When I first arrived, this seemed a vibrant do-it-yourself community of volunteers. There was an enthusiastic frontier spirit of local initiative, mutual help, communal barn-raising, spending locally and even operating outside the official economy through barter. An ethos of taking back control of life. Many people had come here seeking a way to live less encumbered by the conventional ideas and outside authority of the mainstream urban culture. Of course, change is the only constant.

This leads me to wonder why a local organization—essentially volunteer-based—might reject the services of local experts, offered for free, in favour of paying an outside consultant or contractor. One reason could be that the organization is not spending its own money, so why economize? It seems obvious that local projects need financing, hence the appeal of grant money. (Many organizations now pay someone just to find money.) Yet, to some extent, the need for money in the first place implies paying for services that could be (and once were) done for free by local volunteers. Already this represents a shift away from local autonomy, and toward a mentality of dependence on outside authority and resources. There is a growing litigiousness and officiousness in the mainstream culture, where any public project is subject to labyrinthine regulations, and where contractors and consultants must have professional insurance. This may be a product of the city, but the tendency is hardly limited to place or circumstance. Granting agencies have their requirements, hoops to jump through, set far away from our community, according to conventions that people formerly came here to escape. Money has strings attached. Complying with them ironically requires more work, and skills unrelated to those needed to directly realize the project itself.

Beyond legal liability, a more subtle reason to reject volunteer effort involves control. If you hire someone, you are the boss. They are contractually obligated to do what you have specified and to complete the work. If they fail, you can fire them or take them to court (more dependence on outside authority). Not so with volunteers. There is no contract, no legal obligation to see work through, nor to do what someone else tells you to. In fact, there is no boss. It’s a cooperative effort based on good will, good feeling, good faith, and good communication from beginning to end. In situations where those conditions do not prevail, calling on volunteer services may be less attractive to boards of directors than a contractual relationship, despite the cost.

This suggests a third reason: the breakdown of good will, good feeling, good faith and good communication—the qualities upon which localism and volunteering depend. We appeal to outside money and expertise because we can’t get along with each other on our own! Ironically, this tendency is self-aggravating. The less confidence we have in each other and ourselves, the more we turn to big brother—and then we no longer need to cooperate in the name of local autonomy. Divided by petty rivalries and suspicions, we lose dignity and what autonomy we have, subdued at last by the mainstream culture.

The general bureaucratization of everything dovetails with the general commodification of everything. Pandering for money to spend on consultants displaces practical skills that are dying out for lack of renewal. (Who makes their own house, clothes, or entertainment?) But the do-it-yourself spirit cannot thrive without actually doing it yourself. And neither can community thrive without cooperation, self-reliance, and mutual trust.