Community self-reliance (CSR) is a community’s ability to meet its material and/or nonmaterial needs through collective efforts and resources in ways that make it less dependent on the currently existing economy. Less dependence on the economy doesn’t mean that they don’t engage with it. Less dependence means that people have an increased ability to meet their material needs for things like health care, food, housing, water, and electricity—as well as their nonmaterial needs for things like community and relationships—with less need for money.

Visionary Organizing does not create change by marshaling resources and people to force what already exists to change. Visionary Organizing transforms reality by recognizing and nurturing interdependence, transforming relationships, and creating new patterns and systems that — once taken to scale — become capable of replacing what already exists.

From a big picture view, it feels right to say that in the last three weeks our collective sense of day-to-day stability has ended. Our respective material needs may or may not yet have been threatened but our collective nonmaterial needs for security and predictability are under threat every day. If we take time to name and grieve what we’re experiencing while building community, I think that this crisis can become a transition to something meaningful.

 By connecting to, trusting, and following our inner-wisdom, we can create the kinds of communities, organizations, and relationships that support us to thrive as well as survive. As these experiments grow, the logic of our inner-wisdom can become conventional logic and can replace the logic and economy of PRC. When the logic of our inner-wisdom becomes more conventional and requires less practice to access, it will be easier to equally emphasize our material and non-material needs. By connecting to and trusting our inner-wisdom, we can facilitate the paradigm shift we need to exist differently.