Real opportunities for community sustainability - if interested in change where do we begin?

We are long overdue for an arena of public discourse for making real change. The Internet has been around now and I have yet to witness a real viability for society as a result. On it I cannot find any real model to follow or movement to assist in that will get me out of the entrapment of the work/rent/debt/commute.
Yes, sustainability and permaculture information is out there and we've read all about it. We've gardened in buckets and in tiny marginalized random lots around town. Looking to make the next step, there is no path where one should obviously be. The sustainability movement cannot see the forest for the trees.
Typically in the eco-movement, the concurring phase of conscious development becomes someone buying land and building their permaculture vision - this is a fundamentally flawed end as it is mutually exclusive from community and an option only for those who can afford it.
The next most visible path is toward intentional communities, communes and cooperatives. Scrap intentional communities off the list first-off because many have $100,000 buy-ins that are not possible for most people. The "Commune" has bad connotations in the public mind, and worse yet is they are almost always hiding out in the country, away from the the public. Cooperatives seem more effective, especially in economic endeavors, but most housing cooperative options seem to be the tract-style intentional communities with "shared kitchens," previously mentioned. The remaineder of housing cooperatives, especially in urban areas are simply more roomates with a couple of chickens in the yard.
Somewhere the eco-movement will need to initiate a serious grassroots effort that combines the toughest philosophical lessons of dettachment, selflessness and sacrifice to shake-up its majority contigent of hipster/artists/activists into waking up from their dreamspell of what is essentially - "having fun losing" - examples being Buring Man, summer music festivals, shows, raves, protests that have been reduced to becoming scenes where people go to be seen and get laid. Any event, movement or action that does not reach out in a positive manner to the common person unfamiliar with the subculture, is not going to succeed.
Perhaps the environmental movement could take a lesson from immigrant business networks. Here successful established entrepreneurs and future immigrants all pay into a system or pool their resources and money together, outside of the bank control, and help those lower members struggling to advance. When the lower members succeed they continue to pay into the system to help those that were once in their situatation.
I think I'll go talk to the local Mong strawberry farmers about this right now.