Message From Our Board Director Brandon Hines
SHAPING OUR SOCIETY BY BUILDING STRONG COMMUNITIES
I have re-written this article several times since my initial draft. It seems that every day I reflect on how much the world has changed since yesterday’s draft that I have to start over again. The events in Buffalo and now Uvalde seem like a natural progression from a long steady stream of disturbing events. A series of events that both signal and exacerbate the eroding of communities.
We live in a modern society—a society that is evolving quickly and not always for the better. We tend to our daily needs with little control over the ever increasing trauma in the world. It is easy to accept what society provides without much consideration when times are good. Many companies have made ordering things online very convenient or have pushed prices down on many commons goods. As a society we often accept these immediate benefits without much thought about the longer-term impacts to our communities.
We are lucky here in Austin that so many forward thinking people built such a strong community. A community that cares about important issues such as having a healthy environment, providing livable wages, working to improve food security, and pursuing social and economic justice. A community that has built much inertia over the years to work towards solving so many issues. Many of these issues are forever uphill battles and inertia can only carry a community forward uphill for so long. I don’t believe that economics should be the sole basis of a community, however, it is an unavoidable fact that economic pressures can provide a community with great strength or slowly weaken a community over time.
It is easy to get lost in the enormity of it all. So many of us have worked most of our lives just to stay afloat. And many more have faced the real struggles of falling behind. The machine of society is large and can be indiscriminate without strong community influence. I often think about what can I, as an individual, do to affect change. At most, each of us can only make a difference at the margins. However, if enough of us align our energies in the margins, we can have a tremendous collective impact.
I chose to live my values. To me, that means doing what I can when I am able to support the organizations that share my values in an effort to benefit and strengthen our community. Of course, I shop at Wheatsville and volunteer on the board. Wheatsville does so many great things for our community. But it is about much more than Wheatsville. It is about the power of cooperatives.
Cooperatives are, by their very nature, focused on the betterment of the community. People create co-ops to address common needs. Such needs can vary from a desire for having healthy sustainable food, to crafting good beer or, as in the case of many formerly enslaved farmers after the Civil War, because their survival depended on working together and sharing resources†. Cooperatives keep power within the community in terms of the economic multiplier of circulating more money locally as well as by maintaining decision making authority over the operation of cooperatives. Even more, cooperatives build
strong communities.
What can you do strengthen the community? Find more opportunities to support cooperatives. The Austin Cooperative Business Alliance (ACBA) is a great resource to learn more about co-ops here in Austin. Do more of your shopping at Wheatsville. Doing so puts our co-op in a better position to grow our community initiates and support a larger cooperative economy. Do you have a particular set of skills and have time to share? Consider volunteering for one of Wheatsville’s community action partners or any of the other great charitable organizations around town. Would you like to get more directly involved with coops? Run for the Wheatsville, ACBA or any of the other co-op boards. ACBA also provides resources for starting your own cooperative. Above all else, identify what matters to you most and take steps to align your everyday activities to increase your impact and align your efforts within the community. As a strong community we can shape society to be more inclusive and responsive to people’s needs reinforcing the idea that there is strength in diversity and that we are all better together. And, just maybe, we can build a society that does not experience so much needless tragedy.
If you would like to learn more about the history of Black cooperatives, check out “Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice,” by Jessica Gordon Nembhard.