Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Stephanie Rearick is the Founder and former Co-Director of the Dane County TimeBank (DCTB) – a 2800-member time exchange, and Creative Director of Mutual Aid Networks, a new type of networked cooperative. She answers the question of What Could Possibly Go Right?
Over the last few years my organization, Green Releaf Initaitive, has been prototyping our permaculture gardens on select sites affected by disasters and displacement. At the core of our theory of change is not just “design” but regenerative design that invites us to go beyond sustainability and ways that we can apply it in contexts of aid and development.
It is well past the time to face hard decisions of how to reduce obscene levels of corporate production instead of fiddling with perpetual energy fantasies while the planet burns.
Dany Sigwalt, Executive Director at Power Shift Network, has spent much of her career moving between movement building and youth leadership development, working to marry the two into one cohesive strategic reality. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
For today’s mutual-aid societies, the catch line is often “solidarity, not charity.”
Community Loaves, too, draws on the model of neighbors helping neighbors.
There’s no place for Progress here. Or, rather, we need to define progress as the avoidance of imminent catastrophes in pursuit of a life of abundant joy.
Even as communities begin picking themselves up after the devastation, West Coast climate activists are experimenting with what an effective response to such crises looks like.
It all happened so fast. The temptation was to shut down and succumb to the shock. Instead, a group formed in neighboring Ashland and started to figure out how to help.
The Common Ground Collective’s successes and failures provide some useful insights into how to build new, effective mutual aid projects during this crisis and the next.
One of our slogans which we diggers promote is ‘reclaim and extend the commons!’ Yet we have been as surprised as anybody else that this extension and reclamation of the commons should take this form of mass community mutual aid.
Our years of leisurely critique of neoliberal capitalism are over. Now we need to take action to escape from its pathologies and develop new types of governance, provisioning, and social forms.
There is no guarantee that this resurgence of collective action will survive the pandemic. We could revert to the isolation and passivity that both capitalism and statism have encouraged. But I don’t think we will.
