I’ll try to keep this post short just to capture thought sparked in this moment. In current setup (@Ben do we have records of who and how negotiated it this way?), most residents of unMonastery receive 400 euro from which they need to cover food expenses. Myself of course I just ask to receive pleasing share of food (keeping it vegan) + basic hygiene products and simply stay away from all this financial stipend idea. My apologies here to Ben for making with this exception all the related bureaucracy even more complicated to manage 
Today during short discussion with @bembo_davies and @mariabyck I’ve mentioned that I asked @fortyfoxes over SMS if he could let us know if he comes for lunch and how many more people would come with him. I really like eating together with big group of friends, finding sharing meals a big part of creating bounds in community, I also let myself very freely invite people to join us for a meal. Then it got brought to my attention that David doesn’t contribute anymore part of his stipend to virtual pool of money from which people in Food Acquisition Team currently purchase pretty much all the food (we still don’t have clear strategy for transitioning to in-kind donations)
BTW I started yesterday working on simple slides visualizing what unMonastery:Matera can offer. Focusing on real world assets like accomodation, food, travel, coworking space etc. also including still strongly present money fiction 
As I can recall, during session in Strasbourg where we started dreaming about unMonastery, we started by taking about grants and monetary funding and then opened conversation for in-kind donations and clarifying with ourselves what real world assets we need to work on all the great projects we do.
To my understanding, currently @lois doesn’t base her work on any of those physical assets, still receiving humble financial grant and maybe doing some networking with ER community. Now it turns out (please correct me if wrong) that David also doesn’t sleep here, doesn’t eat here, doesn’t work here and just receives similar humble financial grant. As I mentioned in Separation of concerns post I find such situation far from my interpretation of unMonastery vision, while still very likely fitting more broad set of concerns addressed by Edgeryders!
I hope to write more well thought elaboration on this topic which will include recommendation to stay cautious with such stipends / micro grants. Besides obscuring what it really takes (in terms of real world assets) for unMonasterians to do what they/we do. It also may cause some hostility from local community, I remember @ilariadauria mentioning that some people living around here may consider 400 euro as more than many unMonasterians receiving it would consider.
(image from beautiful meal which we - 16 people - enjoyed sharing yesterday evening)
