the implementation portion blew my mind. i have been doing that sort of work for over a decade, most of it in historically underserved communities and some even in those obama federal “promise zones”. i have gotten so jaded and burnt out over these years. people just need some really basic shit. like roads repaired. and safe/affordable housing. healthcare. or like non-exploitive organizations to help them aggregate and access market channels for their agricultural products.

but they don’t get any of that here. maybe a few thousand is allocated so someone can buy something from a national vendor. or a shitty company gets big federal money to build out their infrastructure and cement themselves as a monopoly on some critical resource. maybe some dogooder gets an insecure, but liveable salary to run around and not be able to accomplish anything because the grants they can chase to actually do material things are tiny while the big money grants are for only doing studies and other institutional navel gazing.

any money for organizational development is always shaky and subject to the whims of political economy. and in my experience, no empowering organization that may actually change things and threaten the stranglehold of powerful middle men is ever allowed. everything is quarter-assed and the big money never goes where it needs to go. the money flows in and then right back out, with very little to show for it at the end. and all anybody cares about is how much more money can get passed through, so the stories about what was done are churched up with juked indirect stats to avoid talking about how poverty, disease, and unemployment are the same as when we started or worse. so everybody with the necessary give-a-fuck-itis to do this work burns the hell out after enough years of seeing nothing get fixed but tons of money being made by the people who made the mess in the first place.

and then i read this thing and it’s like, “oh we just did the thing where we build housing for people and give it to them to use / rent for tourists, connect them with non-exploitative markets, and radically improve infrastructure.” and like it said something like half a million for that whole deal. they did all that with that. we would use 20x that and build like one showcase thing that doesn’t do whatever the people asked for and then walk away to let it rot.