KoinNews: the latest in the world of community

I’ve been rereading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This passage from Chapter 5 is shockingly relevant to the farm crisis today. It describes the early stages of the consolidation and corporatization of farms that continues to accelerate. Even more relevantly, it illuminates the systemic nature of that process, that defies any attempt to locate blame. Here, agents of institutional landowners are coming to notify tenant farmers that they must leave their land.

take what you need give what you can. The mini pantry movement activates neighbor engagement with food insecurity. The mini pantry movement is a grassroots, crowdsourced solution to immediate and local need. Whether a need for food or a need to give,

When I was ten, I lost the spelling bee to a kid named Jeremy, who once stapled his own finger to a vocabulary worksheet. He wasn’t trying to make a point, he just had questionable hand-eye coordination and a deeply flawed relationship with office supplies. Still, he nailed “chrysanthemum” like it was his cousin’s name,

There’s something reassuring about Stein’s Law, which says, quite simply, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” It’s the sort of logic that should be embroidered on every couch pillow or tattooed on the inner wrist of anyone watching the news while wearing a blood pressure cuff. At first glance, it sounds like

Nothing worth having ever comes easily. That phrase just sits there like a rock, weather-worn and unmoved, immune to trends and the latest self-help advice. You won't find it on motivational posters anymore because we’ve outgrown such earnestness, or maybe just lost the stomach for it. Still, it lingers, grumbling beneath the floorboards of our

There’s a tragedy in how mindlessly the days pass now. We get up. We check our phones. We pour our coffee. We trudge off to work, to school, to nowhere. We stay busy but we chase nothing. Not perfection. Not even excellence. We simply drift. Polite (sometimes) and tired and half-present. But somewhere, in the

They say, “Why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?” And by “they,” I assume they mean the same people who alphabetize their sock drawers and consider jogging a recreational activity rather than a desperate escape from bees. These are the people who meal prep. Who go to the dentist before something hurts.

The world is not on fire so much as it is smoldering in quiet places. If you look closely, you can see it. A slow curling of smoke around the edges of civility, the low hiss of something precious burning out. Not loudly. Not with spectacle. But steadily. The sort of disappearance no one notices

We grow up under the spell of numbers. Numbers in bank accounts, numbers on price tags, numbers that are supposed to tell us whether we are succeeding or failing in life. From childhood, the lesson is clear: gather as much as you can and guard it well. The more you pile up, the richer you

A time cooperative can be understood in the same spirit as the long tradition of SUSU, though the type of exchange is different. In SUSU, people strengthen one another by contributing money into a shared pool, creating a rhythm of giving and receiving that ensures no member is left unsupported. A time cooperative takes that