Bootstrapping Enterprises Scheming

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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

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

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?