Revised September 2026. The original version of this piece started from Robin Wall Kimmerer and ended up making a business case, treating free help as relationship capital that turns into contracts. That’s close to the opposite of what Kimmerer argues, and it got a few facts about Marcel Mauss and the potlatch wrong. This version keeps the practices I still stand behind and is more honest about the tension underneath them.
A district tech coordinator emails on a Thursday afternoon. Their Canvas course copy broke something, a training starts Monday, and they want to know if there’s a quick fix. There is, and it takes me twenty minutes to walk them through it. Nobody sends an invoice. Most weeks include a few exchanges like that, and I’ve come to think they’re some of the most useful work I do. What I’ve had to think harder about is what they’re for.
What is a gift, anyway?
Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry is where I started. Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, uses a shrub that shares its fruit freely as a model for an economy built on reciprocity rather than extraction, and she argues that the market economy is one story we’ve told ourselves rather than a law of nature. Drawing on Lewis Hyde, she makes a point I keep coming back to: a gift creates an ongoing relationship, and a gift given freely can’t be turned into someone else’s capital. Once it becomes capital, it has stopped being a gift.
I want to be clear that I’m borrowing here. Kimmerer’s gift economy is grounded in Indigenous relationships to land and to other-than-human beings, and a free workshop is not the same kind of gift as a serviceberry. I think the borrowing is still useful, but it’s a borrowing, and it should be read as one.
The anthropology complicates things further. Marcel Mauss’s 1925 essay The Gift didn’t come from fieldwork; it synthesized other ethnographers’ accounts, drawing heavily on Franz Boas’s work with the Kwakwaka’wakw and Bronisław Malinowski’s in the Trobriand Islands. Mauss’s central claim is that gifts are never quite free, since they carry obligations to receive and to give back, and those obligations are what bind people together. The potlatch, the feasting and giving ceremonies of Northwest Coast nations that Mauss relied on, was important enough to those communities that the Canadian government banned it from 1884 to 1951. Gift economies aren’t a soft alternative to markets. States have treated them as a threat.
Where does that leave paid PD?
This is the part I got wrong the first time. It’s easy to take “lead with generosity” and turn it into a strategy: give away enough useful things and the contracts will follow. That can even be true. But a gift designed to produce a contract is a loss leader, and if I’m honest, the original version of this post was describing loss leaders in the language of gifts.
I’m also not an outside critic of this. I work for Compass Partners in Learning, part of a service cooperative that member districts pay to belong to, and PD is part of what they pay for. The Thursday afternoon email might come from a member or from a district that has never paid us anything. I answer both, and I also know that being helpful to the second one is part of how cooperatives like ours grow. I don’t think that makes the help fake, but it means I can’t claim the clean version of the gift for myself.
How do I try to hold it?
What I’ve landed on is less a resolution than a set of habits that keep the two things from collapsing into each other: 1) give things away with no strings, which for me means Creative Commons licensing on tools and writing and answering questions without a pitch attached, 2) charge openly for labor rather than disguising a sale as a favor, so districts can take the free tool and walk away or pay for setup, training, and support, 3) build capacity rather than dependency, through train-the-trainer work that leaves local educators able to run things without me, and 4) treat past participants as a community rather than a pipeline, sharing resources and inviting them to teach each other whether or not it ever leads anywhere.
The test I try to apply is Hyde’s, by way of Kimmerer. If what I gave only makes sense because of what it might bring back to me, it was never a gift, and I should either price it honestly or give it without the calculation.
I don’t pass that test every time. The line between a gift and a pitch moves depending on the week, the budget, and who’s asking, and it’s something I have to keep checking rather than something I get to settle.
If you’ve worked out your own way of holding generosity and a paid role together, I’d like to hear about it. You can reach me at licht.education@gmail.com, and there are more tools, articles, and resources at bradylicht.com.
