KommunityKoin, KoinPurse, TheKoinBlog

I was sitting in my car in a Target parking lot, watching a young woman do everything except leave. She had entered the car a full five minutes ago, and yet, there she sat—head down, thumb scrolling, completely oblivious to the line of hopeful motorists circling her like vultures around roadkill. I remember a time

It’s easy to forget that America once ran on company stores and scrip. Coal miners in Appalachia were paid in vouchers redeemable only at their employer’s shop, and the prices were high enough to keep them permanently in debt. It was a tidy arrangement for the owners: keep your workforce tethered to the very institution

There is a question we ask almost every child. We pose it lightly, with a smile, often in moments of calm or celebration, as if inviting them to enter the theater of possibility: What do you want to be when you grow up? At first glance, it seems innocent enough, even kind. It encourages the

For most of human history, society has been an intricate mosaic of distinct communities—villages, towns, religious congregations, and localized cultures—that functioned as semi-autonomous entities. Each possessed its own customs, traditions, and guiding philosophies, shaping individuals through the shared values and collective memory of their particular community. However, with the advent of mass communication, globalization, and

The bugs are gone. I noticed it years ago when I drove west through Kansas and never once had to smear a moth from my windshield. It was the kind of thing you don’t think about until it is missing. Then you think about it a lot. When I was young, you could not go

With student debt and everyday costs adding up, young adults say they’re struggling to cover the basics.

There are truths that lie so close to the heart of human experience that we pass them by daily without recognition. We step over them as one steps over a sleeping beggar in the street—not out of cruelty, but because the sight of them touches a nerve we cannot bear to feel. One such truth

You sit at the bar and watch the man at the other end. He is old. He drinks slowly. He does not look at anyone when he lifts the glass. He just drinks and thinks and waits. There is a way a man looks when he has lived his life the right way. There is

So there they were again—ghosts of Neal and Allen and Jack—beat-eyed and barefoot in the halls of a digital inferno, walking soft along the edge of a Wi-Fi signal, and they were whispering from the stars: “Everything real is hidden in the margins, kid.” We’re living in a time strangled by too much. Too much

A man wakes up before dawn, dresses in the dark, and walks out into the cold. He stands in the pale light of a bus stop or an office parking lot or a warehouse floor, and he works. The sun rises, the day passes, and he watches the clock because the clock is what owns

There exists a responsibility so fundamental to the integrity of our lives together that its absence renders society a mere machine—functioning, perhaps, but devoid of justice or soul. This responsibility is social stewardship. To steward is to care, not as an act of charity or sentimentality, but as the fulfillment of an obligation that arises

Walk into any grocery store in America and you’ll see abundance. Aisles stacked high with everything from imported cheeses to out-of-season berries flown in from the other side of the world. Every imaginable cut of meat, vacuum-sealed and trimmed to perfection. The shelves are stocked, the freezers hum with excess, and the end caps overflow

In the year 2030, society had become a dim reflection of its former self, not through war or plague, but through a slow, relentless erosion of critical thought. The world was governed not by intelligence or wisdom, but by the path of least resistance—by those who found it easier to follow rather than think. Once-bustling