Back to the [Longest Night Festival](/Longest_Night_Festival)
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### Participants
- [Mickki Langston](/Mickki) ... convener
- [Brandon CS Sanders](/Brandon_CS_Sanders)
- [Art Brock](http://artbrock.com)
- [Ben Sibelman](/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](/Ben): Software business of some kind?
- Art: Community self-governance tools
- Perhaps [Mark](/Mark)'s psychology practice
- Types of business
- Community-building/sustainable
- High growth
#### How this relates to the [SolSeedVillage](/SolSeedVillage)
- [Brandon](/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?