30 Days of Blogging Challenge (Group Economics)

I had the pleasure of being a guest speaker at the Todd Capital Mastermind where I discussed the difference between group savings and group economics with the group. In that we observed how cultural practices like the ‘sou sou’ (a West African/Carribean group savings practice) has many times been co-opted to take advantage of those who wanted to do better but didn’t know better. We’ve seen examples of this most recently during the pandemic where the “money wheel” or “blessing loom” was referred to as a sort of ‘sou sou’ to gain buy in and ultimately scam our own people.

I asked the mastermind two very specific questions:

• What’s the difference between group saving and group economics?
• How are we practicing (or not practicing) group economics?

After a robust discussion on the differences, we landed a few consensus points.

1) As much as it’s about the money, it’s not.

2) Group economics is the exchange of more than monetary goods that include skillsets and social capital.

3) Group economics can only be distinguished from group savings by working towards a common mission or goal. It’s not enough to pool our money and resources to benefit everyone as individuals, we have to benefit everyone as a collective.

I gave homework and was given homework that birthed this project to write 30 days of blogs on whichever topic documents my day, my process, and my progress. So this is day 1.

Group economics.

A term made visible by Dr. Claud Anderson in his book “PowerNomics”. A body of work that gives me and many others the language we use to educate on the topic of Black economics and empowerment specifically.

Shout out to the Mastermind and shout out to Dr. Claud.