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Becoming a Grassroots Economist*

A significant part of this work is training trainers of trainers to spread good stewardship practices. Stewards (whom we also like to call Grassroots Economists or Facilitators) play a vital role in seeding, utilizing, and developing common resource pools to enhance cultural economic activities and foster sustainable community well-being.

People who understand that people—themselves—are the key to their own development, over time, become adept at guiding communities to recognize and utilize their shared abundance across all resources—whether social, human/spiritual, political, natural, physical, and economic.

When using the term group or community, imagine that a community is the sum of each person’s overlapping pools. Similarly, each of us (as conscious collections of resources, organisms, and cells) has (and is) a curation of what we find valuable in ourselves and the world around us. As Stewards, we find ourselves inside this value system, with our own values connecting out to those around us. From this perspective we become better gardeners, able to see and cultivate where valuable and healthy overlap can occur.

** Excerpt from the book, Grassroots Economics, Redflection and Practice by Will Ruddick*

Stewarding a New Collective

There are four primary phases of facilitation proposed to create a collective in the Ecosystem. These have been created to simply spark the conversation and give an idea of a basic framework:

Phase 1 - Individual Assessment: One or more facilitators will emerge to bring forth the passions, talents, personality types of each individual wanting to participate in the ecosystem.
Phase 2 - Field Assessment: Facilitator will assist the individual or small group in creating a proposal, which is then brought to the Council. Council will consider proposals for specific projects. Processes to be created for consideration of proposals including how to prioritize and assign budgets.
Phase 3 - Collective Creation: Facilitator assists the collective in creating a Collective Foundational Agreement where the team identifies values, mission, vision, what governance model they wish to work with, and identifies initial team accountabilities to complete their mission. Brings to council where it is either given a budget, or kicked back to Phase 2.
Phase 4 - Maintaining Collective Coherence: Facilitator assists individuals in identifying and accepting individual accountabilities that support team accountabilities, and assists to remove any blocks in the way of those accountabilities getting completed. Facilitator assists in adjusting or setting new team accountabilities as necessary with the intentions of maintaining social and energetic alchemy. Different facilitators may weave in and out of different collectives as they are needed.