Individual Prosperity Won't Save Us

Welcome to the Root Commons Newsletter!

Here is what you can expect in these newsletters:

🗓️ Bi-weekly newsletter dropping on Tuesdays

🔗 What I am Rooting Into

🎙️ Coming Up in the Commons

🤝🏾 Network Connections

💡 Free subscribers get access to every issue – What I am Rooting Into, Coming Up in the Commons, and Networking Connections.

🌱 Anti Networking Networking Club subscribers get everything above + free access to Root Commons virtual calls + a free 30-minute 1:1 call with me discuss your work and how Root Commons can best connect you to what you need.

When loss brings clarity

Eight years ago exactly, my life as I knew it imploded.

At this time in 2018, my co-parent and I were in the beginning stages of ending our marriage and transitioning to a co-parenting partnership while living together and raising our then 6 and 3 year old. He got laid off from his full-time job in June and I lost my full-time job in November. We sold our home in December.

We had lived in that 2 BR 1 BA house since my oldest was 11 months old. I birthed my youngest in that home. The only reason we were able to buy the home in 2012 was because my co-parent's parents generously gave us half the down payment.

When our house went on the market, we didn't have enough money in our bank account to pay off December's credit card bill.

Our individual financial crisis and structural privilege of owning a home coincided with the height of the Bay Area housing market and our house sold for double what we paid for it.

The devastation of that time was also coupled with acute clarity: I would radically realign my relationship to all my resources – money, time, labor, capacity, connection.

Proximity is not practice

While my life up until that moment was relatively aligned with my values and politics, it was also in constant tension. Needing to chase jobs in institutions that weren't always ostensibly terrible but nevertheless drained my labor and capacity, so that I could chase salaries financially necessary to chase an enoughness that was always just beyond my reach.

I realized that while I was in proximity to models of work, community, and investment that I aligned deeply with, I was not always in practice.

I needed to get clear – with humility – about where the tentacles of scarcity and hoarding resources retained their hold on me, and why I might inadvertently hold on to those tentacles for dear life when I was not fully rooted in the reality that another livelihood was possible.

I needed to live in practice, in the way I had always been trying to live.

Realigning resources

That reckoning sent me on a years-long (life-long) journey of learning, unlearning, and practice.

I learned how to move money away from conventional extractive investment and toward community investing models. Early on I learned through communities and frameworks for values-aligned investing like Toward Aware and No Harm Investing, NextEgg, and Angels of Main Street and Chordata Capital, and continue to deepen into restorative economics and community investment models.

I learned about building solidarity economy practices and infrastructure. I went through LIFT Economy's Next Economy MBA program and rooted into the alumni network. I dove into networks, organizations, and financial models working to build a Solidarity Economy like New Economy Coalition, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Offers and Needs Market, and many others highlighted in the Root Commons Resources page.

I became an Investor and Community Owner at East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, a democratically run cooperative led by people of color that purchases and stewards land and housing, removing it from the speculative market to create permanent affordable community-controlled homes and businesses for communities most disenfranchised from our racist classist housing market.

My income-generating work has been anything but stable and secure. But it continues to move steadfast toward radically aligned business development strategy and network-building with organizations, learning/leadership/capacity-building programs, and social impact ventures that are building and activating member, alumni, and fundraising networks into living, connected ecosystems where capital, connections, capacity, and opportunity flow unrestricted and generate real impact.

We can't create enoughness in isolation

Root Commons is one small thread in the larger tapestry of networks creating an emerging economy where we can move our resources in the most unrestricted and regenerative ways possible.

What we lack collectively is often not the resources themselves. We lack the intentional infrastructure to move them freely. Capital. Connections. Jobs. Time. Capacity. Knowledge.

This calls for a practice of strengthening networks that work – building networked relationships with the explicit purpose and infrastructure to move resources to one another in ways that allow us to create livelihoods where we all thrive.

This is not new or novel. It is a practice that has been stripped from us that we must intentionally restore.

In the most recent episode of the podcast Resistant Communiqués, Jamila Hammami interviewed Ijeoma Oluo in a sharp insightful dialog around General Strikes, Abolition, and Building Community to Resist State Oppression.

Ijeoma Oluo breaks down what many of us who grew up in the 80's and 90's are confronting in acute ways:

There was a huge project in the 80s and 90s to convince people that economic prosperity could take the place of social justice work, and that if you just got the right degrees and got the right jobs, then you would be exempt from systemic oppression. And so growing up with that messaging, many people sought social change on an individual level through economic mobility. And we are now, of course, seeing that that didn't happen.

If anything, the opposite happened, that in turning into this individual definition of economic mobility, it undermined, and it helped our governments and our systems of power undermine the social safety net that we had built to really pull communities up. And so now we're all at the whim of violent capitalism in a way that we weren't 40 or 50 years ago. And so it's really important that we recognize that's by design...It means that first we have to recognize the way in which we're all programmed towards these kind of individualist ideas of safety and success...And so we kind of have to take this approach of, not only do we have to have someone out there with the fire hose trying to put this fire out, we also have to have someone that's building structures at the same time. - Ijeoma Oluo Resistant Communiqués (S2, E2), Mar 31, 2026

We were sold individual prosperity as a substitute for collective care.

When survival is seen as a personal responsibility rather than a collective one, we keep our resources siloed.

We are in a genuine polycrisis that is reshaping our entire landscape of work and livelihood. The answer is no longer "go get a job." This moment requires and invites us to be intentionally networked to cultivate infrastructure that allows capital, connections, capacity, and care to be released from their siloes.

This is what Root Commons is here to do. Yes, 100% to help people find jobs and clients and collaborations. And also yes, 100% to illuminating ways we can create networked practices so that the resources we need to build sustainable livelihoods are no longer hoarded and siloed but circulated with ease.

Let's build together.

Our first Commons Welcome Call!

Our first Root Commons Welcome virtual call will be Thursday 6/4 10-11am PT. All subscribers welcome.

Prior to the call I will send out a Virtual Connection Board with your name, what you do, and what connections you are looking for to everyone registered. Take a few minutes to look through and add a virtual sticky note with any preliminary connections or ideas you have for others.

This way we come into the call knowing who is in the room, primed to make actionable connections during our time together.

If you consent, I will also share your contact information after the call so participants can follow up directly with one another.

New Member Intros

This is the place where we get to know who you are, what you do, what connections you are looking for so we can connect directly with one another.

If you are interested please fill out those details here to be included in the next newsletter!

In the Network

LIFT Economy Next Economy MBA Fall 2026 Cohort Applications are open! This is an incredible program to gain practical skills, strategic clarity, and an invaluable peer networking to transform your organization or launch a values-aligned venture. Attend a free info session or reach out to me directly with questions.

Liberation Movement Lab is an emerging worker-owned cooperative Popular Education and Movement School. Take part in their Community Survey to help them understand what educators, organizers, and community members need most and support their Launch Fund Campaign if you are able.

East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative has launched their 2026-2028 Community Investment Offering with multiple ways you can get invest in their work. I will be facilitating an Investor Owner organizing circle for fellow Investor members of the co-op to organize and strengthen our collective capacity for reparative investment praxis. Reach out directly if you'd like to learn more.

Please share what is emerging in your networks so we can deepen our connections!