Independence begins with Sustainance. Without the ability to sustain your essential qualities of life (like being fed. clothed, cleaned and housed), every choice is dominated by the need to fulfill the basic target qualities and can't be free. Therefor the Joint Sustainment System (JS) aims to create structures that allows people in need to supply whatever little effort they can enter into this system. The goal of it being not to create a 9-5 workplace doing one job, but to fill in the necessities of the system.
A system that turns the wealth creation process around to stop gathering as much wealth as possible (usually in one point), but to distribute wealth as wide as possible. Why? Because even with a little value it is easy to fulfill basic target qualities of life, while it tends to get significantly harder the higher you move from the basic qualities. Unfortunately the usual production process applies only a very specific range of skills of a single person to create value and wealth. So people in need are often in a skill range not wanted anymore or ubiquitous (like unlearned manual labour in first world countries). JS turns this around as it aims to create synergetic and low-complexity structures to fulfill as many basic target qualities as possible. But working as one big cooperative and not as individuals or individual non-profit-organisations. Whoever joins and devotes work for the JS gains entitlement to products of the whole JS (in their area or even beyond, depending on how far reaching and complex the system is).
Individual Joint Sustainment Efforts / Elements might focus on acquiring second- or third-choice bakery products from industrial bakeries, allowing them to make official (regular and tax relevant) donations. Joint Sustainment Members (JSM) might then take care of transporting the donations to distribution sites, where other JSM arrive with other donations and prepare bags and baskets to distribute amongst the JSMs and with enough surplus even among Non-JSMs. The benefit is, that it does not matter if the donation has been brought by a van because a JSM has one and drives, or by JSMs shoving carts through the town. The importance lies in synergy and low-complexity, not in just-in-time deliveries and loading rates as for a professional delivery services. The variety is huge and basically any non-profit welfare or social effort (like the one described) could be integrated into the JS. The actual idea is that by helping one JSE the JSM can acquire Entitlement Levels to products or services provided by other JSE. Clothing donations, cleaned, sorted and repaired or even JSE housing provided and taken care of by JSMs. Higher quality goods like a refurbished bycicle (done by JSMs) or a permanent JSE Room might have a waiting list and a higher Entitlement Threshold, yet, taking rarity and necessary effort into account, almost every product or service provided by JSEs could find a place in this system.
The key element is that all the benefits inside the JS are not money related and are usually not having a very high trade-in value except for people in need. Something that makes it hard to trade the benefits of JS in for drugs. All you can get is food, clothing, housing, a bathroom and a haircut. You can also acquire experience in a job, show that you are reliable and hard-working. Plus, you are not doing it for some posh business-guy who turns your 50 cent per hour workforce into a 500 bucks product, but you are doing it to sustain yourself and people who are in need as well.
Anglicare as a non-profit organisation is just in the right spot to act as a Crystallization Core of the JS, as the system needs organisation of the JSEs and the ability to accept and give receipts for donation. Monetary donations as well as goods or services. Services like a professional plumber taking care of the bathroom in a JSE Housing Site, or goods like the above mentioned bread or like a farmer donating the use of his tractor at a JSE Farming Site. With Anglicare WA being part of the Anglicare Australia Network, the opportunities are even bigger, as with using the network to connect JSEs country-wide, individuals might relocate to help where necessary and find a new place, a new environment or even a new job. As a christian organisation the described system might sound familiar to Anglicare members as it is very close to how monasteries work to sustain themselves as well as to provide goods and services for the communities around them.
But in the beginning it might as well start with three homeless youngsters gathering surplus food (like fruit, meat and bread) in the name of Anglicare WA from Coles in Read Street/Council Ave to distribute it in the St. Nicholas' Church in Rockingham. Which suits the name and ideal of St. Nicholas himself.
