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2021: Transacting Transformation
We need places of engagement to grow community health & wealth
Back in March 2019 a friend asked me to prepare a visual summary of the process of rooting sustainable community wealth.
The image below is a high level summary of the work, and, as you might suspect, these top level actions have very deep roots.
What Does ‘Transact Transformation’ Mean?
We have been entrained to reduce our interactions with each other to economically measurable transactions, e.g., monetary capital for goods and services. This devalues the additional, invisible capitals in play that brought us to that point: attention, relationship, time, trust and wisdom, aka the ‘keystone capitals’ in our economic ecosystem.
These five keystone capitals were discussed in a podcast episode. Unlocking these forms of soft capital will bring forward unexpected complexity that enriches your investment in neighborhood economics.
What are “keystone capitals?”
Well, think about keystone species within an ecosystem: “a species on which other species in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if it were removed the ecosystem would change drastically.”
As they do in the environment, these keystone capitals bring transformational energies into play, creating a deeper connection between participants, and rooting a sustainable future.
However, without the transactional ‘container’ for this potential, those transformational energies dissipate and the shared future that could have emerged disappears. Thus, we need places in which we can capture that potential and activate its value…e.g., ‘transacting transformation’.
Community Engagement Spaces
I’ve been envisioning and developing community engagement spaces for decades. These are the spaces that serve as cornerstones of community, in which we are able to bring forward ‘who else’ we are beyond our title, house or other material manifestations of value. In other words, they are simple entry points to explore our natural complexity and plant the seeds of future community wealth.
