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Vicki Robin

Vicki Robin is a prolific social innovator, writer and speaker. She is coauthor with Joe Dominguez of the international best-seller, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992, 1998, 2008). It was an instant NY Times best seller in 1992 and steadily appeared on the Business Week Best Seller list from 1992-1997. It is available now in eleven languages.

Her new book, Blessing the Hands that Feed Us; what eating closer to home can teach us about food, community and our place on earth (Viking/Penguin 2014) tells how her experiment in 10-mile eating not only changed how she ate, but also renewed her hope and rooted her in her community. She calls this “relational eating.” She went on to investigate how we might restore the vitality of our regional food systems so everyone could have the benefit of relational eating – healthy food, healthy communities. She calls this building “complementary food systems,” not to replace but to work along side of the global industrial systems we now depend on for almost 100% of our food. Her book offers many practical tools for transformation, from changing our attitudes, to changing our habits to changing our food sources to getting active in social and political change.

Called by the New York Times as the “prophet of consumption downsizers,” Vicki has lectured widely and appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows, including “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Good Morning America” and National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition” and “Morning Edition”; she has also been featured in well over 100 magazines including People Magazine, AARP, The Wall Street Journal, Woman’s Day, Newsweek, Utne Magazine and the New York Times.
 

Desert greening

Moving from Resistance to Repair

By Vicki Robin, The Great Transition Initiative

The climate movement has excelled at resistance but is missing a crucial, essential element: a focus on repair. It is clear about what it is against, but largely mum on a restoration project equal to the scale of climate change damage.

  • July 18, 2019
Community

Making Sense of this Life I’ve Lived

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

That title was a tease. I have not made nor will I ever make full sense of me, but I want to connect the dots of my disparate – sometimes desperate – projects over many years and reveal the wholeness and practicality that links them all.

  • June 13, 2019
Global Earth Repair conferenc

From Despair to Repair

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

As a story teller and pot-stirrer and social innovator I am now on the hunt for what will put the soil and water and regeneration story on everyone’s lips, to have teenagers to grandmothers march for healthy soil, to have policies that transform degraded land into garden landscapes.

  • May 16, 2019
American Cabinet in 2009

Sanity Please

By Vicki Robin, Resilience.org

I have a suggestion for a road to sanity. At the moment, it is a thought experiment, but one that is legal and actually common place: consider the Cabinet as the deliberative as well as an advisory body that crafts wise policies.

  • April 16, 2019
bluebells

Is there Hope for the Future?

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

Let us do what we do best – write, swim, play tennis, sing, throw parties, mate, run businesses, teach, fight – for the benefit of all. Let us dedicate our actions not to assuring the best outcome but to assuring that whatever the outcome, we gave it our best. 

  • March 18, 2019
FIRE community

The Two Sub-cultures of FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early)

By Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life

Lest it seem like I’m putting socialism above libertarianism, and the common good above individual achievement, I also see that as FIers mature into this freedom they find a balance between focus on themselves and service to community.

  • October 18, 2018

Is God a 4-Lettered Word?

By Vicki Robin, Resilience.org

What animates you? What is the spiritual or religious impulse underneath the work you do to save those parts of our world that you want to protect and nurture? Is there a spiritual or religious teacher or movement that inspires you to do the uncomfortable work of politics or social change? What role, if any, does faith play in whatever you do that brings you out of your private life and into the public square? How do you “keep the faith” as commentator Tavis Smiley often says in signing off?

  • September 6, 2017
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