photo: Stock Exchange/community center disguised as a vacant building

How do we empower ourselves, the middle class, and extend a hand to those who have fallen from that rung, or never reached it?

Our economic system is rusted shut. Done in by greed and corruption. It is beyond obvious that creative, robust remedies won’t be coming from our federal, state or municipal governments any time soon. Perpetually running for office leaves politicians beholden to their backers and bereft of ideas to relieve suffering and give a leg up to ordinary people.

Clearly, we have to create our solutions at the community level because help is not coming from the outside. Fortunately, the grass roots has plenty of talent, ideas and energy.

Here’s an idea: Locate a vacant, structurally sound, commercial building that needs repair. Work with the city and the landlord to convert it to a community center. Repairing the building in exchange for cheap rent and tax breaks up would employ people, teach valuable skills and create the conditions for neighbors to engage with each other as they create durable solutions with real benefits for ordinary people.

The community gets a gathering place that functions as an anchor. People get jobs and training. Landlords get improved buildings. The city will get more tax revenue from a recovered building that generates jobs than it does from a blighted one. Everyone wins, right?

Community mixers and  housing mixers at community centers will function like a Petri dish by creating the conditions for neighbors to brainstorm for ideas and pollinate them.

Every community has a wealth of good, decent people who will be much stronger when they connect with each other and create their own durable and creative solutions.

Cooperatives are an effective model to provide the goods, services and housing that the “marketplace” does not find profitable. Cooperatives are member owned, operated and governed. If we have a mind to, we can create adequate housing, better food, child care, elder care and even health care.

Although co-ops make a huge economic contribution–own over $3 trillion in assets and generate $654 billion in revenue–the model is neither widely known or understood. Join us on Saturday, October 29th for the Cooperatives – Better Together Symposium at the UIC Student Center to learn more about co-ops and how durable, resilient communities can be well within our reach.

Cooperatively, we can create this shift one community at a time. To do that, lots of people need to get off the couch and show up with an open heart, willingness and commitment. Together, we can create durable, resilient, cooperative communities that are far greater than the sum of their parts.

photo: Stock Exchange/ Fast food drive thru

You will find affordable, nutritious food outside of what you cook yourself, next to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: in your imagination. Fast food is especially abysmal and nutritionally bankrupt. Although I have a guilty affection for junk food, most of it does not taste good and wrecks havoc on one’s health. Do not think of where it came from or how it was processed, especially the meat or fish.

Opening a small restaurant is a high-risk, low reward, labor intensive, burnout experience. Millions of experienced food service workers are wearily familiar with the low wages and transitory nature of the industry.

A cooperative approach could significantly improve this industry and the raise food standards in general. A co-op offering HR, bookkeeping services, and tax filings could free members to specialize in a niche such as breakfast, lunch, carry out, fine dining or pastry.

Joining a co-op could give entrepreneurs access to expert consulting and a leg up to negotiate financing and capital investments. Members could organize bulk purchasing, equipment maintenance, share or trade equipment and personnel. Individually owned restaurants are solely responsible for everything. No wonder it is high risk, low reward, labor intense and often leads to burnout.

As this idea takes hold, we can look forward to higher-quality food. Maybe it will even be more affordable. If this puts a dent in McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King’s, KFC’s, Taco Bell’s and Subway’s revenues, I won’t shed a tear but maybe I will shed a pound.

Photo: Stock Exchange/Community Diner

The Law of Unintended Consequences is, by definition, unpredictable. The abject failure of our current economic and political system to provide life’s basic necessities, while lavishing the wealthy with every conceivable bauble and privilege, eventually leads to a shift. We’re in for a doozie. This economic and social shift certainly feels Biblical in scope. By the time the smoke clears, everything will be different, including our assumptions and attitudes about money.

I was bewildered by the  analysts’ bewilderment in parsing the stock market’s 500-point drop. “What could have caused it?” they wondered. Is it not obvious that the circus over the debt ceiling pulled the curtain back, exposing that the  interlocked worldwide financial markets rest on a shockingly corrupt, tenuous system that has been hijacked by a fanatical fringe?

Corporations, which the Supreme Court has deemed “people,” make the decisions that control our lives.  The torrent of cash into the political system has put this country in a straight jacket. In case you wondered just how profitable it is to represent us in Washington, there are 261 millionaires in congress. How many former representatives and senators who have become lobbyists are now millionaires? Although there are some good people in Congress, money has corrupted the system, even the Supreme Court.

The debt ceiling/budget hysteria illustrates that help is not coming from Washington with the speed and vigor to make a difference to people who need  to eat, feed hungry children and avoid foreclosure or eviction. The growing trends toward barter and the gift economy will become a stampede as people keep their empty wallets in their pockets.  Dimitry Orlov explains the gift economy in this interesting video.

Since help is not coming from Washington, it must come from our communities. Fortunately, by leveraging our talents and resources we can create much stronger communities than  individual efforts achieve.

Gathering community-by-community, at least once a month if not sooner is what it will take to establish the trust and the connections to even know what another person needs or to disclose what you need.

My goal is to facilitate mixers community-by-community, month after month. The first housing mixer was well attended and well received. Several people asked when the next one would be. All we need is a location, which I am working on. Every community needs this. If your community needs a mixer and/or a housing mixer, please visit New Community Vision for contact information.

Sparkling sunshine on a lake

It feels like the first shoe dropped: raising the debt ceiling at the stroke of midnight. It makes me wonder when the adults are coming back. Maybe they aren’t. That is how primal our fear is.

Politicians, business leaders and warlords the world over have no idea how to stop fighting, to put people to work and to ensure that they have homes to live in, enough food to eat, basic health care and education. At one time, not so long ago, we took these things for granted.

Get used to the new normal. Or don’t.

Please join the Transition Rogers Park Cooperative Study Group,where we will promote cooperatives as an ideal business model for today’s challenges. We will host guest speakers,  organize ongoing workshops, and a symposium before the end of the year. At each gathering, you will meet others who are committed to elevating the way that we live in the world.

Cooperatively, we have the potential to relate with each other in new and supportive ways and to remedy the  market’s profound failure to provide nourishing food, housing, health care and education, and the care of our most vulnerable populations: the young, the elderly, the disabled and veterans and all of those in the middle or on the  fringe.

Please visit and join Transition Rogers Park, a robust and lively community. We are deeply committed to creating community resilience to cope with peak oil, climate change and the resulting economic uncertainty. The cooperative model is a missing link that removes many barriers by creating and leveraging  synchronicities. 

photo: Arctic Cooperatives Limited/ Northern Manitoba, Canada

The congressional spectacle over the debt ceiling and the budget shows in stark relief that the economy that we once knew is long gone. R.I.P. Neither the market nor the government has the ability, imagination or the resources to provide:

Stock Exchange/Anxiety, Joana Croft

How nervous are you? Our polarized politics, and amnesia about prior debt ceilings, prohibits prohibits sane, reasoned debate about taxes, light bulbs (!#?!#) and everything in between. This has many people staring at their own ceiling (if they still have one) when they should be sleeping.

Clearly, neither our government, nor the corporations that actually call the shots, has a clue or a dime to get us out of the economic ditch.  We must do it ourselves. That’s okay because grass roots movements are pulsing with creative ideas and energy.

Our myriad crises beg for a new solutions and here’s one: Housing Mixers that introduce alternative housing models that may be more suitable than the solo option that is the norm today. The first mixer is on Tuesday, 7/26,  in collaboration with Transition Rogers Park and Mess Hall‘s X-in-Residence series. A sign language interpreter will be on hand. If you plan to bring children, please RSVP in advance with their age and gender to insure adequate arrangements.

On Thursday, July 28, Herb Fisher will talk about This Golden Moment, the potential to live an abundant and satisfying life by learning to live in cooperation with each other. His forty-plus years practicing real estate law and a extensive cooperative expertise, gives him the long view to see the profound impact of cooperative living. The legendary Jerry Voorhis, said that cooperatively, ordinary people have the ability to do great things.

The rubble of our collapsed economy exposes our brokenness. It presents an opening to live more consciously, responsibly, and responsively to each other. Now is indeed the golden moment to create new and durable systems to meet the real needs of actual people. This requires courage, imagination, and a generosity of spirit that lies within us and that, together, we can call forth.

Photo: Stock Exchange/Missed Opportunities

Everywhere I look, a family or an individual seems to be falling through the cracks, so I usually write about whatever tugs at my heart.

My recent alignment with Sound ConneXions, and Sound ConneXions Chicago, whose goal is to support social entrepreneurs engaging in social innovation, gives me the courage to take on a project that is too daunting to even contemplate as an individual: our housing crisis. I have every expectation that committed roll-up-the-sleeve do-ers, who work tirelessly to make a difference in the world, will show up at every Forum. Sound ConneXions Forums provide a platform to for social entrepreneurs to find each other, to discover common interests and to get to work cleaning up some part of the mess that we slog through every day.

Our housing crisis makes me crazy so that is the newly narrow focus of my effort. My goal is to inform and educate the public about housing alternatives that may be more suitable and supportive for the various stages of life, from just starting out to winding down. Demographic populations that may benefit from looking at housing in a broader context include: older people who don’t need nursing home care but need to be around people for a good portion of the day, single parents, seniors, disabled people, young adults who have aged out of the foster care system, veterans and their families.

Watch for more pixels, stories and clamor to raise the decibel level on housing for families, children, disabled people, veterans and more.

The first Sound ConneXions Chicago Forum is on Saturday, June 26th at Loyola University Chicago’s Water Tower Campus. Please follow this link to sign up. We ask for a$15 donation, payable at the door, to cover the costs of lunch and refreshments. Please sign up at this link so that we know how many people to feed!

For more info: New Community Vision is eager to work with individuals and groups, such as Sound ConneXions, to spawn a movement to think about our social and housing paradigms in a new context. Community gatherings to address our universal challenges are the fertile soil in which durable solutions take root. Please subscribe to this blog and contact us for more information.

Photo: Stock Exchange / Cooties - the silent killer

Working in a chilly corporate environment, with clear distinctions between the people that mattered and the people that didn’t, I came down with that dreaded child hood disease: the cooties. Having left my husband, whom I once dearly loved and thought would be my life partner, I entered the social scene as a 50-something. It’s not nearly as social as when I was a 30-something.

At work, the young women had their own cliques and the people that mattered had theirs too. My beautiful apartment that I love is in a large building where most of the interaction is in the laundry room. The common area is not designed for the casual conversations in which you get to know others and perhaps form friendships. Except for a few groups, most people just go home and close the door. Even though there are many people my age, making friends here feels like drilling a dry well. A sad, druggie, divorced guy was dead for a week before anyone figured out what the odor was. Does it matter if it was an overdose or a suicide?

The net effect was the feeling that no one in my geographic milieu gave a hoot about me – like solitary confinement while carrying on my every day life. Perhaps at the time I was too needy or too overbearing. I knew things weren’t great but I didn’t realize how fragile I had become until my sister visited for a weekend. When our deep conversation popped the lid off the feelings of isolation and ickiness, the diagnosis was indisputable: the cooties.

Two fundamental changes cured me.  I now work among people that I genuinely like and who like me. The humor is reliable, sharp and politically incorrect. It would be a bad environment for sensitive, easily offended people but it’s a great place if you take your humor with salt.

I overcame the the electromagnetic field that surrounds my couch on Sunday mornings to become a regular at the uber fabulous Lake Street Church of Evanston. Being an active member of an intelligent, conscious, committed community feels like a warm embrace in a world that seems cold and is often affected by unbalanced people.

Without the lubricant of casual interaction and camaraderie, people become socially awkward. It’s one of the downsides of being unemployed, of working from home, of working in an indifferent or hostile environment, or of being a stay at home parent where the primary interaction is only with children. People who live with these situations every day probably feel social rust corroding their psyches. Perhaps people are off kilter, like the Nutty guy on the bus, in part because they don’t have enough interaction with people who actually see and care about them. This painful condition responds well to healthy, casual socializing.

The social and housing paradigms that we are accustomed to does not meet the needs of a society under stress. When we had mostly full employment, the illusion of safety, and before we were as fearful as we have become, it seemed to work adequately for most people. Now that we have extreme stress, compounded by an undercurrent of anxiety, the cracks are obvious. The cure is equally obvious: social environments, including housing, that meet our fundamental need to be cared for, to care about others, and to rub shoulders with them every day.

For more info: New Community Vision is working to inform and educate the public about housing alternatives that are affordable, sustainable and engender a community experience that includes healthy inter-dependence and support. Housing models that meet these criteria include cooperatives, cohousing and shared housing. Please subscribe to this blog and contact us for more information.

Bungalow

An odd twist of circumstances led me to live for two months in a bungalow where I shared a kitchen with two other housing units. A Punjabi Indian couple, completing their residencies at local hospitals, lived on the first floor with their beautiful eight-month-old daughter. An engineer lived in the basement apartment, a refugee from the auto industry. Other than his bitterness at having to leave his comfortable Michigan home and family during the week for contract work in Chicago, and having an autistic teenage son, he was a nice enough chap.  I lived on the second floor.

I didn’t relish the disruption but the experience was surprisingly rewarding on many levels. It was proof positive that, even though none of us knew each other, we got along well and it worked fine. Actually choosing and living long term with house mates would certainly change the tenor of the relationships but I was encouraged by the potential of it. The kitchen, of course, was the focal point where we kibitzed over bottles of wine and sampled each others’ dishes. It was far more interesting and palate pleasing than cooking for myself.

As this wrenching economic collapse takes its toll, many people feel uncertain about their jobs if they have one, or getting one if they don’t. The Mortgage Bankers Association reports that mortgages on 4 million homes are 90 days past due or in foreclosure. It anticipates that foreclosure rates will worsen before they improve.

The Center for Housing Policy publication Something’s Gotta Give reported in 2005, before the collapse, that 44.3 percent of families paid over 50% of their income for housing and transportation costs. The consequences are that families cut back on food, medical care and time with their children just to keep a roof over their heads and get to and from work. The housing insecurity of millions gives fresh urgency to consider alternatives.

Interim Landing Places Followed by Durable Long Term Solutions

We urgently need interim housing arrangements to provide safe landing places so that people displaced from their homes can stabilize and figure out workable long term housing. The short and long term solutions will be best met by people coming together for mutual encouragement and tangible support.

Long term, housing cooperatives have the best track record of providing safe, decent and affordable housing for people of modest means and have proven to be more long lasting than many private developments. Indeed, some cooperatives have operated successfully for over forty years. No small part of this success is the opportunity for ownership in a democratically organized corporation in which each housing unit has an equal vote.

Another long term solution could be house sharing, which may work well for some and not for others.  Having lived at various times within my large, Irish Catholic family, two different husbands and assorted roommates, I am a veteran of shared housing, running the gamut from extremely pleasant to downright hellish. Some view with living with others as a one-way ticket to hell. For others, it’s a lifeline. Under the right circumstances, with the right people, it can be a richly rewarding experience. To successfully share a dwelling with others requires that 1) housemates must be compatible; 2) all adults must be on equal footing with no landlord/tenant mentality; 3) the dwelling itself must be suitable, i.e. large enough; 4) there must be a commitment to making it work.

Many people see the downside of living with others without considering the upside. When I envision the potential of house sharing, I see multiple generations selecting each other because they are compatible. Liking someone and being able to live with them are two different things.

The logical place to age

Although aging is the natural consequence of a long life, currently people go to retirement homes, assisted living facilities and eventually to nursing homes because the resources to manage these various stages are beyond our capacity. In an inter-generational household, it would not have to be that way. In a large enough house, the resources to care for ill and aging people could exist within the household. Not everyone would rush off to work  and some people could be at home for large parts of the day. The key to make this palatable is actually liking the people that you live with and practicing the skill of harmonious living, based on clear communication. Theoretically, in a large enough house, if someone requires round the clock nursing, a spare bedroom is a heck of a bargain compared to a nursing home. This can be far more satisfying for all concerned.

The stage is set for a new housing paradigm, whether we are ready for it or not. As we individually and collectively consider our options, joining forces for mutual benefit is the compelling imperative as we witness the breathtaking and heartbreaking changes in this country. Together, we can rise to the challenges that we face. As loners, our options are grim indeed.