The System Isn’t Working. Here Is What To Do About It.
A Practical Guide to Unfucking Society
The systems we rely on are failing us, and we know it.
Not in an abstract, someone-should-do-something way. In a concrete, personal, this-is-affecting-my-life way. Housing costs are out of control. Rural hospitals are closing. Nobody trusts institutions.
The standard responses to all of this are predictable. The left says expand government programs. The right says deregulate and let the market sort it out. Both sides have had decades to prove their case. Look around and decide for yourself how that’s going.
There is a third approach. It’s older than either of those arguments, it’s already working in thousands of communities, and it doesn’t require waiting for anyone’s permission to start.
Housing Became a Financial Instrument. People Got Priced Out.
The median age of a first-time homebuyer in the United States is 40. In 1991, it was 28. That shift did not happen because younger generations are less responsible or less hardworking. It happened because the housing market was gradually reorganized around investment return rather than around people who need somewhere to live.
Institutional investors purchased 30 percent of single-family homes in the first half of 2025. These are not families buying homes. These are funds treating residential housing the same way they treat any other income-producing asset. When a working family makes an offer on a house, they are increasingly competing against entities that paid cash, don’t need the numbers to work on a family budget, and will own dozens more homes in that zip code before the year is out.
This is a structural problem, which means it needs a structural solution.
Community land trusts are one that works. The trust holds the land permanently. Residents own the home. When they sell, a formula keeps it affordable for the next buyer. The community captures the value that speculation would otherwise extract. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont has operated this way since 1984 and now stewards over 2,400 rental units and 600 for-purchase homes, permanently affordable. More than 200 land trusts are doing the same thing across the country. They did not wait for a federal program. They built the alternative.
Hospitals Are Closing Because the Numbers Don’t Work for the People Who Own Them
Since 2020, 116 rural hospitals have ended or planned to end their maternity services. In 2025 alone, 27 labor and delivery units shut down at rural hospitals. Only 41 percent of rural hospitals in this country still deliver babies.
These hospitals did not close because the communities stopped needing them. They closed because health systems, many owned by private equity, looked at the margin on serving small, older, rural populations and decided it wasn’t worth maintaining. The decision-makers don’t live in those communities. The consequences don’t land on them.
When essential services are structured around investor return, the places that are hardest to serve get abandoned first. That is not a bug. It is the system working exactly as designed.
A genuine community nonprofit hospital, governed by local members with open books and a mission legally tied to care rather than growth, cannot make that calculation. It exists for a different purpose. Rural clinic cooperatives and federated community health networks can pool resources across communities too small to sustain full hospital services on their own. These models exist. They are not the ones making headlines for closing maternity wards.
The Trust Deficit Is Not a Perception Problem
Only 22 percent of Americans say they trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Congress earns 8 percent. Big business and television news rank near the bottom of Gallup’s annual confidence survey. The institutions Americans trust most are small business and the military.
That pattern makes sense. Small businesses and the military are directly accountable to outcomes. A business that fails its customers closes. A military unit that fails its mission gets people hurt. The feedback is real.
The institutions at the bottom of the list are the ones most insulated from consequences. They can fail the public repeatedly, absorb the criticism, and continue operating because their accountability runs to shareholders, to ratings, to donors, not to the people they were built to serve.
People are not being cynical. They are being accurate. And the fix is not a better communications strategy from the institutions in question.
The fix is different institutions. Specifically, institutions that are owned and governed by the people they serve.
Credit unions are the clearest everyday example of what this looks like. Member-owned, member-governed, legally required to act in member interest. Any surplus goes back to members through lower loan rates, better savings rates, and fewer fees. As of late 2025, 144.7 million Americans bank with a credit union. The structure works in their favor, and they know it. That’s why they joined.
The People Benefiting from the Current Structure Are Not Going to Fix It
This is worth stating plainly. The private equity firms that own hospital systems are not going to decide that margin matters less than community health. The asset managers buying housing stock are not going to stop because someone asks. The financial institutions that converted from mutual to shareholder ownership over the last several decades captured real value in doing so and have every reason to maintain the structure that produces it.
Regulation helps at the margins. It does not change who owns the institution or what they are fundamentally optimizing for.
What changes the outcome is changing the ownership structure. Building institutions that are not set up to extract. Running essential services through organizations that are legally and structurally required to serve their members rather than their investors. And doing it at a scale large enough to actually replace what it’s better than.
This is not fast work. It is also the only approach that has a track record of actually working.
Credit unions didn’t wait for banking reform. They built member-owned financial institutions and let people choose. Community land trusts didn’t wait for housing legislation. They bought land and held it. Volunteer fire departments didn’t wait for the government to figure out rural emergency services. They trained their neighbors and kept the equipment maintained.
Every institution that works the way an institution should, that answers to the people it serves, that keeps the books open, that exists to do something rather than extract something, was built by people who stopped waiting.
What You Can Do
Move your money to a credit union. It’s the most immediate structural change most people can make. You become an owner, not a customer. Find one here.
Look for a community land trust in your area. If one exists, support it. If it doesn’t and your community has a housing problem, the model is proven and replicable.
Shop at a food cooperative if one exists nearby. If not, the National Co+op Grocers network has resources for communities that want to build one.
Give time to volunteer organizations doing essential work. Local fire departments, mutual aid networks, nonprofit organizations, and community health clinics.
Participate in the governance of any cooperative institution you already belong to. Vote in board elections. Go to the annual meeting. Democratic institutions require people to actually show up and behave democratically.
What This Is Called
Civic Mutualism is the framework for all of this: building and governing essential institutions through voluntary association, cooperative ownership, local accountability, and open books. Organizing essential services around mission and mutual obligation rather than investor return.
The idea itself is not new. It’s how most essential community institutions were structured before they got consolidated and financialized. The argument is that it needs to be rebuilt deliberately, at scale, before more of the infrastructure of daily life gets converted into something designed to harvest from the people it was built to serve.
I’ve assembled a full framework, including the principles, economic structures, governance models, and reading list, located here.
The problems are real. The solutions are not theoretical. The work is building them.
Adam Hinds is a retired U.S. Navy Chief, military analyst, nonprofit leader, civic volunteer, and independent creator focused on service, maritime affairs, leadership, faith, and public life. He lives at adamhinds.net.