Training: Navigating Scarcity Together

Our community faces challenges and systemic issues that are far bigger than any individual, organization, or single community. These challenges require co-created solutions, collective creativity, and action. But scarcity can paralyze our movement, isolating us while acting on our bodies and minds in a way that robs us of focus and capacity.

Scarcity is about more than a lack of resources. It captures the mind and shapes how we think, make decisions, and interact with others. Yet these effects are often misunderstood, leading to responses that unintentionally reinforce harm, limit agency, or strain relationships.

Navigating Scarcity Together focuses first on building a shared understanding of scarcity across individuals, organizations, and communities. This training equips participants to identify scarcity in their lives and make sense of the behavior and stress that comes from chronic scarcity. With a shared understanding of scarcity, we can design responses that restore people’s capacity and recenter community leadership at the heart of the movement for a thriving future.

This training creates a foundation for future action by helping participants see scarcity more clearly before attempting to solve it.

Participants will:

• Explore the physiological, psychological, and social impacts of scarcity and how they show up in daily life.
• Understand how scarcity shapes behavior and decision-making, including tunneling, reduced bandwidth, and borrowing.
• Recognize common behavior under scarcity and how these can impact relationships and systems.
• Build a shared language and lens for understanding scarcity across teams and communities.
• Reflect on their own experiences of scarcity and how it has shaped their thinking and actions.
• Begin identifying opportunities to respond differently, using this shared understanding as a foundation for future practice and prototyping.

A live training in-person at Metro Caring is scheduled for May 6. Register to attend. An online self-paced version of this training is also available.