Benefits of stone soup: Maximizing limited resources

Budgets are tight. Everybody's stressed. Nobody seems to have enough time, money, energy or resources to share. How do we make the best of what we have?

Here's how: (But first a little story from old Europe)

A poor hungry traveler in a time not that different from ours came upon a place where there were people not unlike the ones you know. He asked for food, but was told no one could spare a morsel. "Could I at least borrow a pot and take some well water to make stone soup?" he said. Somebody lent him a big cauldron. He went to the village square, filled up the pot, lit a fire, then dropped in a clean stone he had found. Curious, the villagers gathered to find out what this strange man was doing. "Have a taste," he said. When they did, he said, "with a little salt, this could taste a lot better." Someone brought salt. Everyone took another sip. It did taste better. Another villager said the soup could taste better with carrots, and took them from her garden. The soup was better still. Another brought greens, and so on and so on. In the end, everybody shared in one of the best soups they'd ever had.

How did this poor traveler, with nothing but a stone, make a great meal that fed everyone?

*He got others to bring together their few resources to make more than the sum of their parts.
*He offered a clear vision - a great soup - and showed how to achieve the vision.
*He was the catalyst, but he let everyone else bring what they could to the soup. A lot of cooks actually made the broth better.
*Others saw success - the soup continued to get better - and shared in it.

If the stone soup story sounds familiar, it's because the same story could be told through asset based community development, a successful and influential strategy to revitalize low-income communities. Or the story could be about a group of people working to build a new program with little start-up funding. Or it could be about the revitalization of the South Bronx in New York.

If you were teaching a college course, you might talk about game theory concepts such as "assurance games" and "coordination problems." You might want to have your students read Rational Ritual by Michael Suk-Young Chwe.

But I like to call it stone soup. It's what I make when, as often happens, there is a lot demanded and little money available. Try starting some stone soup. Just remember to be open-minded about what others bring to table. And if someone else is making soup, please share.