Thanks to our studious and charming intern Evan Easterbrooks-Dick, we were able to spend part of the summer researching the specific economic issues that effect young people (between the ages of the 18 and 30, approximately).  Unlike any previous generation, young people today are leaving school with tremendous burdens that affect the success of their careers and personal lives.

The “debt for diploma” system means that college grads are amassing student loans to make it through college. The average student loan debt is $20,000 for college graduates, with many graduates carrying a great deal more than that. There are few entry-level jobs that pay well enough to allow former students to address this debt while also saving for a home, and getting equipped for adult life. Then having a kid or two sets you way back, and so many couples delay it. Life can begin to seem like something that’s always about to get started, as soon as the loans are paid off and you get that better job…

Older folks often berate the younger generations for their lack of thrift and high expectations for immediate rewards after college. While there may be some truth in that, they could benefit from checking out the CSC curriculum piece on the”risk shift” of the last 40 years (detailed in the Facilitator’s Guide). The Great Generation and the Baby Boomers enjoyed social protections that have been deliberately withdrawn under recent conservative governments. A little historical context helps us all to shift the blame away from the younger generations.

Evan’s youth, and his experiences as a student at Tufts University, helped him create a version of the Common Security Club Facilitator’s Guide that is geared towards young people.  Some of his primary sources were Tamara Draut’s excellent book Strapped, and the research of the Demos Foundation on student loan debt, and the exploitative tactics that credit card companies use to hook students into overspending, before they have a mature understanding of their financial lives.

If you work with young people or students, or are in this age bracket and would like to start a CSC with your peers, please request the Special Youth Edition of the Facilitator’s Guide. Write to Andree@commonsecurityclub.org

Ramadan in Dunkin Donuts

This story comes from Adnan Onart, a Turkish Muslim living in Boston, Massachusetts, who is a member of the Common Security Club Network. He and his wife are active members of a Unitarian-Universalist congregation where, he says, they can best live out their Muslim faith. He recites his poem, “Ramadan in Dunkin Donuts,” on this seventh day of Ramadan.

A Midwestern Church Steps Up to the Plate

Michael Greenman seemed a little amused at the question of why he organized his church around the needs of its own community just after the “economic meltdown” of 2008. “I’m an activist. I saw a need and nobody was addressing it.”

First Church Unitarian Universalist in Columbus, Ohio formed “CommUUnity in Challenging Times” to help people through crises of health care, job loss, housing and finances that resulted from the crisis. Every Sunday after the service, volunteers from the community staff tables to offer the professional advice of doctors, lawyers and other professionals to community members in need. The church’s website FirstUUColumbus.org features a substantial list of services and providers that is updated regularly. And about every three months the church hosts a community fair with more extensive offerings of help and expert advice. The church has hosted a clothing swap, provided expert foreclosure assistance, healthcare information and job assistance. Many other programs are being considered, including barter programs, help with food and menu planning, workshops on resume writing and job skills, and a food coop or CSA.

Greenman writes in an article published in the Unitarian Universalist Ohio-Meadville District’s Newsletter, “We asked ourselves: “What is the role of our community, our church, in helping to mitigate the impact of what is surely to come to many of us? As we began discussing possible roles we realized that in this situation we have an opportunity: we could identify and provide training, services, and support from both our own resources and those available from various organizations to help us move through difficulties in such a way that we emerge, stronger, healthier, fulfilled, and both environmentally and economically sustainable. The time has come for major societal change that will hopefully pre vent us from ever again falling back into situations of recurring booms and busts brought about by unsustainable economic, environmental and societal patterns.”

While the work of the Columbus church is impressive in its scale (the church has 700 members and two ministers), it’s a good example of the community support happening in many churches in these difficult times.

Any group of people represents a vast array of resources and knowledge.  Common Security Clubs are a tool that can help us tap into these for mutual aid and action, as well as the intimacy that comes from revealing parts of our private selves to others.
For more information about the work of this church, see their website at FirstUUColumbus.org.

While many Clubs took the summer off, we were busy doing outreach that has led to a lot of new relationships. Vicki Robin and Monique Tilford, co-authors of Your Money or Your Life, stopped in for a workshop we gave on the Common Security Club at the Jamaica Plain Forum in June, and charmed our audience!

We’ve got three new Clubs forming out of that event, thanks in part to vibrant Vicki, who wears purple and a flower in her hair, and charming and grounded Monique.

Chuck and I met with these dynamic women the next day and we all shared stories.  Out of that came a productive new collaboration.

For those of you who have not encountered Your Money or Your Life yet, have a look at the new session we created here to introduce this great program. YMOYL is an intensive program for scrutinizing the way you spend both your time and your money, in order to bring them in line with your true values. It’s been amazingly effective for both individuals and groups for almost twenty years now. We look forward to introducing our Clubs to the YMOYL program as a way of deepening their work.

The Latest…

Welcome to the Common Security Club blog! If you sign up for our RSS feed, you’ll get a report on our activities, and those of Clubs around the country, about twice a week. If you prefer not to receive more email–we understand–you can check this website anytime you want to hear what we’re up to.

Your bloggers are Andrée Zaleska, coordinator of the Common Security Club project, and Chuck Collins, project director. For the record, we work for the Institute for Policy Studies, where this project is housed, but there are many other organizations that have contributed to developing Common Security Clubs, including Grassroots Policy Project, On the Commons and….

Chuck, a senior scholar at IPS, will be weighing in with his 30 years of expertise on the economy, wealth and inequality, and fair taxation. Andrée, a community organizer with a background in teaching and writing, will be relating the stories coming out of our Clubs–stories of the people coping with the new economy, evolving and reviving mutual aid strategies to solidify their communities, and taking action to create a better economy for all.

We look forward to a dialogue with you, and are always happy to hear your stories and comments! You can post comments here, or email them directly to Andrée at andree@commonsecurityclub.org

Best wishes to you and your community,

Andrée

Initiative positions self as national model for troubled times

By David Taber

If anyone is looking for a neighborhood where aspirations to mutual aid and barter, community building and political aid and advocacy might have some traction, they could do worse than Jamaica Plain.

A new initiative being undertaken with support from the JP-based New England branch of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)—a left-leaning national think tank—is looking to bottle those ideas and export them across the US as a response to the ongoing recession.

The notion is to form what it is calling Common Security Clubs (CSCs)—groups of about 20 people who meet on a regular basis to support each other through hard times, learn about what is happening with the economy and potentially do organizing and advocacy work.

JP residents who are participating in the first pilot group say the biggest impact on their lives has been the organization of bartering and timeshare programs. One club member, Alta McDonald, said she exchanged a home-cooked meal for a PowerPoint tutorial.

IPS also sponsors the local JP Forum, an ongoing lecture series hosted at the Unitarian Universalist Church on the corner of Eliot and Centre streets

The first “guinea pig” CSC group started eight months ago in JP, said CSC initiative organizer Andrée Zaleska. It utilized a five-week curriculum—developed by IPS and the Cambridge-based Grass Roots Policy Project to explore topics like: “Bubble economics, phantom wealth and other dimensions of the economic crisis,” and “the ecological context of the economic meltdown,” as well as “recogniz[ing] community wealth and assets as fundamental to our security,” according to a 135-page facilitators guide developed for the initiative.

“We have been sleepwalking for a couple of generations ecologically and economically,” Chuck Collins, head of the IPS New England office, told the Gazette.

One goal of the CSC initiative, he said, is to encourage people to educate themselves about what has happened to the economy.

The facilitator’s guide does not pull any punches in the analysis it presents. “First, we believe that the financial crisis will worsen in the coming year and our personal economic security and that of millions of our neighbors will further erode…Because of the depth of our economic and ecological challenges, we don’t believe it is possible to return to the familiar model of economic growth and recovery.”

Despite dire predictions and complex economics lessons, Zaleska said, the first group has so far functioned on a fairly nuts-and-bolts level. “It’s more of an aid group and a support group” for people who are feeling the pinch, she said.

JP resident Catherine Baker told the Gazette she used the group to help her start a small business—a “decluttering and organizing service” called A Room Of One’s Own.

After the group got through it’s five initial sessions, “We began documenting our needs and the things we could offer,” for mutual aid and barter, Baker said.

“I offered to help deal with organizational challenges and clutter,” And the four people she was able to help gave her extra experience, references and an opportunity to take photographs of her work, she said.

“I am a senior citizen interested in getting together with other people [who are trying] to cope with the downturn,” she said. “I lost some money in the market. For me, it was to see if there were ways I could live better on less.”

McDonald, who is 75, said she appreciates that the club is a “very social group. There are people in their 30s and up, living a variety of lifestyles. We have a potluck dinner before every meeting. I appreciate the fellowship in that kind of thing.”

McDonald said there are members of the group interested in doing advocacy around things like state and federal budget issues and funding for public schools, but, “After working as a social worker for 50 years, I tend not to get excited about social actions.”

She said she personally found the group’s support helpful during a brief scare when she thought she was going to lose a small stipend she earns working at an after school program in the South End. “We were able to get Americorps funding. It’s not a lot of money, but it takes the edge off the situation,” she said.

Collins said he sees getting those types of social patterns entrenched as the first step in the new type of recovery the CSC initiative envisions. “All these people who are isolated economy-wise aren’t going to be interested in advocacy until their personal needs are addressed,” he said.

“People were a little more interdependent back a couple of generations. The thing that is exciting to me is the concept of preparing. If people are isolated and afraid they are susceptible to demagoguery… and scapegoating,” he said.

Alexa Bradely of the Grass Roots Policy Project said it is early yet to tell if the CSC model will take off nationally, “Hopefully the network will grow larger…The scale is unclear yet…but a national network of people focused on our political and political economic life would really make us way more secure,” she said.

Zaleska said that, in addition to the pilot group, two more CSC groups are likely to start in the coming months, and one has started in West Roxbury. Nationally, she said, groups are forming or have formed in San Diego; Edmonds, Wash.; Richmond, Va.; Portland, Ore.; Northampton, Mass.; Albany, N.Y.; and New York City.

There are “many others that we’ve lost touch with, including a whole network of Midwestern Episcopalians who had the model presented to them as part of a church-leadership training workshop,” she said in an e-mail.

This was originally published in the JP Gazette on August 27, 2009. Linked from the JP Gazette online.