Working hard to promote localism and put the family back at the center of economic life.
Most guidance on how to live well: how to eat, how to manage money, how to stay fit, how to practice faith, is designed for people who already have some stability. The fitness programme assumes time and a body that is not exhausted from physical labor. The financial plan assumes an income with something left over at the end of the month. The spiritual retreat assumes a weekend free of shift work and childcare. These are not edge cases, they are the starting point of most people who need this guidance, and the gap between the instruction and their actual circumstances is wide enough that most of them stop trying or are left feeling defeated before beginning.
In many communities, the programmes designed to improve people's economic lives are designed elsewhere. Donors, governments, and development organizations decide what skills are worth teaching, what industries are worth developing, and what a productive economic future looks like for people they have often never met. The people those programmes are meant to serve are consulted, if at all, after the decisions have already been made. What communities are actually asking for and what they receive are frequently different things.
One of the most consequential ideas of the last two centuries, the ideas that reshaped how societies organized work, family, justice, and human life itself, were produced by people who spent the better part of their lives reading, writing, and reasoning, at considerable distance from the communities their thinking would eventually transform. The ideas traveled far and wide and the consequences fell on people who had no part in forming them and no way to hold anyone accountable for what followed.
Children spend a large part of their day with screens, stories, and digital content that keeps them occupied and moving from one thing to the next, when it could, instead, teach them to notice, ponder, wonder and look for value.
A great concentration of the world's population is living far from the land and have become exceedingly dissociated from it as a result. Because our food is packaged and our work is indoors and we rarely come in contact with the elements that nourish and sustain us, we tend to treat the vital resources with little interest, concern or understanding.
