Taking Stabs in the Dark

If HelpBnk took a millionaire with a team three years, how much hope do people with no money have?

If this is your first article with me, the context you need is that I went homeless over two years ago trying to make community wealth a thing. For more on what community wealth is, see this intro video by Yanislav Rusev. And for the beginning of my journey, start here.

I’m still living off persistence and the good will of my community, having maybe £30 to my name currently, way more than that in expenses coming up, and no way to get to the next person’s state that will house me when I get back to America in a few weeks.

I do have an AI agency now though, so if you want to reclaim 10 to hundreds of hours of your or your business’s time every week, I’m looking for our first client and this is where you sign up. [Edit: That agency has transitioned to a media company to get stories of wellbeing economies and community wealth mainstream, Connectioning. You can check that out at connectioning.substack.com.]

Anyway, as I’m contemplating solving these more personal problems, I’m really only concerned about taking stabs at the larger problem of making community wealth a global movement. In many ways, it already is, under many different names.

I know in my heart and my experience that all the solutions and tools we need are there — all we’re missing for all of that to fall into place is a coordinated media and marketing campaign, with a central hub or “connection engine” as I call it, to route people to the resources and communities they need to cocreate a world that works for all of us.

Every day we’re voting with our money and our time for the world we believe is possible. This campaign will allow us to vote in the same direction while doing different things.

Apple had the Think Different campaign. Ours can be the Believe Different campaign.

There is actually someone who is close to doing this: Simon Squibb.

It’s great what he’s doing, but it’s not enough. And he seems to have no knowledge of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) or Regenerative Economics or any of the other hundreds of movements, and his media appeals to only people in the business world. Which is fine, that’s his niche.

But we need a critical mass of people to change the whole world. And it won’t be done solely by folks already interested in starting a business.

Simon Squibb was a millionaire when he started this. It’s taken him years to get this big on social media. I estimated he has a reach of about 9 million people, but we need nearly 300 million to reach critical mass, and he barely mentions community wealth in his media. [Update: In the short time since writing this article, his reach has nearly doubled.]

(Here is one interview I covered where he does vaguely explain one of the core ways in which it works though.)

We need more influencers on this from the social enterprise and circular economy worlds, combining ordinary people’s needs with a transition into a new economy that works for people and planet.

Today I was watching Callum Church’s interview with Callum McDonnell, and he said they were just “taking stabs in the dark” trying for a content format that would blow them up.

If it took Simon Squibb, a multi millionaire who would never want for money again and could hire an entire team years to reach this point, what hope could one barely housed girl with a dream have?

I got off an assessment call last night for a free public speaking course Jessen James puts out. It was with the lovely Henna Patel, herself an accomplished speaker and James’ business partner.

Everyone I talk to, every action I take, is a stab in the dark looking for the leverage point (or leverage person) or silver bullet that will turn the tide.

But that call last night was like a bullet in the gut.

I appreciated Henna’s honesty, I would want no less, but she was frank in telling me that there was no way I’d be able to make money or become a speaker in the next two weeks, that even Jessen would have trouble getting a gig that quickly.

She told me that they have three people working time on his social media, and they’re still unable to predict the algorithm, which changes daily.

And earlier that day I had been trying for about three hours to get the footage off my phone from the interview I did with Kieran Wallace to start to tell the story of community wealth in Liverpool.

Image: Myself and Kieran Wallace, talking about his dream of a garden centre where people can get help and learn skills.

My phone is old. It got thrown over a roof at the beginning of this journey. My laptop is old, I’m not sure it will handle editing the footage. If I could even get the footage to it to edit!

I’m sure millionaires with teams do not face these issues, or planning what in the world they’re going to do for food, transport, and housing every few weeks. And they have teams at their disposal and still take years to gain momentum.

So what hope is there for us, the little guys?

Well, plenty the way I see it.

I was down for just a bit last night after that call. Who wouldn’t be?

But then I remembered: People are wealth.

We don’t need millions of dollars. We just need the right people, maybe just three or four, aligned to the same purpose.

I haven’t given up so far, when many times I rightly should have, and I definitely won’t now.

Even if it seems so far off, I know meeting the right person can change all that overnight.

So I’m trying to find people in the social enterprise or circular economy space who are also approaching this from the angle of creating a movement based on media.

This Friday I’m meeting with Kevin Lovelady of Partnering for Purpose CIC in Liverpool. I’m particularly excited about this meeting, because I do believe the strategy is to focus community wealth strategies in one place. If we can successfully pull this off in Liverpool, imagine the worldwide impacts when others see it.

And the social economy here in Liverpool is already well under way with established anchor organisations like Kindred and growing CICs and community centred businesses like the Liverpool Tool Library and Kitty’s Launderette.

These are the stories I want to show to the world, along with the other community wealth building well established in the Northwest, as was done in Preston.

If we can concentrate our efforts on storytelling, show people how to do this while we do it ourselves, focusing on Liverpool and the Northwest generally as a hub, I feel strongly that this is *the* leverage point for a global community wealth / social economy movement.

When we tell our stories of community wealth, other communities will be inspired to do the same, and this will change the belief in what’s possible in every community around the world.

When a critical mass believe a different world is possible and see the pathway to making it happen, we will see worldwide change seemingly overnight.

Unfortunately I have only two weeks left here. My goal is to have Kieran’s story edited and shared before I leave. We’re going to meet one more time to film some more content for the story. Once we have that, I’ll learn PR and reach out and share it with as many news outlets in the area I can.

Since this is a continuation of a HelpBnk story, I’m also super hopeful that Simon and crew will also help share it with their millions of followers. Simon even asked where he could watch when I posted about what we’re doing on the HelpBnk platform, so crossing fingers!

Kieran’s success is all of our success, and maybe the silver bullet for community wealth in Liverpool, which will be the launching point for community wealth for the world, and proof that we don’t need to be millionaires to make this happen, we just need to believe, connect, persist, and find the leverage points, the right stories to share to make this happen.

I can’t wait to share his story with you.