On August 6th at 7 p.m., you are invited to watch a film showcasing the pilot year of the local community-led fund called Kingston Common Futures.
It isn’t common to get to peek behind the scenes to see what a funding experience actually feels like. But much of this process has been uncommon, and intentionally so.
But let me zoom out for a moment, and raise a tension that is also quite uncommon to discuss in philanthropic spaces: Money is as vulnerable as it is complex.
For centuries, money has been used as a tool to facilitate commerce. And, it has also been a vehicle for extractive and oppressive practices, reinforcing an economic and political system that is top-down, zero-sum, and individualistic—prioritizing power over collaboration, hoarding over sharing, and independence over interdependence. Add in generations of ancestors from all over the world who have faced collective political, economic, and social traumas—famine, genocide, oppressive political regimes, war, forced or economically-driven migration, colonization, to name just a few—and we can begin to sense the gravity of the wounding surrounding power and money that we all share in, and the weight that we carry with us in our daily lives.
In the darkness of this grief, this pain, this anger, this disempowerment, this guilt, and myriad feelings in between—the healing comes not with closed doors and tight lips, but with compassionate acknowledgment within ourselves and each other, and doing our part to inoculate this deeply imbalanced system with the regenerative forces we wish to see in the world.
The design and launch of Kingston Common Futures emerged as a way to inoculate our local collective approaches to money and power with care, transparency, restoration, and deep networks of interdependence: To bring people of all backgrounds together to democratically apply, support, and decide how to put financial resources back into the hands of Kingston, in service of the common good.
At the core of this fund—even from before its inception—has been community-led input and decision making. The design process was a group of 18 diverse members of the Kingston community, co-creating, iterating, and sharing decision making to determine the final objective and shape of the fund. Once launched, the team brought on to manage the fund were not the decision makers, but rather the stewards that invited community-led projects, community-led mentorship, community-led translation, and community-led decision making.
Nearly a year after completing Kingston Common Futures’ first funding cycle with more than 200 members of the Kingston community, what has lasted like honey on the heart are the moments where the community opened up and witnessed each other: the application reader moved to tears by the passion and contributions detailed in an application, inspiring action; the mentor who remained committed to an applicant’s project long after the application; the confidence and pride an applicant exuded after submitting their very first application, with new knowledge and skills to lead their project to fruition; the heart- and perspective- expanding conversations decision makers moved through, ones that they will take with them far beyond decision-making day.
The money will come and go, but these are the moments that help us come together, help us heal, and help us—little by little—fertilize the social and economic systems we want to see in the world.
As a team of three, there were so many occasions in the thralls of our first year together where we couldn’t possibly articulate these moments with mere words, let alone our own voices, when this fund was truly embodied by the people who participated in it. And so, in an emergent fashion, we recruited Sarah Carlson from Growing Films, based in Kingston, to embark on what became a short documentary to acknowledge and celebrate the community and some of the many moments that arose during this uncommon and profoundly relational funding process.
This film is dedicated to each and every person who contributed their gifts, their presence, their energy and attention to Kingston Common Futures. Thank you for dreaming this up and bringing it to life. My wish is that the moments and stories we celebrate in this film offer a moment of personal and collective healing for us all, so that we may continue to dream up and do good work.
Amanda Cassiday was a member of the community fund design team, and the Director of Strategy & Development for Kingston Common Futures in its pilot year. She is also the co-founder of Engather, a gift economy network in the Hudson Valley, and a systemic facilitator and strategist working at the intersection of regenerative economics and psychospiritual healing.
