We often rely on the injection of money through grants and loans as a means to stimulate well-being. Rather than cultivating thriving, resilient living systems, this method has often perpetuated dependency and hindered the organic growth of local economies.
The concept of Commitment Pooling can be recognized as a regenerative economic model inspired by ancestral wisdom and communal resource sharing. This approach seeks to decentralize economic power and create networks of mutual support and exchange, where value is not solely defined by monetary transactions but by the commitments and contributions of community members. By formalizing these commitments into exchangeable vouchers within a pool, we enable a dynamic ecosystem where services and resources can be fairly traded, fostering a more resilient and sustainable community-driven economy.
Grants
Imagine where each service offering listed on a grant as a formalized commitment from various providers. These offerings are curated and as the grant comes into a Commitment Pool the providers can exchange their formalized commitments for service (vouchers) into the pool to remove the $USD while also being able to exchange their commitments with one another. In this way all the service providers have been pre-paid a certain amount and also have a credit among the rest of the service providers in the pool. Each provider can also create their own pool with local sub-contractors.
Micro-finance:
Imagine a micro-finance institution where their lendees (those getting loans) are invited to exchange their commitments (to repay) for loaned $USD funds. The lendees would need to buy back their commitment by placing national currency back into the pool and removing (settling) their debt. While this could happen with a normal loan – with a commitment pool anyone could choose to purchase those commitments from the pool (repaying the loan). And with many curated assets in the pool, commitments could also be exchanged for each other – this addition to standard lending creates an ecosystem that can connect out to a network of pools.
In both cases, we haven’t gone far from business as usual – audited lendees or grantees are offered money and asked to repay it in cash or in-kind - but while doing this through a Commitment Pool there is created an environment where the lendees or grantees may also exchange their commitments and debts with each other and other connected and cascading pools that share common commitments. Crowdfunding – could work the same way – if the crowd funders could have their commitments accepted as well as their cash.
This is seeding a connected garden that can be resilient with or without USD in the future. While currency, money, formalized commitments are all a form of value signaling – they need a container in which to connect to each other – The USD or national currency alone does not form living gardens of connected commitments – it leaves a path toward those with national currency – which leaves a brittle non-resilient itself.
Self Seeding
Note that seeding pools can happen as well without national currencies – if there is some commitment(s) to resources that can catalyze the rest of the garden to contribute. As far as I can see – spontaneous solidarity of random people all self-seeding a pool simultaneously would be a beautiful yet extremely unlikely miracle. Given that our ancestors began the seeding process with community leaders initiating rotational labor traditions like Mweria in Kenya makes me believe firmly in the power of seeding living networks. This has been a core focus of Grassroots Economics Foundation – providing training and seed resources to reinvigorate a renaissance of mutual services and a network of cascading commitment pools.
Preparing the Ground
You don’t drop seed into a desert and expect it to flourish and develop an ecosystem. You need to prepare the pool to be seeded.
As we look out at entrepreneurs and various service providers that are the living beings we want to support and cultivate. We need to look for synergies and companion planting. In syntropic agroforestry, we look at succession – when there is a hole in the canopy of a forest, a tree doesn’t just jump in there to fill it – there is a whole process of plants filling that gap and preparing the soil to enable the trees to eventually come back.
Often in the world of alternative economics, there is a search for a critical mass of goods and services in a network to sustain itself. With commitment pooling – as long as you have any flow in one pool, it should connect to another pool. We don’t expect one pool to have all the ingredients of a resilient living system – it in itself is a curation of a steward(s). It might be commitments (gift cards) from great vegan restaurants that the pool steward has cultivated. A seed of national currency might enter that pool as a grant, purchase, or loan toward these restaurants – creating an environment where one can now exchange commitments (vegan gift cards) at any of the restaurants in the pool. This creates a small flow – but certainly, vegan restaurants are not enough for the survival and thriving of a community. These vegan restaurant commitments can as well be in other pools for transportation and house repair and connect the pools together.
Seeding Land Trusts
A land trust is one modern formalization of ancient land management practices and as such, can be viewed from a commitment pooling perspective. The offerings that we would want to connect in a land trust pool could include usufruct (use rights), production from the land, and ecosystem stewardship. Successful land trusts generally operate some form of cooperative where production based on the land goes back into ecosystem stewardship. Many land owners would like to enter into this formal relationship and develop a land trust and cooperative but lack the funds to bring productive people and cooperatives onto the land – and the people themselves that would like to live and work on a land trust don’t have the money to get up and move and start an operation. Finally, those people who would love to offer ecosystem services simply can’t afford to live without a paycheck.
These three parties – Land Owners, Producers, Ecosystem Stewards all have an offering – they can commit to providing their services yet they lack the funds to get started. A Commitment Pool could be created with all their formalized offerings at national currency market rates. This would be rich soil to seed with a grant or loan. Money could go into such a pool and the three parties could exchange it for their commitments. Having been prepaid to provide services to each other they could begin to account for their exchanges with each other – back to the rotational labor traditions of our ancestors – while still interacting with national currency. The commitment pool creates a membrane around the resources of the community on the land trust while enabling an in and outflow of national currency.
Yang meets Yin
Vouchers or money as formalized commitments represent yang energy because they are active, outward expressions of value and transactional intent, often associated with masculine qualities and pollination. In this context, money and vouchers serve as signals of value, facilitating exchanges and acting as bearers of commitment. They embody the yang principle of action, movement, and externalization, much like the male role in pollination, actively contributing to the process of fertilization and growth.
On the other hand, pools are more reflective of yin energy, which is associated with receptivity, nurturing, and communal care—qualities often linked to femininity. Pools, in the context of resource coordination, represent the gathering and sharing of communal resources, akin to nesting and nurturing. They are about holding, curating, and caring for
the collective assets and commitments of a community, emphasizing collaboration, sustenance, and shared well-being. This nurturing aspect of pools aligns with the yin principle of receptivity, internalization, and collective care, mirroring the female role in nurturing and sustaining life.
In essence, commitment pooling represents a transformative economic paradigm that harmonizes traditional wisdom with contemporary needs, fostering resilient, interconnected communities. Through this approach, we not only sustain but also enrich our collective well-being, seeding gardens of prosperity that can thrive in an ever-evolving world.
Through the lens of Commitment Pooling, we see a future where economic systems are not merely transactions of currency in markets but living networks of curated and shared commitments and values.
Reconsider the essence of economic interactions and their potential to cultivate sustainable, thriving communities.
I love the yin/yang metaphors here and nods to permaculture! As I’m reading this, I can’t help but reflect on some ideas that have been percolating around the interplay between attestation, value signaling and capital allocation. For context, I recently started a new gig where most of my job is trying to figure out how communities can efficiently distribute large sums of money towards things they find valuable, as well as how they can trust each other while doing this.
Let’s start with capital allocation. It’s interesting to me that in web3 there’s an abundance of capital thanks to Big DAO Money yet a terrible track record of being able to allocate it well or to the right people. So naturally, people building around this problem tend to focus entirely on how to tweak where the money goes. Hence the almost prolific interest in pluralistic grants and all things public goods. (I sometimes wonder how helpful these terms really are. It’s hard to critique something if it’s very name is synonymous with being very smart and very good at the same time – but then again, hasn’t Effective Altruism enjoyed this privilege for the longest time?) Anyway, the point here is that the discourse then becomes entirely about “get money in” rather than “seed value within”, which is what I think you are proposing.
Next, let’s look at attestation. This is where I think the RPGF nerds make a good point - none of this actually works if you don’t have solid mechanisms for attestation. How do I know that you are who you say you are? How do I know that you will make good on your production loan? To be very honest, I love the Commitment Pooling concept and have been following it for a long time but I’m yet to see this component get the attention it deserves.
Finally, on value signaling. I actually think this could be the most interesting and exciting part about Commitment Pooling! Right now I’m asking people to complete surveys that ask them about their time commitments, desired contributions, etc. but under the model you propose, this is really just the voucher creation process (right?)
If the big theme here is just getting people rewarded for the value they provide, then I see people approaching the various pieces from vastly different angles. It’s interesting to observe what gets prioritized and deprioritized along the way. One thing that really draws me to the concept of Commitment Pooling is that, to use your own analogy, in makes place for the “yin” in economic design. The container always matters! Everything is only valuable in relation to other things, and the great tragedy of our current economic paradigm is that it has blinded us to the inherent relational value that exists between human beings.
As I’ve followed this idea from inception, I often ask myself this: what would it take to create a Kickstarter built on Commitment Pooling? What pieces would need to be in place for this to work anywhere, for anyone?
I want to see this where i live.