Reclaiming investment: investing back in building community
… A basic of building community is investment.
People need to feel invested in order for the work to continue. If everything is free, the work is devalued. People need to see that volunteering time to community building – and ultimately they must make time as one must make time for caring for oneself and those one is responsible for – is the only way to allow this to happen in any sustainable way.
People need to recognize they are movers shakers and healers in their own right. This is the counter narrative that is essential. It borders the economic reclamation of labor – emotional particularly – that remains as invisible as women’s labor and the stolen labor that built these civilizations we are bound to contractually at birth.
The social contract may be a peonage for most but we need to see we can resist the narratives that drive us forward into living desperately.
We don’t have to and we mustn’t.