About 20km from our home is Msitu Wa Ndoto, the Forest of Dreams ... a forest growing inside an ancient limestone cave that was once beneath the sea. Inside Panga ya Saidi, people lived for tens of thousands of years. Here, around 78,000 years ago, a small child was carefully buried. Tools, shells, beads, stories, sacred places ... layer after layer of human continuity. Standing there I kept wondering: after all this time, what would our ancestors still recognize in us? Care. Burial. Singing. Dancing. Tools. Healing. Gathering together when one person or family cannot carry something alone. We lose forests and languages and ways of living, and that deserves mourning. But not everything disappeared. Some things travelled an unbelievably long way. If you are anywhere near Kilifi, please go visit and support Msitu Wa Ndoto. Walk slowly. Listen to the guides. It is really worth your time. This little video is from our visit to the Forest of Dreams. 📷 Read more about recognizing ourselves in the past and future: willruddick.substack.com/p/r…

If you are around Kilifi Kenya come join! What to expect: 🪘 Meet and learn from the community Sit together, hear stories, learn about Mijikenda culture and traditions, and bring your questions and curiosity. 🎶 Music, instruments & dance Discover traditional instruments and music, and join in the dancing! 🍲 Share an indigenous meal Enjoy a delicious local meal 🌱 Regenerative farming Get hands-on with regenerative farming and permaculture practices 💚 Your contribution Suggested donation: KSh 2,500 per person You are very welcome to contribute more if you are able to. Your contribution helps support Mijikenda community-led initiatives and Grassroots Economics' wider work to: * strengthen local livelihoods and small businesses * support farmers and local producers * increase access to goods, services and economic opportunities * provide training and community organising * develop local exchange systems * strengthen resilient, community-led economies By joining us, you are not only experiencing a day of culture and connection, you are contributing to a community-led initiative and helping create opportunities for local people to share their knowledge, strengthen their livelihoods and protect their environment. Come with curiosity, respect and a willingness to learn!

Join us for a day of culture, connection, learning and nature with members of the Mijikenda community in Kilifi! Come spend the day learning directly from Mijikenda community members, sharing experiences, and taking part in activities rooted in local culture and the environment.

You can support Grassroots Economics by staking ETH or stablecoins and directing a portion of your returns here: grassroots.impactstake.com/

Sustainable Finance Hackathon sustainablefinance.live/hack… #cosmolocal #commitmentpooling Share and Apply!

this is new grassroots.impactstake.com/

Sometimes seeing real care hurts, because I notice most clearly what is missing or what has been lost, rather than what we came from and what can still be nurtured. It is a little like a pain doctor who has never seen a healthy person and only knows the symptoms. Watching our daughter being welcomed by so many hands gave me a glimpse of what healthy social soil can feel like. Not to romanticize, just something I could actually see and feel around us. Remembering that these ways of caring for each other exist, and can be nurtured, makes me hopeful.

SeedRights = Food Rights Kenya High Court: Criminalising indigenous seed sharing violates the Constitution. State appeal now threatens this win for farmers.@Seedsavers_KE @BIBA_Kenya @Greenpeaceafric Read : josephsilali.substack.com/p/…

My hope is in neighbors and colleagues who cannot be hired or fired, and who often cannot be paid enough. Alignment there means visible commitments, shared limits, and repair when someone defects .... If that cannot hold, claims about regional, global or ASI alignment feels premature.

@grassecon could use some support here. Plz share.

🌱 We’ve been selected for @Artizen Season 7! @grassEcon Seed a Living Watershed initiative in Kilifi, Kenya is officially live. 🌍 Help us restore water, rebuild soils, grow biodiversity & strengthen community livelihoods. Support us here 👇 artizen.fund/index/p/seed-a-…

Data is not reality itself. It is only the part of reality that the system has learned to see. 🌾 Our network includes more than 60 ecovillages and community spaces. And almost everywhere, resources are scarce. One community needs to repair a roof. Another needs additional solar panels, better insulation for a shared space, or tools for a community bike workshop. To support this work, we create shared funding pools. For now, the mechanism is very simple: a community organizes a volunteer workday, publishes a report, and receives 10 USDC. But when we put all these reports into one table and visualized them, something more interesting than the distribution of money became visible. Some communities report regularly and receive a significant share of the support. Others are barely represented. At first glance, you might conclude that the first group is simply more active. But that is not necessarily true. Communities may organize volunteer workdays regularly without publishing reports. People may lack the time, energy, digital skills, or capacity to understand how the pool works and properly document what they have done. So funding does not necessarily flow to those who do the most work. It flows more easily to those whose work has become visible to the system. And this creates an interesting systemic problem. If rewards depend on reporting, while the ability to report depends on organizational capacity, the system may gradually reinforce communities that are already stronger. They document more → receive more resources → increase their capacity → document even more. Meanwhile, less organized communities can remain invisible even when a lot of real work is happening on the ground. This is no longer only a question of funding allocation. It is a question of institutional memory. What does our network actually remember about the work being done? Which actions become part of our shared history — and which disappear simply because nobody had the capacity to document them? And what can such a simple visualization tell us about weaknesses in the capacity of our communities? Perhaps the next round of support should go where organizational capacity is lower. Perhaps some communities need help documenting work they have already done. Or perhaps the reporting mechanism itself needs to become much simpler. And we don’t necessarily need complex accounting systems, blockchains, or dashboards spread across three monitors to see these patterns. Sometimes a spreadsheet, a pencil and a sheet of paper are enough. You could even visualize the distribution with stones on the ground. Accounting preserves the memory of what happened. But only of what was recorded. A good system should therefore do more than show us what it can see. It should also help us understand who — and what — remains invisible. Thank Will Ridduck and @grassEcon

No pesticides. Full protective suits. Lemongrass oil as bait. Kilifi County just turned 60 farmers into beekeepers in two days. 20 hives, 4 farms. One watershed getting its ecosystem back. 19-20th August 2026. #Kilifi #pollinators

70% higher crop yield. From bees not fertilizer. 60 farmers in Kilifi installed 20 hives to prove it. Pollination is now part of the harvest plan. This went down on 19-20th August 2026 #beekeeping #ClimateAction

Should @grassEcon replace Voucher with Gift?

What does a bioregional economy look like when local commitments, community pools, and national currency can be seen moving together? I made a short video walkthrough following five Chama pools near Kiriba and Takaungu across 4,606 public Celo events. It explores how locally governed vouchers, shared liquidity, community activity, and national currency can connect without collapsing into one currency or institution. There is a full article explaining this video and software (ask me if interested)

@grassEcon moved away from mandatory demurrage a long time ago. A decay rule that helps one marketplace may be unnecessary or harmful in another. We now think decisions about demurrage, fees, limits, reserves, and credit belong with the people stewarding each marketplace. In my view, this is also where Circles needs to go: Groups and local markets should be able to choose the rules that fit their own conditions, rather than applying one monetary policy universally. So who is it for? Not everyone under one system. It is for communities, producers, merchants, and local stewards who want tools to coordinate what they can actually provide and need, while retaining control over the rules. The point is not to eliminate hard choices. It is to make sure those choices are not determined only by who happens to hold scarce national currency. I put this more plainly here: nitter.net/wor/status/20882071826…

...why does nothing in the economy push fertility back toward replacement? Perhaps because the institution that historically performed part of that feedback was never principally the market. It was the commons of care. The contemporary fertility decline is partly a consequence of the de-pooling of reproductive labor and care. Modern economies have transferred childrearing from extended kin and neighborhood systems into increasingly isolated households while simultaneously increasing the opportunity cost and organizational complexity of parenting. Commitment pooling may reverse part of this process by making reciprocal care, labor, material support, and emergency capacity visible, dependable, bounded, and shareable across households.

🗳️ Vote for my @SXSWEDU talk proposal titled: “Community Exchange: Economy of Every Community” participate.sxsw.com/flow/sx… #SXSW #SXSWEDU