Community Discussion: Exchanging Goods & Services

Although we are unfortunately estranged, I have always felt my father had an interesting backstory:

Born in a coal mining town, he left his physically abusive home at 15 and lived in a car for two weeks. He was taken in by a friend's family and finished high school where he was a football and track star. Instead of taking one of the sports scholarships he was offered for a Big Ten school, he signed up to go to Vietnam as a Marine.

At Camp Pendleton, he was made a platoon leader. After bootcamp and still a teenager, he eventually led men through the jungles of Vietnam for thirteen months and was awarded two Purple Hearts.

When he returned home, my father possessed a drive to rise above where he came from and looked to education to help him with this. He had a natural "gift of gab" and he ended up winning a scholarship and a job from an outdoor advertising company when he presented before them for a class assignment at the community college he was attending. He eventually became the top salesperson for this company for a few years, but when they cut his commission because he was making "too much money," he quit and built his own outdoor advertising companies when we were all very young.

My father soon discovered people couldn't always afford the advertising he tried to sell them. To bridge this gap between what his customers could afford and his needed pricing, he set up partial bartering. From clothing, to food, to contractors, and sometimes entertainment, his wife and five children were able to have a life he was not given due in part to the bartering he had set up. With all that is going on today, I feel we can learn something from my father's story.

With inflation, job loss, and defunding causing so many of us to struggle to make ends meet, how can our communities set up something possibly similar to what my father did in order to help one another?  

What if we used our individual strengths and abilities to help our community and ourselves? If most people in your town/city would contribute their strengths and abilities, how could it change for the better?

*All constructive comments are welcome. We reserve the right to delete comments that do not help solve the problem or add to the discussion.