Big Barter comes to the Bronx
A row of folding tables has appeared on Fordham Road in the Bronx, near a bodega whose wall still bears the watermark from the 2032 flood — a faint brown line about four feet up, like a bathtub ring. The tables are covered in jars of preserved vegetables, dried herb bundles, hand-sewn bags, repaired electronics, and homemade soap. The vendors have small devices clipped to their jackets, glowing amber. The amber means they are available to trade.
Hand-lettered signs on the wall read: YOUR LABOR HAS VALUE. KEEP IT LOCAL. NO CARD/NO CASH/NO ALGORITHM REQUIRED. WHAT CAN YOU OFFER? (HINT: MORE THAN YOU THINK!)
Moving through the tables with a tablet, a teenager confers quietly with each trader. She is one of sixteen auditors — there to verify trades are fair, that the ledger is being maintained, and that no one is being taken for a ride. She reports to Amara Thompson, 34, a community coordinator for A-Humane, the organization that designed and runs the barter network now operating across all five boroughs.
“People think barter is primitive,” Thompson says. “It’s just honest. The question is always: what is your labor worth? For twenty years, this city has let the rich folks and their machines answer that question. We’re answering it ourselves.”
The person who mentored her from that point of view is Professor Daven Asafo-Agyei, 51, founder of A-Humane. His work for the city began with a call, received in a bunker.
A-Humane’s compound occupies eleven acres outside Newburgh in the Hudson Valley — an old farm with hydroponic grow towers, a satellite relay, a shared library, and a series of excavated rooms that Asafo-Agyei built as a bunker in the early 2030s. He was in there when his phone rang on the morning of October 14, 2032, as the second surge of the Great Storm pushed water through the subway tunnels.
The newly formed Office of Community Resilience needed someone who understood what was about to happen to low-income New Yorkers when the transit system collapsed. The secretaries and janitors, caregivers and dog walkers, and laborers who had been commuting ever-longer rides to reach jobs — they needed to understand how to support those who could not work from home, could not afford an air-Uber, could not weather a week of disruption by ordering in. Asafo-Agyei had been studying that problem for more than a decade. When they called, he had a plan.
Asafo-Agyei grew up in the Bronx, attended Samuel Gompers High School, went through CUNY while working security, and founded A-Humane in 2020. The security career shaped his ecological work — particularly the concept of the critical asset: the thing whose protection everything else is organized around. He applied that framework to the city as a place on a spinning blue planet. Why does so little effort go toward protecting it?
“Race is resiliency,” he says, sitting at a long table in the compound, sipping tea. What he means is that communities of color — that survived Moses’s Cross Bronx, redlining, the crack epidemic, the flood — carry adaptive knowledge the mainstream resilience industry has consistently ignored.
When the seawall held in lower Manhattan in October 2032, the displaced water went north. Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens absorbed the surge. The subway shut down for eleven days. The people who could work from home did. The people who could not lose wages, lost jobs, and lost the city. Asafo-Agyei’s answer, when the city called, was not what they expected: it was time to build Big Barter.
A-Humane had already spent years training barter leaders across the city in fair exchange, mutual aid, and cooperative economics — drawing on the economic theory of W.E.B. Du Bois, and on A-Humane’s own system of sweat equity accounting: a framework for assigning value to labor that financial systems had never learned to price, or had intentionally undervalued.
Big Barter is not informal. Each trade is logged by trained auditors. The amber and green devices indicate verification status. To watch it play out in the barter tents, you could easily miss the precision — the trades are warm, fluid, human, full of shouting and haggling. But the checks and balances are what allow it to scale. Asafo-Agyei understood from the beginning that any exchange system without accountability reproduces hierarchies.
Can it scale further? He thinks about it for a moment. “It doesn’t have to scale the way a tech product scales,” he says. “It has to spread roots.”
At the compound this week, a group of eleven- and twelve-year-olds from a South Bronx juvenile detention center is here for ten days of hydroponic gardening, remote sensing basics, and what Asafo-Agyei calls ecological belonging: the slow work of getting young people from the city to stop flinching at the things that live outside it.
One of the first things he noticed working with urban youth in nature was that they killed spiders — not out of malice, but reflex. “I ask them: why?” he says. “They don’t know. So we think about it together. The spider is part of a system. It’s been doing this for four hundred million years. The question is: what does it mean that your instinct is to destroy something you don’t understand?”
Spending time around Asafo, you begin to realize he’s asking about the Cross Bronx Expressway, and the seawall, and the barter table on Fordham Road, and the kid pulled out of pre-engineering and put into music engineering because it was easier than figuring out how to actually teach him.
Outside, the eleven-year-olds are in the grow towers, arguing about something, laughing. One of them has found a spider in the corner of the frame and is looking at it — just looking.