Bootstrapping Enterprises Scheming

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Back to the Longest Night Festival


Participants

Discussion

Current examples

  • Denver Food Lab
    • Consciousness-shifting around healthy food and relationship w/ community
      • Foodies
      • Social Justice Folks
      • Econmically minded suits
      • Environmentalists
    • Food Lab is an incubator for healthy-food businesses
      • Commisary kitchen as a shared resource
      • Packaging food to sell at various places
      • Resources to share to help make a business successful
      • Don't have tons of resources to start, so building partnerships and what not
    • Partners
      • Urban Land Conservancy (could help get property/land)
    • Helping build markets for local food products
      • Got to be able to sell your delicious food
      • Create a marketplace such as a food co-op ... currently supermarkets and farmers markets ... but no food co-op
        • Dropoff/pickup location for Community-Supported Agriculture: CSA groups have good food and members, but not necessarily good places to drop off/pickup ... CSA dropoff slowly building into a marketplace
        • Problem with creating a marketplace is that you need capital for inventory
      • Even with CSA I still have to go to the supermarket for foods other than produce
        • Create a CSA that includes things like bread
    • Seed funding
      • The city's Office of Economic Development
      • Foundations
      • Restaurants (pay them back in food)
  • Projects in Denver providing classes around growing food closer to home
    • Opportunity for community learning

Bootstrapping SolSeed

  • General principles
    • Have a plan
    • With a budget
    • Do the work
    • Connect with others ... look for opportunities
    • Repeat
  • Specific ideas:
    • Consider having a commissary kitchen
      • Find partners who would run it
      • Could run food-related trainings there
      • Practical considerations
        • Proper drainage and ventilation
        • Harder if we have to build one ourselves rather than buying a property that already has one
        • Educated guess is at least $50,000 to build
      • Revenue sources
        • Hourly rental charges for people wanting to use the kitchen (maybe $15-$20 per hour)
          • Could base rent on length of relationship with client, time of day, etc.
        • Training fees
        • Providing extra staff for farmer's market booths
    • Having a cafe that brings people in to the community
    • Event space
      • Hub for knowledge sharing
    • [Other] ideas that match members' current skills
      • Ben: Software business of some kind?
      • Art: Community self-governance tools
      • Perhaps Mark's psychology practice
  • Types of business
    • Community-building/sustainable
    • High growth

How this relates to the SolSeedVillage

  • Brandon: The village should grow organically rather than laying out a plan for a whole city block
  • Figure out the needs of the community around the village site before deciding what to focus on building
  • Questions from book: The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
    • Do we have passion to do this?
    • Can we be fantastic at doing it?
    • Is there a model where it could become self-sustaining?
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