We want to change the way our society operates for the better — to restore community, meaning, and dignity to American life.
This requires more than just orienting our own lives towards giving. It means doing what we can to protect and promote the right to give for everyone in our communities.
While we aren’t a political organization in the traditional sense, we believe we can do this best by engaging locally in political efforts, to advocate for what’s best for our communities.
Our Policy Principles
Contributist policy is any policy that makes giving easier, and makes hoarding and leeching harder. Because of our hyperlocal focus, we don’t have a policy platform, but instead work locally to advocate for what’s best within each community's unique context. But here’s the kind of policy we support:
- The right to give — We advocate for any policy that expands individuals’ ability to play a positive role in their communities. This can come in many forms: expansion of welfare resources, better healthcare policies, worker rights + protections, grants for care labor, grants for effective nonprofits, etc.
- Free, not forced — While all policy has an element of coercion, we don’t advocate for policies that force people to contribute in specific ways, but instead ones that enable them to contribute in the ways that come most naturally to them, including forms of labor that are traditionally under-compensated (e.g., care labor, community work).
- Redistributive — We advocate for policy that disincentivizes hoarding and leeching, and instead gets capital to those who most need it and who will use it productively. This means we support redistributive taxes (e.g. land value tax, taxes on hoarded wealth) and other policies that make it harder to choose not to give.
- Democracy-enhancing — The measure of contributism in a political system is how many people are able to give effectively to it — in other words, to have real, concrete political impact. We advocate for any policy that results in more people having more real political impact.
- Hyperlocal — We believe, for many reasons, that the most effective contributism is local — that the best policy comes from within our unique communities, not from above them. So our primary focus is always at the local level; we advocate for policy designed by and for our cities, our neighborhoods, even our personal networks.
Our Political Tactics
We believe that, as MLK, Jr once said, “the means are the ends in process.” In other words, we get to a contributist society by being contributists ourselves. Here’s what that means for our political tactics:
- Personal, then political — Ultimately, the things that are healing to our society are just scaled-up versions of the things that are healing for us. We believe that the most powerful political force is personal commitment; so our preferred starting point of all political organization is figuring out how we can live out our political goals in our own lives and relationships.
- Direct democracy — Some of our favorite political tactics are ballot petitions, propositions, and showing up at legislative meetings (city hall, school boards, even your HOA); tools of democracy that engage people directly and demand specific legislative action. We also support various forms of protest as ways to rally individuals towards collective action.
- Work as a team — We believe everything worthwhile happens through community, so we prefer partnering with other organizers, as well as with politicians and legislators, over trying to do it all ourselves. In fact, if you have a political goal that you think is contributist, come talk to us at one of our meetups; we want to be part of the team that helps you make it happen.