100 Minds

We are open to all ideas; however, we note that most attempts to end poverty are good intentions that often pave the road to hell.  We don’t believe in top down solutions or mass attempts by government to extract a program with good results in one town and mass produce it across the country or world.

We do believe in bottom up approaches by small but critical masses of people, namely 100.  100 is a marker, not an absolute. It’s small enough for each member to hear the voices and dreams of the others involved and yet large enough and nimble enough to forge a relevant economy across the group’s accumulated households and purchasing power.

If enough groups of 100minds formed in neighborhoods around the world, we believe poverty would radically reduce.

Where do we start?

We start by asking ourselves how our particular society and its antecedents accidentally or purposefully manufactures poverty.

Then we ask could a group of 100 people eliminate the specter of poverty for themselves and in the process create new jobs and engines around a underrepresented neighborhood.

Our group begins in Oak Park, a long impoverished neighborhood in Sacramento, the capital city of California, the 8th largest economy in the world.

The distinction is an important one: this is ‘a’ beginning for 100 Minds, not ‘the’ beginning. 100 Minds began 30-odd years ago in the mind of a young boy named Brian Fischer who realized with the innocent clairvoyance of youth that there are better ways for people to live in harmony with one another. That the current landscape of social interaction is a wilderness of superficial greetings and ‘not my problem’. That we must find a way to return to the mindset and character of a village, even as our towns and cities become regions and metropolises.

Villages represent the most fundamental building blocks of a society. They form because of a basic understanding that together we are stronger than the sum of our individual efforts. The health of the village is tied to the health of every member, and so we help and care for each other even as we would care for ourselves. Each child is ‘our child’, each grandmother ‘our grandmother’. It is only by becoming truly vested in the health and prosperity of those around us that we achieve true health and prosperity ourselves.

So we return to ‘a’ beginning, one of many over the past few years. In this beginning we are incorporating the use of a new type of village square, a place to speak and be heard, and to listen to our friends and neighbors. Other beginnings over the past three years have included finding ways to collectively influence the public process to affect the distribution of several hundreds of thousands of dollars of collective funds to heal and celebrate the street that defines the physical and intellectual spine of our community, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. For too long this legacy to the life of a great leader was left as a backhanded memorial, yet it is important to note that it was not even in the discussion before we began. Understand, my friends, we are just beginning to tap into the tools available to us. Together we can achieve the vision of the healthiest Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the country, and make Oak Park one of the most vibrant neighborhoods in Sacramento.