Back to the [[Longest Night Festival]]
__NOTOC__
== Participants ==
* [[Mickki|Mickki Langston]] ... convener
* [[Brandon CS Sanders]]
* [http://artbrock.com Art Brock]
* [[Ben Sibelman]]
== 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?