It is hard, but it's at the root of most of the things I do.

We grow food! Not enough for a whole community, obviously, I'm not a full time farmer. But enough to supplement for our neighbors.

We make pottery! Dishes, bowls, plates, cups, etc. Again, not enough for a whole community (right now) but enough that we're exporting pottery and bringing additional income in to our community.

We're making toys. Same basic deal as above. We don't make enough toys, or good enough toys, or a large enough variety of toys, to completely replace all external toy purchases for every kid in our community, but you can bet your ass that between the vintage and antique toys we restore and resell and the new toys we produce that there are some kids in town with just absolutely bonkers playtime.

We print and publish books. We get paper, usually, from a local supplier. We write zines and comics and we use those things to drive traffic away from corporate shit and towards local businesses.

We record music, we host shows, we press records and dub tapes and run a radio station.

We make TV. We do this both to reduce the mindshare of media produced by mega corporations and to extract ourselves from their pool of advertising. (I've talked about this since at least 2015, I won't rehash the whole argument here. Ask the duck for ajroach42 DIY Media.)

I work with an electronics recycler to get useful computers off the path to the landfill, and back up and running with FOSS, in to the hands of community members who can make use of it.

And, of course, we run Mastodon, Peertube, Nextcloud, Element/Matrix, etc. As a community, we contribute to open source software projects (financially and technically) and we run infrastructure.

And none of that is enough!