Regenerative Communities

I'm currently in my second year of a two-year MBA program at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI). BGI is a triple bottom line (3BL) business school whose mission is to change business for good. Over the summer, we formed Marketing teams around entrepreneurial concepts that we will continue to develop over the school year and possibly launch in the spring. My team and I are working on a business model for Regenerative Community Developers, which will focus not only on designing and constructing developments with the latest permaculture technologies, but also on the cultural components that will enable these communities to live to their fullest 3BL potential.

Once embraced only by a fringe element of society, now hybrid models are finding their way into the hearts and minds of a growing number of Americans. Governments are recognizing co-housing and eco-communities  as potential solutions to many of the socio-economic, ecological and fiscal woes of contemporary society. But I believe we have yet to unleash the full potential in these models.

My teammates and I are forward thinking individuals, so we know in our hearts that communities must embrace diversity if they expect to thrive. But knowing something in your heart is not the same as proving it on paper. In my Marketing class we talk about demographics and the importance of honing in on our target market. But what if you believe that integration is the key to communal success? What if you need to target all markets to successfully prove your theory? Our Marketing professor suggested we look for some common wants and needs that our target groups share. So how about this:

We all want and need to feel wanted and needed.

BGI is such a cool school. Not only am I blogging about the idea in my Social Web class, but I'm running a creative session around it for my Creativity and Right Livelihood (CRL) class. My CRL session focus is "In what ways might we bring diversity into community developments?" But that is just the beginning. The necessary follow-up question is "In what ways can communities encourage ongoing integration, empathy and exchange?".

For the purpose of this blog (and my project), I would like to focus on the following demographic groups and explore ways in which we might find not only shared wants and needs, but opportunities in their disparity:

• people who have more money than time
• people who have more time than money

We all know that every demographic group fits in one of these categories to varying degrees, and hopefully we understand that people with more time may also possess other resources of potential value to the community.

So how do we make it work? How do we design communities that consider human resources as valuable as natural resources? All the pieces are out. Now it is time to starting solving the puzzle.