The Economics of Trust: Resource Pooling - Action Lab #6

As we face growing societal instability, from rising costs of living to unpredictable economic shifts, our default strategy is a massive vulnerability: trying to survive alone, with whatever money we can individually scrape together. But as we are exploring through our three-month Collective Courage community inquiry, history offers a better blueprint. When conventional systems failed them, marginalized communities built their own safety nets. From mutual aid societies and Caribbean sou-sous to Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm, they proved that getting through hard times is a group project. The real currency they traded in was trust. Most of us have never practiced this. We meet our needs individually and cross our fingers that the system holds. But if layoffs, inflation, or broader disruptions make resources scarce, the people who already know how to rely on each other will be the ones ready. We need to build these habits now, before things get harder. Led by Rob Hurwich, who has spent six years building community economies, ran a resource-pooling collective for four years, and designs tools for Grassroots Economics, Action Lab #6 moves us from reading history into immediate practice. We'll learn about collective pooling and design our own. We'll start with the simplest version: a pod of about ten people, each putting in a set amount every month to fund emergency reserves, zero-interest loans, or connected community projects. This isn't a lecture.