In an earlier blog post, I asked: what might it look like to negotiate our needs (e.g. food, water, housing, clothing, transportation) outside a monetary context? Though in writing this post, I wasn’t able to arrive at a conclusion that precludes money, I did attempt to address this question, leveraging some of our members’ (that’s you!) old posts and exercising imagination abundance when considering the notion of personal security in the age of retirement.
Cooperativizing Real Estate
When imagining my dream retirement scenario, I see myself living in an ecovillage with my partner, my younger sisters, and a dozen of our closest friends and comrades sharing the responsibilities of cooking, cleaning, and other household chores. Indeed, communal living in retirement isn’t so far from our reality today. Many of you have shared similar visions, but feel overwhelmed by the implementation. What does it look like to co-found and invest in a community land trust? What might it look like to build housing and grow food together on shared land? Put simply, is there a way to make groups like EBPREC the norm?
Crowdfunding
When GoFundMe came on the scene in 2010, it was a way to capitalize on the generosity of everyday people to address individual needs in the absence of structural solutions. Today, crowdfunding is a multibillion dollar industry, but not without its critics. Much of the industry relies on designing and relaying a compelling narrative, often perpetuating stereotypes of the poor peoples and denying them voice and nuance by flattening their experiences into poverty porn. But, are there ways to see crowdfunding as a form of reparations? Could we systematically encourage the white and wealthy to make contributions to the retirement savings of their poor BIPOC brethren? Are there ways in which to leverage crowdfunding principles to encourage place-based, equity-oriented, and targeted investments into certain communities? What about community wealth funds, where governance is distributed across the beneficiaries?
Participatory Budgeting
While the previous two imaginings still require monetary capital as an enabling condition for their success, participatory budgeting (PB), to me, feels much more proactive. Originating in Brazil, PB is “a democratic process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives people real power over real money”. Though South Bend, the city where I currently reside, engages residents in the budgeting process, they often do so with a pre-set list of priorities and, ultimately, residents do not have a role in implementation nor is the city accountable to their feedback. The reason PB feels so compelling to me when considering personal security in retirement, I can imagine feeling much less compelled to save if I knew that my local and state government were going to meet my needs as I approach and through my elderhood.
Sharing is Caring: Commoning to Meet our Needs
While many of us have experienced the power of sharing via public libraries, few likely have experiences sharing anything else…which is weird, considering much of what we use doesn’t necessarily require private ownership. When I lived in Baltimore, I worked closely with the Baltimore Community ToolBank and became obsessed with visions of a sharing economy. Consider transportation: how can we meet our needs to get from one place to another in elderhood without needing to have our own car? What if instead of money, we used time-based currency, exchanging hours of our unique skills, talents, and expertise to meet our needs, instead of dollars? Another term to help us better understand this transition to the sharing economy is “commoning”, a term frequently used by David Bollier in his writings.
What does your employer owe you?
Finally, as the recent Director of Research for Beloved Economies, a national narrative change campaign demonstrating the power of transforming work—both as a social institution and practice—as an oft-underutilized lever for greater economic and social change, I often think about what our employers owe us. Particularly in a context where we continue to negotiate our needs in a system of a wage-labor, I almost feel as though it is our employers’ responsibility to support us in achieving personal security. But, beyond a 401(k) match, what else can employers do? The Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), one of the co-founders of this project and platform, provides its employees with a salary above (1.3 times, to be exact) the liveable wage that affords employees the opportunity to save. Other worker cooperatives are figuring out ways to expense worker owner livelihood costs, as business expenses can be tax deductible, much like a traditional retirement plan. Could our employers support us more intentionally to meet our housing needs? What about food and transportation? And our healthcare and caretaking responsibilities, which undoubtedly increase with age?
What about you? How might you creatively meet your basic human needs in your elder age?