“I can offer, but I can’t receive,” lamented Barbara to her Common Security Club in Portland, Oregon.  She was facing a difficult move, alone, and her group was trying to persuade her to accept their help.  She seemed both embarassed, and ashamed of feeling embarassed.

“It takes all five sessions {of the CSC curriculum} to get to the depth of relationship where we’ll examine a feeling like that,” said their facilitator, Jared, revealing a sentiment we often hear from CSC facilitators–the shame we feel in our culture about seeming vulnerable financially, unable to “manage on our own.”

Jared Gardner, a busy organizer in Portland, launched four CSCs in his church. Two of them were comprised almost entirely of unemployed people. By the time his own group had met five times, they were planning tours of local co-housing projects, organizing to fight locally for progressive taxation, and wondering how to bring the rest of their church into the time bank they had created.  All four groups are gathering at the end of this month to connect socially, and then decide how to proceed.

In Boston, another church is experimenting with merging two Common Security Clubs. Both groups have continued long after finishing the curriculum, finding their groups to be a place of refuge in a difficult economy.

Mutual aid on many levels keeps the groups busy.  One member got a lot of advice, as well as ready volunteers, in creating her own business as a personal organizer. Two active seniors have wrangled with their needs for more income, and the desire to keep working as social workers after retirement, in balance with a desire for rest and free time. One of them was persuaded–reluctantly!–to give up her car in favor of a local car-sharing business, saving her $500/month. Contacts, connections and ideas are abundant.  This month members are getting ready to host a workshop to connect the whole community with a city-wide time bank, to further the reach of a budding “alternative economy” they have helped to create.

In Ft Lauderdale, Florida, Reverend Gail Tapscott brought together church members who were terribly affected by the financial crisis, facing unemployment and loss of their homes, with other for whom the crisis was still mainly abstract. This mix led to some interesting connections, and in one case a comfortable homeowner offered space in his house to a father and son who were in serious financial trouble.

“During one meeting we discussed the Starfish story, you know the one, where a man is standing on the beach throwing starfish back into the ocean,” Tapscott related. “Another man, passing by, asks why he’s wasting his time, tells him he can’t possibly make a difference. In response, the man picks up a starfish and throws it back, saying ‘I think I made a difference for that starfish.’  Later that night, the gentleman in our group who had taken in two others told me he was ‘just trying to help a couple of starfish.’”

What if you don’t give your kids the Christmas they deserve? (We know they deserve it because they are wonderful, as all kids are wonderful.) What if they wake up on December 25 at five am and discover that they didn’t get the new Nintendo, the American Girls Doll, this year’s i-whatever?

What if you make Granny mad by saying that you can’t bear to have anymore plastic junk in the house. Are you ready to tell the kids that there’s no Santa, and we need to make the mortgage this month, which is going to be hard since Daddy’s been laid off?

Many of us would really like to simplify the holidays. (Since Christmas is the holiday most victimized by corporate takeover, I’ll concentrate on it here, with the understanding that all our December faith celebrations have received the same treatment.) For many, it’s a question of household economics–it’s simply too expensive to buy every family member a gift, usually several for the children, and then absorb the extra expenses of fancy meals, the tree, and perhaps travel to be with family. The average American household spends an extra $700 in December.

The other reason to rethink the holidays, that is being voiced more and more, is this: It’s simply no fun the way we’re doing it. A month of stressful shopping for adults is compounded by the overall tendency of our culture to schedule all sorts of “special” events in December (holiday parties, school plays and concerts). It all culminates in a frenzy of unwrapping and eating on one day, which is then followed by a lot of cleaning and a terrible confrontation with bills in the month of January.

Rev. Cecilia Kingman of Portland, Oregon, struggles with these issues every year, in a congregation of mixed-classes. Yes, many people want to simplify the holidays, reinstate the primacy of their faith at that time, but can we really offer this solution to those in poverty? What part of Christmas involves addressing people’s real material needs? “{Simplicity at the holidays} is a very good practice. However, it does assume that the participants already have what they need. So I suggest an alternative for households that may be struggling, and in line with the way Christmas used to be celebrated: Give people things they truly need as presents. For example, I’ll be giving one family member some warm boots.”

While some people are able to make family-pacts to reduce or eliminate gift-giving, for many there will be terrific resistance to such a suggestion from both the elders and the youngsters. Older people who consider themselves self-made, have carved out a certain prosperity in their lives, often want to show generosity at the holidays, especially to children.  They may resist the exhortations of their strapped, grown children to “tone it all down”.  Kids, of course, are rabid little consumers by nature.

Here are some suggestions from CSC members around the country, talking about their approach to the holidays:
“I bought everything at the thrift store!”
“We don’t do gifts for adults, only kids.”
“My father wanted to give me something practical, so we agreed he’d take my car to the shop and get it tuned up and repaired. He probably saved me a whole year’s worth of delayed car repairs, as I never have time to deal with this stuff.”
“We’ve all agreed to make only homemade gifts, which are often small offerings of food: Fudge, applesauce, salsa, jams. You pull it out a few months later and it’s like Christmas all over again.”
“I give everybody wool socks in fun colors. It’s become a joke-I’m the sock-auntie.”
“I put aside money from every paycheck for Christmas.  That makes for a much better January!”
“I have freed myself from most of the commercial side of Christmas, gifting only to my nearest and dearest and modestly at that, but still every year the week before Christmas I panic and reconsider—it’s the “did I buy enough?” feeling.”

There are no easy solutions to the puzzle of meaningful holidays in this culture, except to keep your own counsel and offer what you can in the spirit of the season.  Excellent resources exists for those who want to “downsize” Christmas, including Bill McKibben’s book Hundred-Dollar Christmas, and Unplugging the Christmas Machine, by Jo Robinson and Jean Staeheli. On the web, have a look at the Adbusters campaign Buy Nothing Christmas for serious anti-consumption politics. Center for a New American Dream has excellent practical suggestions for simple, cheap, fun holidays.

And for a take on holiday consumerism that’s both fun and thoughtful, rent “What Would Jesus Buy?” about the Reverend Billy and his travelling choir of anti-consumer evangelists. Show it to your mom.

By Grace Lee Bogs

The greatest human need facing the American people is to stop shirking responsibility and to start assuming responsibility. This is what Jimmy Boggs wrote in 1963 in The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Workers Notebook, which has just been reissued with a new introduction by me and commentaries by six other Detroit activists.

This human need was not so clear in 1963 because the issues then were not so urgent. Global warming was not threatening to extinguish all life on Planet Earth. Millions of people were not jobless because of the economic meltdown and increasing de-industrialization. In 1963 it still made some sense to look to Washington because politicians had not become so dependent on corporations for their election.

Fortunately there are growing signs that the American people are waking up to this reality. Last week I described some of the grassroots steps, like community gardens or neighbors joining to install solar panels, that Americans are taking to slow down global warming,

Since then I have learned from an article by Chuck Collins (Common Dreams, Oct. 9) that CommonSecurityClubs (CSC) are forming around the country. As the economic crisis reminds us of our vulnerabilities, an increasing number of Americans recognize that we must take responsibility by building authentic security and demanding accountability.

Participants, he says, have been able to reduce anxiety about our finances  and see the abundance that still exists in our communities. What weve discovered by coming together is that we cant face the changing economy in isolation.

CSCs bring together people from a variety of backgrounds: Secular groups, such as community organizations, unions, and neighborhoods, and religious organizations and congregations. www.commonsecurityclub.org

A CSC provides:

-A common ground where people explore the challenges of personal security in a changing world;

-Information to learn the root causes of the ecological and economic challenges we face;

- Opportunities to explore ways to strengthen our economic and personal security through shared action and mutual aid;

- An opportunity to strengthen community by building solid relationships.

CSCs include three basic components. The first component focuses on learning and understanding the larger economic forces at work through popular education tools, shared readings, and videos. Mutual Aid and Local Action are explored through stories, a workbook, and web-based resources that allow participants to reflect on what makes them secure. The Social Action component explores issues that require people to work together to engage in the democratic process to initiate state, national, and global transformations.

In the Oct. 2 SOJOURNERS, Collins reports on the success CSCs have had in congregations around the country. One pastor reflected that facilitating a club was the most meaningful thing she had ever done as a minister: There is something powerful when people [feel] they are in charge and facing the economic and ecological future with open eyes.

Six months into the process, existing clubs have identified concrete benefits, including overcoming isolation and shame through Reality Support Groups. Congregations have started small local actions with unemployment support groups, establishing bartering exchanges, and forging get out of debt pacts.

Ideally, these groups foster human relationships that provide the revolution of minds and hearts that Jimmy Boggs speaks of in The American Revolution. These critical connections provide the foundation necessary to begin the radical revolution of values or cultural evolution advocated by MLK.

CSCs provide the opportunity to revisit a forgotten idea, the idea that we can do for ourselves. In this post-industrial epoch, we must learn that doing for ourselves means transforming our conception of ourselves to mean, not the me of an exploitative capitalistic culture, but ourselves as defined by us, the we of our extended families, our community, our hood.

In doing so, we can begin the two-sided transformation necessary to evolve past the paranoia and fear of losing our jobs to the post-industrial transformative mindset of sharing our work.

Originally published in the Michigan Citizen on Dec. 10, 2009.

By Chuck Collins

In the Boston neighborhood around our church, the wreckage of the economic meltdown is still palpable. Foreclosed houses sit empty, metal grates shutter businesses and the view toward the future is anxious.

Many of my fellow congregants have watched their job security vanish and savings evaporate. Grown children have moved in with their parents. Parents have doubled up with their grown children. And the demand for our church’s food pantry has outstripped donations.

Last winter, 60 congregants gathered in our parish hall to try to find a way, together, to confront these issues. There were tears of shame and deep expressions of fear.

We shared a reading from the theologian Walter Brueggemann suggesting the economic crisis was a call to move from “autonomy to covenantal existence,” from “anxiety to divine abundance.” He stirred visions of an early Christian church, putting our trust in God’s hands, pledging to hold wealth in common. But what did this mean in hyper-individual Mammon America?

Part of our church response was to form a “common security club,” an approach being piloted at several congregations in the Boston area at the same time. Our club is part-study group, part-mutual aid, and part-social action — a way to hold one another, spiritually and practically, as we face uncertain times. Fifteen of us have met twice monthly since January. Another club formed out of church members over the summer.

With very little publicity, a mini-movement of these “common security clubs” has formed in churches of varying denominations around the U.S.

At each meeting, participants learn a bit more about the economic crisis, by watching videos, reading articles, sharing what we know. We’ve strategized over personal budgets, shared tips to live more frugally, and helped our unemployed members network about jobs and health insurance.

Members have made pacts to get out of debt and cut up credit cards as ritual. One Boston club did a “weatherization barn-raising,” helping one another insulate their New England homes for the winter in order to save hundreds of dollars in fuel costs. We have bartered for services among ourselves swapping yard work for childcare, computer skills for language lessons.

At all our meetings, we gather around a potluck - a manifestation of “loves and fishes” abundance if there ever was one.

I recently gave a presentation about our common security club to a group of ministers and lay leaders.

“Isn’t this what church should be?” asked a pastor from Washington state. “When did pastoral become so excessively focused on spiritual?”

There are probably many answers to that question. A generation of “you are on your own” economics has chipped away at our mutual aid skills. We understand charity, but reciprocity is very hard. Maybe this is an Anglo church problem. My friend Donald, a lifelong Baptist, informed me, “To survive, our Black church tradition has always had mutual aid associations. It was impossible to separate the pastoral spiritual from material economic necessity.”

Our group has recognized the value of practicing with the small things, simple bartering and hospitality. Even with the shared experience of an economic disaster, most of us still feel deeply ashamed that we haven’t figured out economic security on our own.

We may not become like Apostles in the book of Acts -renouncing materialism in favor of wealth held in common. But we can go much further in holding one another in prayer and drawing from the wealth and skills and experience we have together. Maybe that’s what church is?

Chuck Collins is a member of First Church in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of “The Moral Measure of the Economy” (Orbis). Learn more about Common Security Clubs.

Originally published in the On Faith blog at www.washingtonpost.com on Nov. 2, 2009.

Our National Fear of Neediness

Jared Gardner represents our west-coast “hub” of Common Security Club organizing, having been responsible for getting four Portland groups up and running.  I was talking to Jared last week about the groups when he mentioned an issue that’s a recurring theme among CSC facilitators. One of his group members needed to move house and was trying to rebuff the offers of help from her Common Security Club. “I’ll manage…it’s not a big deal…I’ve done it on my own before.”

Does this sound familiar? Do you hear yourself saying it? Is it really hard to ask for help? Humiliating? Worrisome? Does it make you feel like you are “in debt” to someone?

Jared had the good sense to explore the issue, and the group talked about the difficulty of being on the receiving end of generosity. “It takes about five sessions of meeting with a group to get to where we can speak that openly,” Jared commented.

Yet most of us love to give.  If we’ve grown up in a religious tradition we are often adept at charitable giving and steeped in a theology that encourages it.  On the darker, flip side, we don’t want to be like those people who need to ask for help: the ones who come to the food pantry, or need to go to a homeless shelter for their Thanksgiving meal.

Katherine Ellin, who founded the successful Cambridge time-bank called Time Trade Circle, feels that this is one of the main barriers people have to overcome in order to benefit from a time-banking. At the introductory sessions she holds to welcome new members, she inevitably hears two things: “I don’t have much to offer,” and “it’s hard to ask for help.”  It’s clear that we need to stretch our “mutual aid muscles”. Katherine notes that the main benefit of time-banking is social, not financial, so overcoming your own “neediness” is what leads to richer social connections.

Katherine has two simple answers for the person who feels awkward asking for help: Remember that you, or anyone else, can always say no.  Remember that in receiving help you are providing someone else a sense of self-worth, and an opportunity for generosity.

Another friend, Adnan, tried to start a CSC in his Boston church and found the effort completely blocked by the impulse to charity.  His congregation strongly resisted the idea that they should put their energy into helping each other, preferring instead to concentrate on the “needy” outside their church.  “I don’t mean to be critical,” Adnan commented, “but this is a totally American problem. As a Turkish Muslim I had a hard time comprehending it.”

We need to get our mutual aid muscles in shape, and this is one of the objectives of the Common Security Club movement. What CSCs are helping develop is reciprocity, as an alternative to charity. We have a hard time receiving help.  We objectify those in need, when we all are in need, though our needs are different.  When we learn to accept the vulnerability of being a recipient, our social world can expand in ways both unpredictable and wonderful.

By Katrina Vanden Heuval

Chuck Collins, co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, describes the difference between this financial crisis and those of the past.

“The risk of this economic crisis is that people stay isolated, hunkered down and afraid,” Collins says. “What’s different from the serious economic crises of the past is the much greater potential for fragmentation and isolation–because we’ve lived through a couple generations of ‘you are on your own’ economics. So the idea that we can trust any kind of shared response is broken.”

That’s why in January 2009 the Institute for Policy Studies piloted Common Security Clubs to break through the isolation, and bring people together to learn, help one another increase their economic security, and ultimately take political action. The clubs are not an effort to turn away from government, in fact they are in part an effort to develop the skills and solidarity needed to advocate for a government that work for the common good.

“It’s a way to organize the vast, anxious, unconnected public,” Collins says. “It’s really important to get people together, away from their isolation, and the sense that they should figure this out on their own. Learning together–people learn the economy is not a weathered event here, people caused this economic crisis, this could have been prevented. Now we have to get active to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

There are now over one hundred clubs, averaging fifteen to twenty people, across the nation–with clusters in Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Maine, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. Over 900 groups or individuals have requested the facilitator guide and other club materials but IPS doesn’t have the resources to track everyone. Some religious and community groups have used the materials to go in their own direction.

“It’s sort of taken off and has a life of it’s own,” Collins says.

The clubs are all founded on three key principles: learning together, mutual aid, and social action. Every two weeks a round-up of good learning resources is circulated to participating clubs. It might include anything from a good Bill Moyers’ interview or a Jonathan Schell piece in The Nation, to a story of a rent party with a band or an effort to weatherize one another’s homes to cut fuel costs, to ideas for political action. Members have helped one another network for jobs, strategize personal budgets, and find ways to be more frugal. They barter services–for example, swapping yard work for childcare or computer skills for language lessons. They have lobbied Congress on legislation to stop foreclosures, protect consumers, and rein in Wall Street.

“In a way it’s very simple, but at the same time it’s kind of radical,” Collins says. “It’s basically people coming together, learning together [about this crisis], and mutual aid. And then people are much more eager and engaged to be part of social action–they see the limits of what they can do at the local level.”

It’s that combination of radical simplicity that is so appealing. And as radical as it might seem first glance, it does have roots in our recent history. Certainly our ancestors, and immigrants, have relied on helping one another, building community, in order to lead productive, secure lives. Collins also speaks of the Depression, when people formed sewing circles, threw rent parties, started soup kitchens.

“Now, more people are disconnected,” he says. “We don’t live near each other, the exurban community–there is a foreclosed house, next to a house where people are doubled, tripled up in it, next to another foreclosed house. People are at home watching TV. There used to be more connection between people–our mutual aid muscles are a little out of shape. We need to get them back in shape. It’s a necessary precondition for a healthy democracy.”

One of the most appealing aspects of these clubs is that many are multi-generational. In fact, a special youth edition of the facilitator’s guide was developed drawing on the work of Tamara Draut. Collins notes that it is people beginning their careers–in their twenties and thirties–and people in their mid-fifties, who are “really getting clobbered” in this crisis. He describes the coming together of older and younger people in his own church-based club in Boston.

“Several women lived through the Depression,” he says. “They have all kinds of skills that the younger people in our group are hungry for–how to preserve food, how to do canning, how to mend clothing, and prepare simple, low-cost meals that are healthful. They have all kinds of domestic arts skills that society stopped valuing. Our younger people are excited to learn from them.”

Once the clubs develop trust as a group, and begin helping one another, it opens opportunities for political action and pressing for policy changes–whether fighting foreclosures in the neighborhood, advocating for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, or beginning to take a new look at the global economy.

“You can’t really have a solidarity economy if you don’t have an experience of solidarity–meaning an injury to you really matters to me,” Collins says. “Once people experience a sense of agency–a sense of power–around the economy, it will lend itself to greater global justice policies.”

In this downsized age of “you’re on your own” inequality, where the economy and political power seem rigged for the wealthy and stacked against everyone else, this movement to declare that we will no longer accept isolation and the status quo–or a government that maintains it–is invaluable.

“In the end, it’s not really that complicated–it’s getting people together,” Collins says. “And the most important thing is the sense that people feel of being held by a group–that they will not fall. There are people watching their back–people who are thinking about them every day. In our insecure society a lot of people are afraid of falling through the cracks and that no one will care.”

Originally published on Editor’s Cut, a blog at TheNation.com.

Boston Community Organizers Fight Foreclosure and Eviction—Successfully!

In a Boston neighborhood, a nonprofit called City Life/Vida Urbana is fighting foreclosure and eviction, home by home.  Staffed largely by volunteers, including lawyers, organizers and ordinary homeowners who have been threatened with home loss, CLVU has one of the most successful rates of retaining homes for both tenants and owners in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods.
How do they do it? By shaming the banks. 

Tenant Organizer Steve Meacham explains the tactics. Boston is the only place in the country where banks are selling homes back to their owners post-foreclosure at their actual value. The process of pressuring the banks to do the right thing begins with a weekly Bank Tenant Association Meeting, where those threatened with home loss gather and are counseled and encouraged to advocate for themselves by the CLVU staff, and volunteer lawyers. They learn their rights, develop solidarity, and are taught about the political nature of the problem, so that they don’t blame themselves. Protests and public actions are planned.  The weekly meetings of the Bank Tenant Association are now often as large as 100 people.

Meacham talks about creating the “moral space for people to feel like they have the right to resist {eviction}.”  His organization has an extraordinary track-record: 95% of the tenants who come to them for assistance are not evicted, while just the opposite is true for those who receive no help.  “Faced with a combination of long drawn-out legal defense and public protest, the banks are very often choosing to negotiate and settle with us,” says Meacham.

When CLVU threatens a public protest, called an Eviction Blockade, the owner, tenants and supporters risk arrest to call attention to the eviction. Local politicians begin calling the bank (owner of the foreclosed property) to encourage them to negotiate and avoid the bad publicity.  Most of the time, a deal is made and the residents get to stay in the home. Increasingly, banks have been willing to negotiate deal with former owners to sell them back their properties at their real value—which is usually about 35% of the loan value.
Watch Steve and his team of staff, volunteers and tenants go through the process of defending homes here on Bill Moyer’s Journal {link here}.

By Sam Pizzigati

In closely knit communities, people care about each other and help each other, too. But healthy “social fabrics,” as the expression goes, can tear. Inequality can tear them. The wider the income gaps between us, the less we share in common, the less we care about those around us.

Over time, in a deeply unequal society, we come to feel almost totally on our own — and unprotected. Our society becomes a place where people don’t help each. They fear each other.

This past summer, many Americans saw that fear — in TV footage of angry protestors at congressional “town hall” meetings — and wondered whether our deeply divided society is sliding toward a future where hateful demagogues are essentially calling the shots.

But small bands of other Americans weren’t wondering and worrying. They were busily building an infrastructure for an alternate future. The building block for this infrastructure: the “Common Security Club.”

This fledgling Common Security Club organizing, after spending the last nine months pilot-testing and fine-tuning mobilizing materials and strategies, is now ratcheting up to a new and higher level of activity.

Local Common Security Clubs have already started up in over four dozen communities. The clubs typically bring from 15 to 20 people together for face-to-face sessions where they can grapple with their personal financial stresses, learn more about why our economy isn’t working, and explore what people can do, through mutual aid and shared action, to increase our economic security.

“It’s important we learn together,” says Chuck Collins, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good and an organizer of the Common Security Club network. “We ceded too much power to the experts — and now it’s time for us to think for ourselves.”

Common Security Clubs are drawing participants from a variety of sources. Some have formed out of church congregations or union locals, others from neighborhoods.

To help all these groups get up and running, a small national staff, assembled by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Massachusetts-based Grassroots Policy Project, has prepared a facilitator’s manual and made all sorts of other resource materials available.

What are the clubs doing? Their efforts vary.

In the spirit of mutual aid, clubs are helping people deal with immediate personal crises — like foreclosures. They’re also raising issues around long-term family financial planning, through a club network relationship with Vicki Robin and Monique Tilford, co-authors of Your Money or Your Life, a widely respected program that helps people rethink how they relate to money matters.

These mutual-aid activities, says club organizer Andrée Collier Zaleska, are helping create “tremendous energy for local and community responses.”

But the clubs take that energy further.

“We can’t ignore,” says Zaleska, “how larger economic policy failures wrecked the economy — and the need for ordinary citizens to weigh in on the direction of future economic policy.”

Local Common Security Clubs are starting to do that weighing in. They’re campaigning, for instance, to beat back the Wall Street blitz against the proposed national Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

The club network currently extends from Massachusetts, where the first club formed in Boston, to Washington State, and the press is just beginning to take notice. Organizers see a steady expansion ahead. Want to learn more — and maybe start a Common Security Club within your neighborhood or organization? The Common Security Club Web site covers all the basics.

The current recession, club organizers note, will eventually fade. But the economic ground beneath us has shifted. We can’t return, they note, to the cheap energy and unlimited fossil fuels that used to “grow” our economy — and we don’t want to return to the “bubble” economics that grew our vast inequalities of income and wealth and triggered last fall’s crash.

“We need to prepare ourselves and our communities,” sums up organizer Chuck Collins, “for more fundamental changes and a new economic model.”

Too Much is published by the Council on International and Public Affairs, a nonprofit research and education group founded in 1954. Office: Suite 3C, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017. E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org.

By Chuck Collins

When the financial world hit full-blown crisis mode last fall, it seemed there was little for ordinary people to do but helplessly watch their savings and their jobs melt away, victims of risky speculation by a poorly regulated industry.

But in the midst of the meltdown, people throughout the U.S. were joining with their neighbors to weather the economic crisis. Last winter, more than 50 Common Security Clubs formed in communities around the country: a mini-movement of people coming together in religious congregations, community centers, and union halls to help each other understand and cope with the the collapsing economy. The clubs soon moved past the goal of simply weathering the crisis and began to work toward reforms—both nationally and in their communities—that would prevent a repeat of the devastation.

Responding to the flood of fear and isolation in the immediate aftermath of the collapse, organizers  used the free facilitator’s guide developed by the Common Security Club network to design mutual aid exchanges, educational events, and even worship services as a response to financial instability.

The clubs’ original goals were to learn together about the causes of the economic crisis, to build networks of mutual support within communities, and to engage in social action to press for changes in economic policy in order to prevent future economic meltdowns. Six months later, club members are reporting a number of other benefits, as well.

Overcoming isolation and shame

We can’t underestimate the value of breaking down the isolation and shame that many of us feel facing this economic upheaval alone. Even though there has been a widely shared experience of economic meltdown, many people still blame themselves for circumstances beyond their control. By educating ourselves about the root causes of the crisis, clubs are able to devote time to developing productive solutions rather than self-blame.

We need “Reality Support Groups”

Recent news coverage about the crisis includes rosy predictions that the economy is rebounding. One member of a Common Security Club described her club as a “reality support group” because members unflinchingly look at the real signs of the times. Unemployment is still climbing, people are losing their houses, poverty is deepening. The economic meltdown wasn’t just the result of a few bad actors, but of a deeper system failure. The experts, politicians and media all failed to keep a critical eye on the economy. For many members of Common Security Clubs, this is one of the reasons it is important that we learn together. We ceded too much power to the experts—and now it is time for us to think for ourselves. What is real in the economy? What is real wealth and what is phantom wealth? We don’t need to be experts to begin to trust our common sense judgment about what will be good for the economy.

Getting our mutual aid muscles back in shape

After two generations of “you are on your own” economics, it is really hard for people to ask for and receive help from their neighbors. We understand charity, but genuine reciprocity is harder. This is less true in some communities of color and among new immigrants that depend on strong mutual support networks to survive. But for many communities and congregations, we need practice in mutual aid. One lesson is to start small with bartering exchanges, unemployment support groups, and “get out of debt” pacts.

Common security clubs have helped members network about jobs, strategize personal budgets, and find ways to be more frugal. Several clubs have done “weatherization barn-raisings,” helping one another insulate their homes for the winter in order to save hundreds of dollars in fuel costs. Some have bartered for services among themselves, swapping yard work for childcare or computer skills for language lessons.

Taking National action

Once people start looking at things they can do together, there is tremendous energy for local and community responses. Yet we can’t ignore that larger economic policy failures actually wrecked the economy, or that now is the time for ordinary citizens to weigh in on the direction of future policy. How can we ensure that stimulus funds will reach our communities and create good jobs? How can we push back against the powerful Wall Street interests that are limiting health care or trying to undermine basic financial oversight?

Clubs have recently lobbied Congress to pass legislation to stop foreclosures, protect consumers, and rein in the unregulated financial operators on Wall Street. They have transitioned from offering support to taking action.

Once there is trust, there are few limits

For clubs that have been together for several months, there are wonderful benefits. People are able to share financial information and challenges at a deeper and more useful level. The group develops a shared understanding of the economic system that informs social action.

These clubs have been a place where we hold each other as we face change together. It is a place where we both take responsibility for our own complicity in the economic crisis —perhaps with blind trust in experts or borrowing beyond our means. But these clubs are also a foundation for increased social action to press for a solidarity economy that works for everyone.

Today, they seem more relevant than ever. Two million more people lost their jobs this year. While politicians and pundits fixate on the stock market’s rebound as a sign of recovery, ordinary folks—who know first-hand how vulnerable we still are—are recognizing the urgent need to come together at a local level to take care of one another.

Chuck Collins wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chuck is a member of a common security club in Boston, Mass and has helped coordinate a network of clubs. He’s also a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank. To learn more about Common Security Clubs, visit www.commonsecurityclubs.org. A different version of this article appeared in Sojourners.

By Chuck Collins

Earlier this year, I wrote an article in Sojourners about Common Security Clubs: a mini-movement of people coming together in churches, community centers, and union halls to help each other understand and cope with the economic crisis.