Community Usury Ledger
The Community Usury Ledger: Entry 001
A public record of extraction. The first entry is my own.
Byline: Geoff Barrett Date: July 1, 2026 Post URL slug: /posts/ledger-entry-001 Meta-description: The Community Usury Ledger opens today. Entry one is the founder's own: a federal promise delayed, and the extraction that delay set loose. This is not a complaint. It is a receipt.
Today the Community Usury Ledger opens to the public. I am opening it with my own entry, because I am not willing to ask anyone to put their debt on a public record if I am not first willing to put mine.
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 platform's response to documented extraction is reparations-funded relief. That means the debt is retired. Not refinanced. Not consolidated into a new loan with a new lender. Retired, so the household is actually free of it.
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 served in the 82nd Airborne. I worked for the United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation.
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.
The entries that follow will belong to households in participating neighborhoods who choose to document extraction above the 10% line and seek reparations-funded relief. Their terms, their protection, their pace. Never required. Always their choice. The cut off is $100,000 per individuals and families as for tax reporting purposes.
What to do next
If you are carrying debt above the 10% line and you want to understand how reparations-funded relief works, start at [Help Build This]. Tell us your region and what you are carrying. If you want to understand the whole platform first, start at [Start Here].
This is not a complaint. It is a receipt. Seven Years of Change draws the line at 10% because any rate above that is not the cost of lending. It is extraction. Help us write it down. We are building the thing that retires it.
Corrections, questions, or verification by an authorized representative: connect@sevenyearsofchange.org. Signed releases and correspondence connected to this entry are released only to a verified representative of a requesting office, confirmed through that office's official published channel, with non-essential identifiers redacted first.