The seven odds
Not by accident, and not by anyone's villainy. By structure. A few of the odds, by name:
1 of 7
A third of America's local newspapers have closed since 2005. Fifty-five million people now live where almost no one reports on their own place — and what a community can't see, it can't shape.
Our answer: the community journal →
2 of 7
The smallest community banks — the ones most likely to back a local project — are down 85% since 1985. Good local ideas now pitch strangers, far away. When a community owns its own institutions, its ideas don’t have to pitch strangers.
Our answer: our community ownership work — in the open →
3 of 7
A century ago, a third of American men belonged to a mutual-aid society — sick pay, burial costs, a hall governed by its own members. And closed to too many of their neighbors. We never fixed that flaw; we buried the form instead — and the ownership went with it.
Our answer: our community ownership work — in the open →
4 of 7
When COVID hit, thousands of neighbor-to-neighbor mutual-aid networks formed within days — proof the will to care never left. Most have already gone quiet. A group chat and a shared spreadsheet own nothing — and a network that owns nothing rarely outlasts its founders' exhaustion. The networks that lasted generations had a hall, a treasury, and a federation at their back.
Our answer: a tool for organizing together — taking shape →
5 of 7
Take the raise, lose the help. In much of the country, a parent whose pay goes up a little can lose more in assistance — childcare, food, housing — than the raise adds. Families get punished for climbing. We built a floor, and never built the ladder.
Our answer: still taking shape — follow the acting work →
6 of 7
Even when a dozen groups want to work together, the coordination itself is the one thing almost no grant will pay for. So good work runs separately, on borrowed time, until the people carrying it wear out.
Our answer: a tool for organizing together — taking shape →
7 of 7
A generation of owners — shops, firms, farms — is reaching retirement with no successor in sight. When a business closes or sells out of town, the ownership never comes back.
Our answer: Cooperative Exits — employees become the owners (in testing) →
Mindful Living Communities / Working hypothesis
None of this is separate, and none of it is bad luck. Over decades, the ownership of what shapes a place — its capital, its institutions, its decisions — drifted somewhere far away. The old member-owned forms were flawed, closed to too many; but instead of opening them, we replaced them with systems that cover more people and belong to no one. Coverage rose. Ownership fell. And what a community doesn't own, it can't steer.
The cost compounds by generation. Of Americans born in 1940, nine in ten went on to earn more than their parents. For those born in the 1980s, it's a coin flip.
The odds are stacked. They are not fixed. We even know what flips them: structure. Most new ventures don't survive the decade — community-owned ones included. But side by side, a cooperative is roughly twice as likely as a conventional business to still be standing at five years — and a century and a half of documented failures tells us exactly how co-ops die when they do: three missing locks, not a broken model. Every cohort that collapsed en masse built alone — no federation, no community finance, no locks. So we build with the structure in from the start.
Communities have rebuilt their odds before — and the rebuild starts the same way every time: with the seeing.
Seeing, acting, governing — the work of what we call bioregional acceleration.
See the work →The research
What the research says about seeing, acting and governing, and what we take from it for the work. Every finding names its source.
A review of 146 randomized studies of experimental disclosure (expressing thoughts and feelings about personal, meaningful topics) found a small average benefit.
That supports our focus on specific uses, such as reflection and reviewing progress, rather than promises to change anyone's life.
Frattaroli, 2006, review of 146 randomized studies
Across 138 randomized studies, encouraging people to monitor their progress improved how well they reached their goals, more so when progress was physically recorded.
Harkin et al., 2016, 138 randomized studies
A review of 46 samples found that properly conducted debriefs of individuals and teams (structured reviews of performance) improved effectiveness, which the authors described as roughly 20–25 percent.
So we mean a shared record to be read and discussed, not just filed.
Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013, 46 samples
In a study of 51 work teams, psychological safety (such as feeling safe admitting mistakes) was associated with learning behavior.
That's why control over sharing is a design requirement for the prototype.
Edmondson, 1999, 51 work teams
Scott warns that top-down efforts to make a place easier to administer can erode local knowledge when they override the people who live there.
Our design goal is for people and communities to have authority over records about them and how those records are reused, in line with the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.
Scott, Seeing Like a State, 1998; Carroll et al., 2020 (CARE Principles)
Research on UK COVID mutual-aid groups that kept going highlighted continued attention to real needs, regular meetings, care for the organizers themselves, and connections with existing community organizations.
Our wider reading of cases also suggests value in one concrete, recurring service and a small coordinating core.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021 (UK mutual-aid groups); our research, 2026
Burnout can reflect work that exceeds the labor available, and self-care alone can't close that gap.
Our reading of longer-lived groups suggests that sharing and rotating responsibilities may help.
Spade, Mutual Aid, 2020; our research, 2026
In a study of 25 collective-impact initiatives, 20 showed population-level change on at least one outcome, and shared agendas and coordination support were among the most developed practices.
The study doesn't show that the initiatives alone caused those changes.
ORS Impact and Spark Policy Institute, 2018, 25-site study
A 2018 review of asset-based community development, a widely used approach, found no papers focused on people with long-term health conditions, leaving its health benefits for that group unestablished in that review.
One lesson we take from how often stories outrun evidence: record what didn't work, not only what did.
Blickem et al., 2018, realist review
Existing arrangements offer useful ways to organize decisions: bylaws define continuing responsibilities, meeting rules provide ways to challenge decisions, consent methods use objections to improve proposals, and cooperatives connect ownership to members.
Our research doesn't yet include a matched study of community outcomes across the seven arrangements we compared, so we don't claim ours would do better.
Our research, 2026
Ostrom studied long-lived arrangements for shared resources; among their principles were participation in changing the rules, accessible local ways to settle disputes, and, for larger systems, groups connected across levels.
Our research proposes further safeguards for shared information and relationships, including the right to decline participation and protection against surveillance.
Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 1990; our research, 2026
Our case reading suggests that restrictions on selling shared assets need credible enforcement to hold; where members can vote to sell and split the proceeds, some do.
We haven't established that those protections guarantee a cooperative will endure.
Our research, 2026
Long-running cooperative networks in our review developed shared finance early, including Mondragon's bank in 1959 and Desjardins in Quebec in 1900.
Our research, 2026
Our case reading also raised a succession risk: work can become too dependent on what one founder knows.
So we plan to document governance decisions and practice handing responsibility on.
Our research, 2026
Mindful Living Communities