Matt Birkhold
“Someone’s knocking on the door,” I tell Myrtle Thompson-Curtis, the short, brown skinned co-founder of Feedom Freedom Growers. “Hey Barbara.” Myrtle says as she invites her in. “I have some pizza and some eggs. You want me to put them in the refrigerator?” Barbara asks. “Yeah, that’s fine,” Myrtle replies. “Thank you,” They say to each other as Barbara leaves. Myrtle then says to me, “She’ll go out and get her kale, bell peppers, garlic, and anything else she needs from the garden,” It’s clear that this exchange is a regular occurrence.
Barbara just met her need for fresh vegetables without going to the grocery store or to a farmers market. She likely got the eggs from the store, but their cost paled in comparison to what the produce you’d have cost that same store. Feedom Freedom Growers, an urban agricultural project on the east side of Detroit, literally makes people less dependent on the economy to meet their material needs for food because they make grocery stores—and the mass produced food they sell—less necessary.
Community self-reliance (CSR) is a community’s ability to meet its material and/or nonmaterial needs through collective efforts and resources in ways that make it less dependent on the currently existing economy. Less dependence on the economy doesn’t mean that they don’t engage with it. Less dependence means that people have an increased ability to meet their material needs for things like health care, food, housing, water, and electricity—as well as their nonmaterial needs for things like community and relationships—with less need for money.
When people need money less, they can be freed from relationships to money and work that force us to neglect our nonmaterial needs because we to have to meet your material needs for survival. Community self-reliance gives people room to follow our hearts, spend more time on relationships, and make our nonmaterial needs as important as our material needs. Community self-reliance literally allows us to exist differently.
CSR is happening all over. In Kingston, NY, O+ has a clinic and health care exchange where a mechanic without health insurance can exchange one hour of mechanic services for an annual physical from an insured physician. In West Philadelphia, people can fix their homes without ever buying a tool by participating in the West Philadelphia Tool Library. In Brooklyn, NY, the Brooklyn Microgrid is allowing individuals and businesses to meet their material need for electricity through a solar powered, community controlled, energy sharing system. Community self-reliance is allowing people in these various places to meet their material needs for health care, food, home repairs, electricity, and heat without being forced to spend a dime.
Imagine if all these projects existed in one neighborhood. That neighborhood would no longer need grocery stores, the utility company, home depot, or health insurance yet still have the food, health care, electricity and ability to repair housing that they need. As the people organizing and maintaining these projects continued to connections, building relationships, and learning from their experiences, new patterns could become new systems and whole new culture could emerge. As this culture and economy attracted others it could grow to the point of being able to replace our current economy and culture.
By teaching us to exchange differently, these systems could also teach us to exist differently.
