Our work had argued the case for creating learning resouces, as delivered in a one-stop shop for business development:

“In order for economic development to take place in any given location, the very first thing required, before anything else can possibly happen, is information. This information includes first and foremost where to look for the necessary resources to do anything. If new businesses are needed, knowing they are needed and finding funding for them are two very different things. The first step is to locate possible capital resources in order to move forward, and this step is no more and no less than information. Once resources are located, the next step is what terms and conditions are involved in obtaining those resources — more information. Once this is known, paperwork must be completed, business plans made, market research and due diligence conducted, and all of this compiled and forwarded to the appropriate parties. Again, nothing more than information. In fact, most of the work involved between identifying a need and solving the problem is information acquisition and management: getting and developing information.”

Bringing this model of business for community benefit to the UK in 2004, we approached ICOF and SWRDA with our business plan which proposed a model which invested 50% of surplus revenue to invest forwarding the creation of new social enterprises through local CDFIs, taking up the same role as in Tomsk.

Interestingly, the living wage policy that we embedded in our business model has recently re-appear under the label or predistribution. As we’d predicted, uprisings arrived on our streets 7 years later.

http://www.p-ced.com/1/node/76