Welcome to How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy and really don't love dictatorship, but who also know that democracy needs to change fundamentally if it's going to survive. I am Omizin Khalifa. And I'm John Alexander.

Okay. So let's let's talk most recent, and then we can go backwards and connect up to multiple different historical stories and future work that we're doing. Civic Square is essentially an organization based in Ladywood in Birmingham. We're focused on the scale of the home, street, and neighborhood. We're interested in this question and this inquiry of what it means for neighborhoods and the people who live in them, human and more than human, to be at the forefront of their climate, social, ecological, economic, all the all the transitions we know, that need to happen and need to be brought forth or that we're gonna be forced into. And that question sits at the heart of all of our work. We're then really deeply interested in what it means to have the physical infrastructures to to support that. What is the equivalent of the neighborhood GP or the community library, the public goods, the spaces, and places that unlock, our connection, our skills, our wisdom, the resources that folks need to be at the forefront of that. And so so this quote is really

you know, more particularly since I've met Indy, which we can talk about later on, like, our in entire, like, working and organizing journey from my perspective, I've been in the backdrop of, like, recent bout of austerity, which has systematically kind of, dismantled, the equivalent historical spaces from our communities and neighborhoods to devastating impact, and we continue to do that. And so for me, it was really this question of, like, not asking for permission, but also, and, again, I'll talk more about the detail around this later. But, like, you know, throughout history, we've we've understood what it means to build infrastructure that supports, bold transition. And so I I got, like, really curious about what that looks like at in the British context. Like, what is it about, this? Because if you're born in 2000 onwards, you don't you don't know even the basics that, like, a 1985 baby grew up with. You don't know that a district nurse came and visited my mom every day for two weeks, or you don't know that the neighborhood GP was about many more things. You don't know. I went to the library after school every single day and took out seven books on repeat. Like, these things are not in the cultural memory. So for me, you know, there was something really important about looking at the context of The UK and learning about the journeys. I remember watching the play Bevan and understanding the story, from the Tredegar Medical Aid Societies where working class minors were putting like a tiny percentage of their salaries together to buy collective access to health care in this cooperative movement that through many, many different things and many tipping points, including the war, led to the formation of the NHS. And this kind of real interest for me was the neighborhood GP, one of Indy's colleagues, Jack, you know, remember, said it to me once, which was, what would be the equivalent of the neighborhood GP for this? And I got really intrigued by that because what I understood from that conversation really was how things like the community libraries in the neighborhood GPs that were actually born from, momentum on the ground for people, normally working class folks organizing against, current systems that did not provide them with dignity or access or infrastructure. And I was always interested in how that scale, the equivalent of the neighborhood GP or the equivalent of the community library was giving folks access to the tools, the resources, the dignity, the spaces to, to discover. Like, this word discovery, I mean, we don't use it as much anymore, but it was very, very, in the heart of our work to discover what was needed for this next for this next moment. And so that's always been a of a huge interest in mind. And when you start to, like, connect that to what we were seeing through all of the journey that, you talked about is there's this huge untapped, incredible knowledge, wisdom, creativity, ancestral memory in a city like Birmingham because these are people who've rebuilt their worlds out of, like, often catastrophic displacement and devastation, including my own grandparents and and many of my, peers arrive into The UK. And so I was always interested in what does that look like for for this time. And there was a time early on in the journey where it was like, you know, there are these intervention points maybe in a city like Birmingham where, we we're like you know, if you wanna watch a case study of what's gonna happen and what is happening, just watch watch Birmingham City Council, like, falling apart and too big to govern, its its, scale of of people and, all of the things that will seemingly everyday things that fail first and start to create these, challenges. And so for me, it was like, you know, what what, happens in a city like Birmingham when we know this kind of sell off of assets and other things were coming. So early on five or ten years ago, I could have said to you, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna reimagine the libraries for the twenty first century, and what they're gonna be is at the forefront of, you know, climate resilience and how we transition and unlocking the skills of people and this, like, participatory democracy and so on and so on. But the last five or six years, I definitely have, been in a slightly different space where I still believe those things are critical, but, like, they're not asking for permission. Like, they're forging forward and needing to demonstrate that new, like, what could be possible beyond the Overton window of today, I think, has become more and more critical because we're just we've lost that belief in ourselves. We've lost the capacity to do it. We've lost the imagination.

It's really about the social contract here. The way that has been is that we take care of our little lives and governments will take care of the big affairs. And we are safe, and we can have food on our table, and we have peace on our streets and educate our children, and we can get cured if you get sick, and so on. But now that doesn't work anymore. So what Emmy is asking is, what do you do in that case when when you realize that social contract is not working for you anymore, when you realize that no one is coming to save us? And her answer is that you step up and you build what's needed. I think it's the most civilized way that you can have, where you say I'm going to do it myself, but it's also taking back your power as a citizen and at the same time becoming the adult in the room. There is so much growth in that. It's like taking the responsibility when no one else, is doing it for you.

I would say that the thing that really crystallized this, though, was COVID. Right? And so COVID is what's directly taken us from this idea that we need to make our infrastructure and our institutions fit for the twenty first, twenty second century. And when you start to ask that question, you realize, hold on. What about the climate risk? What about wider risks? And so that question becomes deeper and deeper. But then in COVID, our our version of those longer historical stories started to play out where you could see the way in which, I think, you know, in in blogs at Indira many years ago, that last mile was not it was not more important than the other miles. Like, they were all important. Right? I always say, I don't wanna take over the brain surgeon's job. I don't want participatory democracy over how a brain surgeon is gonna do my brain surgery. I want some precision here, or maybe you'd have an argument a different argument to that. But that last mile was able to organize things that we couldn't do at a at a national scale. It was able to move to a scale of humanity and connection and problem solving that was different to what the state or the region and others could do. And so this got us closer and closer to these ideas of, like, the things that were, struggling in the national context. And at that time, alongside this larger site that we are transforming, which, you know, you put Civic Square in this into the any search engine, ethical search engine, and you'll see that story. But getting closer and closer to that challenge, dark matter in 2020 and 2021 released a load of blogs around, the the the system challenge of retrofit. This idea that we had hundreds and hundreds of millions, billions of pounds committed towards the decarbonization and the retrofit of our homes. This site of all other like, one of the first sites at which you experience so many things and that go on to create primary, secondary, tertiary impacts on your children's health, on, their their outcomes in school, have costs all over the place into the NHS and so on and so on. And then we've got these big, huge behemoth government government programs. And there was a particular one at the time, the government green grants. It was, a scandal in 2021 where 500,000,000 had been sent back to central government, and the the reasoning for it was a lack of uptake. And so if you're working in at the neighborhood scale with the creativity, possibility, and and deep challenge that we see every day in an inner city neighborhood like Ladywood, you're like, what do you mean? Like, would you mean people don't want warmer, safer, cheaper to run homes on streets that are greener and are, happier for their children to play on. I don't understand. And so this became like a fractal for me. That that home street and neighborhood, we've we're doing some really big things. But the home became and the street, this, like, scale that you could understand became this, like, site of just radical imagination. I was like, hold on a second. If the home is the place in theory where all your safety, dignity, start to life should, should exist, and it is the producer of so many outcomes, negative or positive, and it costs us so much when it's not done well. And you see the creativity of the of the people and what they want and how they want to be involved. How could this be? And so for us, the retrofit work was really like, how could we reimagine this? How could we get away from it being poor quality scandalous insulation schemes stuffed into people's walls with £10,000 grants and people knock on in your door, desperately setting up companies left, right, and center to extract as much out of these government programs whilst you're seeing the big six continue to extract profits, what would a different story look like? And we started to organize with neighborhoods and communities across the country. If you look up retrofit reimagine, there's a beautiful film of the second festival we did all over the country. And we just started to ask some different questions. Not that I don't think decarbonization and the correct insulation of your homes and good quality windows and doors and solar is is not important. It absolutely is, but there's such a wider story here about what it means to be able to unlock, the trust, the capacity, the creativity, and to make if we don't, you know, we'll talk about three degrees later. But if we don't have the time, carbon budget, material budget, we're not doing a good job of any of these top down huge schemes. We need to absolutely think about this, in a way where every penny has multiple benefits and unlocks many, many things beyond just insulation and new values alone. And so we bought a home. Sorry. We bought a house and, as part of a longer journey, which I I don't have all the time to talk about. And we've we've opened that up as a site of learning and imagination. And a couple of weeks ago, we had something called the retrofit open house, where we had artists, creatives, architects, neighbors, gardeners, growers, young people, educators, builders, trades folk, pot ceramics practitioners, people interested in biomaterials. Like, no word of a lie. Just a whole week of every single room of this, economists of this tiny, unassuming terrace house in the middle of our beautiful neighborhood activated, in the most, beautiful and creative way with people. Yes. We still get down to retrofit. Yes. We still need to decarbonize. Yes. We need these, the quality of our housing to improve in order to improve many other things, but it was being unpacked in ways that was deeply human, deeply imaginative. But also the thing that I think what people don't expect when I say that, when when I say all these things, people are like, oh, that's nice. Oh, that was lovely. Oh, god. But, no. Actually, people were thinking about new governance, new tenures, new ways of self owning homes, or, things like Fairhold or, people were thinking about, the climate risk in three degrees. And so this idea as well, just to finish, that communities can't handle it. They don't even understand the word retrofit. How are they gonna do anything else? These are all these are all games sent to fuck with us and distract us from actually what is in our communities, which is a deep embodied, imagination, understanding creativity. And what we're trying to do is just unlock that and unlock it towards some of the biggest challenges our generation face. And what I'd argue is that it's not small, quaint, inconsequential. It's the foundation of how we will build resilience, how we will build, new stories, how we will transition.

It makes me think of my experience with Mobdion Creative Youth, the organization of social impact that we set up and led in Tunisia after I left party politics. The pressure in this situation you have to know, especially from international donors and from how the system of making change works, is that funders always ask about the numbers, how many young people we reached, how many events we organized. But the quality is not really their main priorities. It's it's really something that maybe can happen on top as a nice to have. But we understood at Mogdion that if we really want to make change, we really meaningfully need to touch people's lives. It's not that you invite a few people, a few young, young girls, young boys to a conference or an event or a workshop, and you repeat and do that everywhere on the country, so you say that you cover the whole territory, it doesn't make real change because maybe they came to your workshop once. They heard about your message once, and they go on. They go back to their lives, and that's it. But if actually you invest in a local neighborhood, a local town, and you do a series of events and workshops with the intent to really improve people's lives and work with them, listen to their issues, but stay in the same place. You really you're really anchored, and you start building trust with the community. And they come to you and you and you start to build their relationship based on really the the trust. I cannot go back enough to that, why you're bringing something that they maybe never had before or never heard of before. And this exchange between you people between you and the people you care about is the beginning of the transformation. It's really where an ecosystem of interdependence of mutual respect, but also mutual growth happens. And in ideal world, it would be the inch wide, mile deep change everywhere, which means all of us need to be doing that everywhere instead of, thinking about the quantity and covering a territory and showing the numbers. So I think I think really in in the infrastructure of how philanthropic organizations, donors, people who invest in social impact need to change about need to really have a deep thinking about how they are supporting civil society organizations and how what would change they wanna measure? And if everything is measurable even, Maybe some things we cannot capture in numbers, but these are the most important thing. Things like relationships, things like trust, things like you really offered a new opportunity to someone who without your interaction, without your relationship, would have never had that idea or that opportunity at the first place?

human. So, like, in the second retrofit reimagine festival, which was me responding to those early blogs and being like, okay. This makes no sense. Hundreds of millions of pounds, lots and lots and lots of, energy at the neighborhood scale. And and I and we all tasted street democracy. Even if it was tiny little bit, we tasted it in COVID. Everyone's With, like, street WhatsApp groups. That was the moment where I was like, oh, shit. This is gonna be possible. Right? I didn't know we were gonna go backwards so far and lose the moment, but I remember, DM, doing a blog about how, the build back better, we should be through the lens of retrofit. And I I got really excited by this. Right? And so for me, like, we did that first retrofit reimagined. It was in this field, that conversation Lindy's talking about. Hundreds of people came. It was beautiful. It was in 2022, UK's first, 40 degree summer where we had, six thousand excess deaths across The UK. And that's when retrofit reimagined happened, and we were we were baking, and we were like, right. The question isn't just how you keep your homes warmer. All of these other things started to come out. Right? Then we did the festival again in 2023. And why it's emblematic of our working relationship? Because if you don't if you don't spend enough time with Indie, you realize you've realized something else, and the thing you're working on is completely kind of irrelevant. Right? So by 2023 and, like so you have to you just have been running around being like, what's the latest then? And that's why I often do like, I'll be like, well, tell me why I'm wrong about this now because I'm I'm sure I've missed a chapter. But this was a really critical moment because 2023, we go to five cities across the country to, like, really showcase the energy and understanding of this possibility around what we do at retrofit is there, and it was thousands of people. By this festival a year later, that's when Diem had done the early research and work to really bring numbers and detail to this critical idea, right, which is we do not have the carbon budget, and we do not have the material budget. That's the first half of three degrees. It talks about crime it's like you should be able to pick up the physical copy of three degrees first half, read it in a couple of hours. It's a top level of the climate research. As Andy said, we could go in different directions. If we lose the AMOC, then we we could go in a very different direction as well. And so the first half was all of that. Critically, in 2023 is where that kind of connection between we don't have the material budget and we don't have the carbon budget, and the reason for this is also linked to our historical emissions and our historical behavior, really captivated a community like us because it was like, finally, you could actually put words to be like, we are have been driving, his disproportionate historical emissions, and we both have and continue to extract materials and minerals at a scale that is, non nonviable. Right? This became really, really critical because suddenly, a load of folks who were not interested are like, this is a new age of imperialism. This is us extracting and the and the net zero transition in The UK, which is on the first few pages of the of three degrees. There's there's this critical part in in DM's research where it's like, the current plans for net zero would require us to do 600% more a year mineral and material extraction from places that we already know and can see in Sudan, in the DRC, in in place of what we're already extracting. So even if we did do the energy transition that we're talking about, it would, enact so much harm and extraction that before we even got there, as Indy talks about, many global geopolitical and other systems would come into all sorts of increased volatility and chaos. That was a game changing moment. There was this moment, just just so you know, we're sitting in retrofit reimagined, 2023. And I looked to my colleague, Charlie, and I'm like, fuck. I was like, we can't do what we're planning. We need to go back to the drawing board because because it was like we thought the question was, how do you get more people to want to retrofit their homes? We know how to do that. Excellent. Let's go. That wasn't the question. Right? How do we retrofit our homes whilst understanding that we don't have the material carbon budget to do it is a very different question. So that then gave birth to the six fundamentals, which is, okay, if we think at the street and neighborhood level, this suddenly unlocks a whole range of other creativity as well. Because we're talking about in a city like Birmingham, we're talking about half of the population having come from places and countries, where shared infrastructures, where, cultures of individualism were not, what they understood, where intergenerational living, where rethinking comfort, where every room being warm exactly the same wasn't, wasn't normal. And when you start to tap into elders in the country, they're like, yeah. We we never wasted and consumed like you guys. So suddenly, the conversation got way more interesting. And so the six fundamentals were to start to ask questions about what could you not in, like, a in a, like, in sorry. In fact, not not even the negative way. In a liberatory way, what could we share? What needs to happen at the street scale? We can't retrofit every single home to deal with every single different temperature fluctuation, every different scenario. We will never make it. So what needs to be at the street and neighborhood scale? And those fundamentals then start to ask the question of, shared energy systems, reuse, things that we all understand, libraries of things, of of tools, of resources, a laundrette for your street rather than 50 white goods in every single home. And, some of these ideas just they just speak to people's hearts because people are already annoyed, and they're like, when I was younger, we used to have a high street, and there used to be things that we did there. And they don't understand why what happened to the economic system to take us here. Right? And then so those ways in those ways in are deeply human. I can speak to the neighbor about, you know, what a street loan direct would look like or, what happens when we make and create together, and that gives the entry point in to a much deeper conversation. Right? Because there it isn't just street launderettes and warm rooms that are gonna save us. But some of these are deeply human, deeply connected ideas that folks, whether you've come from other parts of the world or whether you're older and can remember times before, you know, our high streets were entirely, captured by the the issues. And and that tagline that we have, there's a role for everyone, is not just a, like, nice tagline. It's not just public You will literally meet it. There is, like, a role for everyone. And and, like you said, humans are deeply needed. And this was another, like you know, indie really framed this around that time, you know, the these years where the you know, when you're first getting asked, what about AI? What about AI? I think you're one of the first people to talk about AI done done well will unlock exactly what humans are best at, care, craft, creativity, complex cognition. The things that machines can't can't do is what will become the highest human order value. That stayed with me. Right? Because it's it really stayed with me to be like, well, what would we need to be building and creating to show that, like, there is a fundamental and critical role for humans. It's not just like, you know, we we just what sit sit by and watch, machines take over everything and reduce our value to nothing. And so what what is this human machine relationship is similar to what what we're trying to do at at retrofit house or on the street is like, what is the role of humans and everything else? Not like we we suddenly go back to the dark ages because that isn't that isn't happening. But, like, how do people understand that within this journey where people are selling products to them, are telling them, like, new values and and about their bills and all of these things that, yes, all of that is true, and there is technology that's needed here that can unlock. But but you are fundamental to this and fighting back to show that you're And you can and you can be part of starting a street laundrette and a Yeah. Whatever that that become the spaces where some of this stuff is happening. I'd argue that the last thing I'll just say on this is Mhmm. Is those that are most, being targeted by forces that divide and, and are, you know, creating division and and fear and placing blame on asylum seekers or immigrants or others. Like, often, folks who have been in the trades, who have deeply skill like, deep skills and are being told, you know, computers are gonna check your jobs or immigrants are gonna take your jobs. What's been really interesting for us is, like, putting trades folk and builders and people whose skills are hugely needed because, actually, a lot of the most scandalous recent, stuff outside of, that's come out of the audit office about one of the recent programs in retrofit has shown that the work has been really ill thought, really poorly done, really, done in the wrong order, and much of it is gonna have to be repeated. And if you speak to a person on the street, it's like, I could've told you that. You shouldn't have shouldn't have put that over that and sealed up the house at least. Even done that as mile wide inch deep, half an inch wide moldy. And I think I'm gonna have to back yet, and I think that's really important in the context we're in, which is it's not just about all of us saying we're all really important. It's those who've also been most scorned and marginalized by the current economy knowing that they are some of the most important people who would need to be at the forefront of this. And that's, I think, a really, really important layer given the political context we're

This is really fascinating to me and also a bit challenging, to be honest. My my parents studied in France and in The UK and The US. And when they decided to found a family, like most of modern society in Tunisia, they created a nuclear family. So two children away from my grandmother's or away from my aunts and cousins and and and everyone else. And, of course, we would eat at my grandmother's house and Eid, which is the equivalent of Christmas, if you will, and other religious celebrations, even if my parents, and we are secular. But that would be great moments of community, and that all stopped when my grandmother died because my parents love their independence. And I think they suffered a little bit from, in growing up in families that were very numerous. My my my dad had 14 brothers and sisters, and my mom had six sisters, and I mean, six brothers and sisters too. So for them, I guess and this is how we were raised. Our individual houses are our cocoon, our nest home. We don't wanna share it even with other family members. It's fascinating because it's different. We cannot generalize, I think. But to me, for example, when I hear you speaking about the adaptation is going to to go back to that way of living. It's really going back to what my parents tried to escape. And he's like, god, no. No.

oh god. How do we do this? Okay. It makes me think of two things. The first is the muscle we need to build. You know? Remember the episode citizen as a verb with Baratunde and Elizabeth. They talked about what are the muscles of relating to one another in community. How do we survive in community? How do we share resources in community? And the second thing goes back to the social contract that's broken. We think of it as a role as the role of political leadership to understand understand the resources that are available to a society or a group of people. And in a democracy, you have a system that is in place to see how you allocate those resources and how you protect those resources and how you make sure that normally you don't destroy the planet when you do all of that. And there is now the sense of urgency that no one is doing it and that this fundamental leadership that we need is not happening. So what's the role of government in this situation?

we can hold ourselves together in this journey. Right. And what Indy is talking about is a whole different role for the state, really. In a neoliberal society, right, the government doesn't do anything. It's minimal. It's the private sector, the market who handle these kind of things, and then it's led by profit. And it's the consumer vision in a in a more extremist view. And then you have the social democratic state where the state can be a planner or a strategist. And so she thinks about everything that needs to be done, and the intelligentsia is in the administration that runs the state. But here, it's another form of state. It's another form of organization of government. It's not the ultra minimalism, but it's not the planning and the strategization either. It's really offering the right conditions for people to thrive and try out initiatives. It's a transition between the current system to a whole new system, a whole new idea of governance.

but it's a very different one. And there is something else I would like to bring into this as an as another contract, which is my experience of growing up under dictatorship. Because what I want people to understand is that this would get shut down in a situation, in in an environment like that. It would be immediately perceived as a threat to the institution itself that lives because it makes everyone believe that it's the only solution. It's the protective father that is providing for everyone. This kind of work might not be speaking against dictatorship, but it's doing something that shows that it's not functioning and that there is actually an alternative.

establishes itself, this sort of thing gets shut down. Either that or they instrumentalize you, and they can say it's theirs. And it helps the unique party or the regime claim it. And then you can shine, but only under their colors, and you would have to corrupt to be corrupt, to compromise. It's yeah. You would have to do something for the regime. In that place, you won't stay pure. If you wanna talk about moral purity, integrity, that place would become a place where you indirectly buy votes, where you give only to people who support the regime. You you you will only have the conversation that will happen to support the regime. If they compromise with the regime and the dictatorship, that division won't stay the way they want it. Freedom will disappear, and that would become just yet another instrument to make people servants in the subject story. Which is why we have to save democracy. Right? We have to renew it, but we do have to save

Yeah. Okay. So, maybe I'll start and then indeed build on this a little bit. So I think there's two there's two things for me. In the case of the retrofit story, it is that there are billions. Right? There are billions coming through, many different programs, eco, and and many others. And they are very, very from from a a layperson, which was helpful. I knew nothing about it, and I was just watching these grants go back to central government. They're very narrowly focused with a very narrow set of interventions that, are built on a range of different ways of, delivering those that continues to perpetuate, you know, the same people being able to extract the most from them. They're incentivized to do fragmented, disjointed, disconnected work. They will take forever to get all this insulation in one home every three seconds. The responses are really out of whack. These are these are real, like, versions of things that, have informed the six shifts of retrofit reimagined, with what people are saying they need. So it's kind of like, oh, you're overcrowded, and there's mold, but you're eligible for Windows. Right? You're getting Windows. Right? So there's lots of this. So first of all, in the retrofit conversation, it was about the money that we're already pledging to spend, to be spent in much more thoughtful and broader ways. We cannot first do all the installation and then do all the cooling cooling down and and then do all the windows and then do all the solar and then build 1,500,000 homes. And then, like, we this will be going to, like, the next millennia and won't won't have got there. So this that particular work, and there's some blogs on it, was about repurposing and rethinking more thoughtfully the money that's already there. And there's a second piece of work about the now, which we're working on, which isn't, again, the whole story, but there are also hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions and billions of pounds sat in the top, climate foundations and endowments of the country, barely touching the sides being moved at two to 3% a year. And we're also working on this, like, what is a more meaningful and thoughtful, not just a cleaning up of the symptoms in a charitable way, but actually a a a much more transformative investment and use of those resources to unlock a bolder story. So it does need money. Absolutely. And then it needs a bigger story about value, accounting, resources, the government's, investments. But this is just a little bit of, like, the now, like, the next few years, what we could do. Just before I bring India on for a kinda last word as well, the the could you say a bit of a word about community asset ownership and and the mycelial network and and and actually taking ownership of the assets rather than Yeah. Well, again again, this is like I I'm I'm someone who's like, how what does what would do we do in the next five or ten years over this big arc? Right? So, again, for me, through the work of Alastair Parvin and Open Systems Lab, and and many folks who've been talking about the land system in The UK, It is just a, again, a a no brainer. Right? It's like a as a layperson, not an architect, I'm not in any of these guys' world. I'm like, but if Alastair says to me ten years ago, 90% of The UK's wealth is held in the land system and everything comes back to land, then seems like a pretty good place to start distributing and shaking shit up. Right? So we started to really work on what what is the history of this to understand this and start to look at what what are some of the, again, deep demonstrations or neighborhood demonstrations of what happens when you decommodify. You, are not looking at land as an asset land and buildings and asset to make as much profit from, and you are moving them into, long term, holders of neighborhood wealth. Right? What does it mean to, at least today, remove resources from the extractive financial markets and move it into long term holders of wealth and value for communities. In other places, the land system and the land and buildings don't have so much power. But when they do here, when when one of the the main ways is you can have any goddamn agency over anything is to just own that high high street unit or, own that house. Or what does it look like to, at least as a first step, utilize all these hoarded resources to start liberating spaces, land, assets into the hands of neighborhoods, and then through the work with many of the guys, actually think about what a relationship beyond ownership looks like into stewardship and so on. And so it's not that, it absolutely needs money, time, resources, energy, but what it also needs is, like, some real kind of, like, like, ability to look at where we are setting that fire of money or that money on fire on, symptoms or on really poor quality strategies, or we're just sat on top of it, waiting waiting to go, like, when's the emergency and unlock that as well as a longer arc, which I guess these guys have been working on a much more. And I can give you much more, data about the the level of money. There is enough money. There is enough goddamn money to start making There's enough money. Yeah. Don't don't be told that there isn't. Right? Because to get much of this going, there is plenty, and that's that's a thing that I think we're often, like, told that there isn't as well, and I I just don't I can't get behind that. Okay.

This was How to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omezhinliefer, and produced by Joe Barrett. The studio engineer was Christian Kapwita.