This resonates with me
I wrote this post some time ago about how a consumer collective in Japan, Seikatsu club, started as a neighborhood collectively buying better quality staples like milk…and then moved on to actually buying their suppliers. What actually made it feasible was locality, excess capacity and culture. So in Japan apparently there are a lot of housewives who have time and incentives to coordinate for better quality produce as they were concerned about the quality of food they were feeding their kids. I’ve been thinking along the same lines about how we could get those dynamics going in this community and one of the ways we can look at it is offsetting costs of living and pouring the savings into buying collectively owned assets.
I see some variant of timebanks as a possible way for community members to start building those networks and dynamics within their local communities, or connect with existing initiatives. But yes I agree with you that too much auditing and a transactional mindset makes this kind of thing less interesting. Perhaps focusing on clear actionable goals like taking control of supply of one thing that enough people care about could be a good way.