anybody arrives. Not by who needs it, and not by who will give most to it. By who had it spare that month.

And the person who did not have it spare that month is very often the person for whom the hour would have made the most difference.

Here is what donation based actually means in practice, because people are unsure and the uncertainty keeps them away.

There is no suggested amount and there is not going to be one. A suggested amount is a price with manners.

Nobody is told what anybody else gave. There is no moment where it is visible, no list, and no reason for anyone to work out where they sit.

You do not have to decide beforehand. You can come, see what it is, and give nothing this time and something next time, or the other way round.

And nobody will ask you about it, ever.

The question I get most is some version of am I taking advantage. Almost always from somebody who is not.

The people who worry about that are the ones already in the habit of making sure they are not a burden, which is usually the whole reason they have ended up needing a room like this.

So I will say it plainly. You cannot take advantage of something that was set up this way deliberately. There is no quiet threshold you are failing to meet.

The other question is whether it is sustainable, and that is a fair question to ask of anybody.

It works because it is not trying to be the thing that pays for itself. The circle sits alongside work that does. Deciding that was the whole decision, and once it was made the rest of it stopped being complicated.

What I ask instead of a price is simpler and harder. Turn up. Turn up again. Tell somebody who needs it.

A room that fills reliably is worth more to this than a room that pays well, because the thing that makes it work is the regularity. The same chairs, the same hour, the same handful of faces who were there last week.

What people tend to notice about a donation based room, and I did not expect this, is that it is more generous in every other way as well.

People give each other lifts. They bring something. They notice when somebody has not come and they ask after them.

I think that is because nothing in the arrangement has told them they are customers, and so nobody is waiting to be served.

If you've been coming and giving what you can, thank you. If you've been coming and giving nothing because right now nothing is genuinely what you have, you are still as welcome as anyone else.

That will never change.

Why I kept the circle donation-based, and what that decision means.

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