Here’s a great story.
Mark and Cindy Hill, from Dearborn, Missouri, recently won a quarter billion dollar lottery payout.
What makes them different from the typically lottery winner is that it doesn’t look like they will spontaneously combust due to excessive consumption. Instead, from all accounts, they plan to continue to live modestly and will continue the small town routines that they currently enjoy.
As smart as that is, what makes Mark and Cindy really different is that they plan to invest their money in community infrastructure. Here’s what they are putting their money into:
- A new fire station with better highway access.
- A ball field for local kids.
- A sewer treatment plant.
I liked this story a lot. It got me thinking about the community improvements I’d invest in if I had a boatload of extra cash to do so.
I’d do things a bit differently than Mark and Cindy. My investments would be in productive, 21st century infrastructure. The type of infrastructure a community needs to have in order to prosper in the future.
What would that include? Here’s some of suggestions I’ve covered recently:
- A Public Greenhouse (and Community Gardens if needed).
- A Community Microgrid. A smart local electrical grid that lets the community produce more local power and avoid blackouts.
- A Makerspace outfitted with all of the latest equipment.
- A tool library and a fix it Saturday.
I’ve got LOTs more.
Lots of ways to enable people to do more locally while connecting to the world to find out how.
Thing is, it doesn’t take winning the lottery to build this infrastructure.
Almost everything I’ve listed is something that can be done relatively inexpensively as a bootstrap.
What would be on your list?
Join us. Become resilient.
Yours,
JOHN ROBB
PS: I’m not a big fan of government sponsored lotteries. It’s a morally bankrupt way to raise funds.
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Great story and I like your version a lot.
I was thinking along similar lines over the last few months. I was wondering what kind of impact 6-7 couples or families might make if they sold big city real estate to re-establish themselves in a much smaller community, investing the difference in the kind of projects you list.
Lets say you manage a $200K profit out of selling your condo (not far fetched in some areas of Canada since we didn’t have the real estate crash you guys experienced, especially plausible if you invested long enough ago), you can get a pretty good house in a small village area for $100K, probably quite a bit less and even less if some of the living is built around shared resources and even shared living buildings like a large farm house for two families, etc. If 6 families do the same in a concerted effort and invest the rest together, it’s a half million injection of cash in the area.
Well placed, in the right community, with lots of work, you could establish all your list of structures (minus micro grid) + education initiatives to get permaculture projects going, try out new agriculture avenues, compost programs, equipment for the school, establish coop(s) in other fields, residencies for college students in an non profit that runs those programs, invest in 2-3 existing businesses, etc.
In a forward looking village with a small existing population of like minded people, it would be a heck of a project with big impacts.
A list presuming infinite resources is a good place to start. Following on that is a rollout plan given median resources. Following that is a hierarchy of lists given a range of resources and contingencies.
Having said that, I’d set up “builder land” specifically for secondary school boys to have constructed homesteads, including gardens and animal husbandry, before they graduate from high school. The reason? The decision to leave that “podunk hometown” and go off to “get an education” is being exposed as the destruction of human and social capital it is — driven largely by the bad assumptions of the economics of family formation. Take away the debt slavery of an enormous student loan that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy (in exchange for an education of questionable value), not to mention the good old mortgage, and the decision to form a family vs go to the urban areas to, basically, be gelded, becomes more rational. The demographic collapse in the US over the last generation or so that has driven the demand for immigration may not have been deliberate genocide, but the consequences were actually worse.
What a great act by those two! Very smart and forward thinking. I actually spend a lot of time day-dreaming about what I’ll spend some millions on. Here’s my list:
Community gardens and greenhouse, with adjacent large community/public kitchen space equipped with food processing equipment like canners, stoves, etc.
Health and healing space, where doctors/dentists/nurse practitioners in conventional medicine share space and consult with acupuncturists, massage therapists, shamanic and energetic healers.
Fully equipped heavy duty Maker Space — welding/metal fabrication shop, carpentry shop, small engine repair shop, electronics repair shop — fully equipped with all the necessary heavy equipment and a staff to educate users on the safe utilization of same.
Weapons shop/repair/modification space — where you can buy state of the art new and used as well as Old School firearms, from SCARs/ARs to muzzle loaders, ammuntion, reloading equipment, a reloading set up/gun repair workshop staffed by experienced loaders/repairmen who can provide help, on site gunsmith, adjacent to a shooting range where quality instruction can be obtained. Also would sell knives and martial arts supplies and offer instruction in the same.
Alternative school with half the curriculum on the 3Rs, the other half applied resilience skills.
Daycare/nursery
All of the above built to spec as energy producing/self sufficient structures and properly staffed with the right people….
Now I’m back to making my millions…
cheers, m
Hmmm… a delicious fantasy? Well, lemme see… I would do four things:
Endow a solari (a community financial corporation, thought up by the remarkable Mrs. Fitts)
Start a Main Street property trust (similar to land trust, buying up languishing properties, refurbishing them, renting inexpensively to local businesses who would have a usufruct “ownership” and voting rights in the trust)
Endow a “grow soil now” foundation that would organize workshops and give initial grants to any local landowner embarking on holistic land management via rotational grazing, and would serve to gather and disseminate best local practices
And most of all, I would support efforts by the locals to make their own decisions what the community most needs, via some variation on Jim Rough’s process Dynamic Facilitation which has taken off in Austria with impressive results
Very well written piece, turning a very heartening news story into a thoughtful piece about resilience and infrastructure. Thanks for writing it up and sharing it. Ben.
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