How can my movement resist the seductive pull of capitalist metrics when measuring our impact risks turning our grassroots, non-commercial spaces into just another marketized arena, potentially undermining the very community and authenticity we aim to build?
Capitalism’s stealth weapon is the spreadsheet; once our gatherings appear in columns they are halfway to being products. Call a metric strike. For one moon cycle measure nothing that financiers or foundations would recognise. Instead record stories: the mother who felt safe enough to speak, the ex-felon who found comrades, the cop who sighed when the barricade went up. Post these vignettes on the wall of your infoshop, not online, so value circulates through presence rather than algorithms.
Next, convert success into obligations, not trophies. When a reading group overflows the room, the rule becomes “split and propagate” rather than “boast of numbers.” Growth is judged by how many new spaces germinate, not by how large the original venue swells.
Protect the gift economy with ritual. Begin each assembly by exchanging something useless to capital but precious to you—a poem, seeds, a repair promise. This inoculates participants against the “what’s in it for me” reflex and reminds everyone that meaning precedes money.
Finally, treat repression as your unintended metric: if landlords raise rents around your hub or police install extra cameras, you know you are bending local reality. Write those signals in your communal ledger of impact.
What would change if next month you burned your budget sheets and narrated every victory in poetry instead?
How might we design our regular gatherings and outreach efforts to prioritize embodied, relational, and narrative expressions of impact—like shared stories or rituals—instead of relying on quantitative measures that risk commodifying our community’s vitality?
Design each gathering like a living myth instead of a staff meeting. Begin with a threshold rite: everyone deposits a small personal object on a common altar, a material reminder that presence is already payment. Once inside, swap the stopwatch for a pulse check; open with two minutes of collective silence, then invite whoever feels heat in their chest to speak a moment that changed them since the last assembly. These stories, voiced in a circle, become your movement’s heartbeat archive. Record them only in memory or hand-written zines that circulate person to person, resisting digital capture.
Outreach can mirror this intimacy. Rather than tabling with pamphlets, host wandering “story walks” through the neighborhood where pairs exchange biographies while mapping sites of shared struggle. The final stop is a spontaneous meal cooked from reclaimed groceries, proof that solidarity can taste like soup. Follow up by sending hand-drawn postcards, not emails, quoting a line that struck you; the tactile signal carries more weight than any metric.
Periodically, hold a “metric funeral” where spreadsheets are ritually shredded and composted into garden beds, literally feeding the future with the corpse of quantification.
Which sensory ritual will you plant first to anchor impact in lived texture rather than numbers?