A report on mutual support clubs created after the meltdown in the U.S., that aim to obtain real life security.
From Sam Pizzigati in AlterNet:
“Local Common Security Clubs have already started up in over four dozen communities. The clubs typically bring from 15 to 20 people together for face-to-face sessions where they can grapple with their personal financial stresses, learn more about why our economy isn’t working, and explore what people can do, through mutual aid and shared action, to increase our economic security.
“It’s important we learn together,” says Chuck Collins, the director of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good and an organizer of the Common Security Club network. “We ceded too much power to the experts — and now it’s time for us to think for ourselves.”
Common Security Clubs are drawing participants from a variety of sources. Some have formed out of church congregations or union locals, others from neighborhoods.
To help all these groups get up and running, a small national staff, assembled by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Massachusetts-based Grassroots Policy Project, has prepared a facilitator’s manual and made all sorts of other resource materials available.
What are the clubs doing? Their efforts vary.
In the spirit of mutual aid, clubs are helping people deal with immediate personal crises — like foreclosures. They’re also raising issues around long-term family financial planning, through a club network partnership with Vicki Robin and Monique Tilford, co-authors of Your Money or Your Life, a widely respected program that helps people rethink how they relate to money matters.
These mutual-aid activities, says club organizer Andrée Collier Zaleska, are helping create “tremendous energy for local and community responses.”
But the clubs take that energy further.
“We can’t ignore,” says Zaleska, “how larger economic policy failures wrecked the economy — and the need for ordinary citizens to weigh in on the direction of future economic policy.”
Local Common Security Clubs are starting to do that weighing in. They’re campaigning, for instance, to beat back the Wall Street blitz against the proposed national Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
The club network currently extends from Massachusetts, where the first club formed in Boston, to Washington State, and the press is just beginning to take notice. Organizers see a steady expansion ahead. Want to learn more — and maybe start a Common Security Club within your neighborhood or organization? The Common Security Club Web site covers all the basics.
The current recession, club organizers note, will eventually fade. But the economic ground beneath us has shifted. We can’t return, they note, to the cheap energy and unlimited fossil fuels that used to “grow” our economy — and we don’t want to return to the “bubble” economics that grew our vast inequalities of income and wealth and triggered last fall’s crash.
“We need to prepare ourselves and our communities,” sums up organizer Chuck Collins, “for more fundamental changes and a new economic model.”