If you’ve read either Ron Beasley or my ramblings you’ll know that we think that the problems that society faces are structural in nature and only going to get worse due to peak resources, demographics, deflation, etc. In light of this belief I am growing increasingly involved in ground up movements to address these issues at their foundation, which is working towards moving back to local structures in production/consumption of basic needs and eventually governance. I’ve talked and worked with some interesting people but I find the efforts sorely lacking and not translatable. This is primarily because these organizations are heavy on the emotion and personal change while light on the physical and structural change. Basically there are a lot of neat ideas that work and are good in theory but are hand crafted and not scalable. This just won’t cut it, especially with peak oil bearing down on us.
Due to my personality I am focusing primarily on the technological and business development to try to start translating this worldview into concrete products that can be installed widely and foster local economic activity. Let’s just say that there is a surplus of intellectual and emotional talent and a deficit of upfront development and/or consumer funds. I can give some specific examples in the comments if people want to know.
In any case, over the last few years I have had perused many venues of possible funding and always run into the same problem: if you don’t have a megacorporation that is interested then it is very hard to secure funding, and even though investors are more than happy with the technical side and potential, they are wary about the size of the potential customer base…especially because many of these ideas involve products that will cost $10k+.
It recently occurred to me while talking to local entrepreneur that we do have a very large customer base for these products if they could get financing and I drew up an cashflow model based on his product to show that it would work. That led me to the eureka moment: we should all just get together and form our own bank! If we could convince the members to move their deposits out of the big banks into this one, then it would provide an asset base to then make loans in this area of efficiency improvements, electrical generation, food production, etc. to the households (notice all the loans I’m talking about are for things that are guaranteed to have relative lifetime appreciation in value while lowering monthly expenses). They could also give some loans to small businesses in the field to help with all those needs. This way we’d have a good estimate of the customer base, have financing available for the products and have business inventory support; thereby making the pitch to investors on the development side of new products much stronger.
There are more details but the conclusion is simple. I am looking to start a nonprofit group that will seek to push this paradigm through community involvement, economic consulting, publishing, etc. Once a nonprofit group has been established (or we may tag onto an existing nonprofit group such as Transition) and has a membership base then we will start a credit union for the members of the nonprofit to serve its members’ financial needs generally, with a strong focus on the type of loans I’ve talked about above.
Anyway I have conversed with a few people that have quite a lot of influence over moderately large sectors of this community and I’ve been tasked with developing the path forward in order to make a formal pitch to their following. Is there anyone on TMV that wants to a) learn more about what I’m trying to do and hopefully b) has legal/financial expertise to contribute at least in the development phase? There is a major conference in Cleveland in the first week of November where people are going to pitch ideas and the winner will get mental, political and material support from the participants to make it into reality. I would like to have the idea fleshed out by then to pitch.