Community Usury Ledger
The Community Usury Ledger: Entry 001
STATUS UPDATE — AUGUST 2026
This post preserves the founder’s first public Ledger entry and the harm it documents. The operating model has since changed. Seven Years of Change is not asking households to submit their debts and is not currently promising household debt retirement or reparations-funded debt relief. The current Ledger page controls.
A public record of extraction. The first entry is my own.
This is Entry 001 in the Community Usury Ledger. I began with my own experience because I believe accountability starts with being willing to place my own record under the same scrutiny I ask of the platform.
What this Ledger is
The Community Usury Ledger is a plain, public record of where extraction is happening to real people. Not a complaint. A receipt.
The line is 10%. Any interest rate above 10% is, by the community standard of this platform, no longer the cost of lending. It is extraction. The Ledger documents where that line is crossed, what it cost the household, and what the platform does in response.
The Ledger documents where the community’s 10% extraction standard is crossed and what the available record shows. Documentation does not itself create a promise of payment, refinancing, debt retirement, or other financial relief.
No one is ever required to appear on this Ledger to receive help. The Ledger is a tool of transparency and a record of harm. It is never a condition of care.
Entry 001
Who I am. Geoff Barrett, founder of Seven Years of Change. I taught in public schools and public service for more than fifteen years. I am an Army veteran. I worked for the United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation. And I served with a nonprofit that brought traditional Eastern medicine, including acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, to low-income communities.
The core harm: a federal promise, delayed.
I qualified for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. I did the work the law required, for the years the law required. I have the proof that my forgiveness should have been granted no later than March 2025.
It was not granted then. So I filed suit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, with the Department of Education and the Secretary of Education named as defendants, asking the court to order my files reviewed and the forgiveness I had earned to be granted. There was congressional involvement in moving it forward. And on May 21, 2026, my forgiveness was officially granted.
The forgiveness is real, and it is granted. The case is winding down now, while remaining account, reporting, and case-resolution issues are verified before dismissal.
But look at the dates. I earned it by March 2025. The government honored it in May 2026. Those fourteen months are not a paperwork delay. They are the harm. And that harm did not stay in one place. It spread into the rest of my financial life, the way this kind of harm always does.
What the delay did downstream.
While that federal debt sat on my credit profile, wrongly unforgiven, it dragged the whole profile down. And lenders responded to the dragged-down profile exactly the way the system is built to respond.
A Capital One credit card that started at a 17% interest rate climbed, over about two years, to 23%. That increase was not a response to a missed payment or to new risk on my part. It was a response to a credit profile weighed down by a federal debt the government should already have cleared. Seventeen percent is above the 10% line. Twenty-three percent is well above it.
Four institutions refused to refinance my debt even after I documented that the underlying federal debt should already have been forgiven. Capital One. USAA. Navy Federal. Discover. Two of them, USAA and Navy Federal, market themselves as institutions that serve military families. I served in the 82nd Airborne. The documentation did not move them.
The shape of it.
Read the sequence plainly. A promise the government made, and delayed. A credit profile damaged by that delay. Interest rates pushed above the extraction line because of the damage. Refinance doors closed because of it. A veteran and a public servant charged more, and offered less, because an institution failed to follow its own law on time.
That is one person's entry. I am one example of a much larger pattern. The people who paid the most are the people who could afford it least. That is exactly what this Ledger exists to document, and exactly what this platform was built to interrupt.
Why I am first
I could have opened this Ledger with someone else's story. There are millions to choose from. I opened it with mine because the ethics of asking people to be seen is that I go first. I have shown you my dates and my lenders. I am asking you to trust a public record, so I made myself the first line in it.
What to do next
If you want to understand how Seven Years of Change currently uses the Ledger, read The Ledger. If you want to understand the whole platform first, start at Start Here.
Do not send Seven Years of Change private financial records, account numbers, debt statements, Social Security numbers, or other sensitive personal documents.
This entry remains part of the public record because the harm it describes remains part of the history that helped shape Seven Years of Change.
What now?
If you need help right now — Start Here
If you want to build something where you live — The Work
If you are still deciding whether to believe any of this — Integrity Statement