Unlocking Economic Gridlock

How Philanthropy Can Compost Money, Not Create More Dependence

Let me start with a simple observation: we are living inside an economic traffic jam.

Picture a community full of people who can cook, fix roofs, farm, teach, care for children, build furniture—who hold immense value in their hands and hearts. Yet those same people are unable to trade with one another. Why? Not because the skills are gone, or the needs aren't there. It's because we’re all sitting in economic gridlock—waiting for more money to arrive so we can finally do what we already have the capacity to do.

This is the everyday experience of millions. We have goods and services. We have time. We have energy. But we don’t have the money to transact, to connect, to build. It’s a strange condition—a wealth of ability stuck behind a lack of liquidity.

And worse still, we’ve become so dependent on money itself that we've forgotten we can pool resources and create mutual credit with one another. We no longer imagine that we can build trust, pool commitments, or value each other’s labor directly.

This dependence on money becomes its own special kind of poverty.

A poverty of our ability to share.

Waiting for the Rain That Rarely Comes

The default solution society offers is: just wait. Eventually, some money will arrive—through aid, investment, remittances, or markets. Then we’ll be able to trade again. Maybe.

But often, the rain doesn't come. Or it does, but only for a few. Or it floods and washes away our roots instead of nourishing them. In any case, the pause button is stuck. The community sits in idle, needs unmet, talents unused.

And so we wait.

This is the foundational gridlock of modern economics. It isn’t about lack of productivity—it’s about lack of flow.

The Philanthropic Paradox: When Help Hurts

Now here’s the irony: even well-meaning attempts to break the gridlock can backfire.

Take philanthropy. A donor shows up and floods a community cash. It seems generous, but it often reinforces the same dependency. People rush in to swap their own goods and services for the new cash. Suddenly, the limits of everyone are maxed out and they have no more room to exchange. No more internal movement is seen as possible. Everyone’s now waiting again—for more outside money to arrive.

Gridlock, round two. Now reinforced with a dependency on the donor cycle.

Composting Cash: Toward a Living Pool

There is another way.

Instead of seeing money as the end goal or ultimate resource, what if we saw it as compost? Something to enrich the soil, not dominate the system?

In healthy ecosystems, excess is returned. Fallen leaves decompose, feeding the roots. No organism hoards everything. Even predators are part of the loop.

Likewise, in commitment pooling systems—like the Mweria of the Mijikenda in Kenya or other forms of rotating labor associations—a community doesn't wait for outside currency. They seed the pool with what they can promise: labor, goods, skills. They trade based on trust and future delivery. Value flows, even in the absence of money. People help each other build houses, tend crops, educate children. The magic calabash stays alive, because it’s fed by oaths, not dollars.

When money does come into a pooling system, it must be digestible—like compost. I recommend that external currency introduced into a pool remain less than half the total value of internal commitments in that community resource pool. That way, there’s still plenty of space to trade and circulate, without choking the system.

A Word to Donors and Do-Gooders

If you’re in philanthropy, aid, or impact investing—ask yourself: Am I composting or clogging a shallow hole?

Are you enabling the community’s own capacity to move, trade, and commit? Or are you dumping so much money that people abandon their own systems, only to become stuck again when your funds dry up?

Healthy economic ecosystems are not built on over dependency on any one resource. They’re built on reciprocity, commitment, and the ability to keep moving even when the cash tap is off.

What we need are not more injections of frozen capital, but better flows. Not dependency, but design.

Let us compost money with care. Let us unlock the gridlock from the inside out.

Below is a video for people working with commitment pooling protocols and pools on Sarafu.Network.