This is an excerpt from The Nation.com/blogs. Click on link to read entire article.

Chuck Collins, co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, describes the difference between this financial crisis and those of the past.

“The risk of this economic crisis is that people stay isolated, hunkered down and afraid,” Collins says. “What’s different from the serious economic crises of the past is the much greater potential for fragmentation and isolation–because we’ve lived through a couple generations of ‘you are on your own’ economics. So the idea that we can trust any kind of shared response is broken.”

That’s why in January 2009 the Institute for Policy Studies piloted Common Security Clubs to break through the isolation, and bring people together to learn, help one another increase their economic security, and ultimately take political action. The clubs are not an effort to turn away from government, in fact they are in part an effort to develop the skills and solidarity needed to advocate for a government that work for the common good.

“It’s a way to organize the vast, anxious, unconnected public,” Collins says. “It’s really important to get people together, away from their isolation, and the sense that they should figure this out on their own. Learning together–people learn the economy is not a weathered event here, people caused this economic crisis, this could have been prevented. Now we have to get active to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”