We’d like to share what we’ve learned – especially what we, along with many excellent and talented colleagues, have learned over the past eight years. In turn, we are sharing a percentage of all workshop income with the Totnes REconomy Project.
The New Entrepreneur – local, ethical, ecological, resilient
This intensive workshop is designed to stimulate, inspire, and support you as you develop your business idea. What does it mean to be a ‘local entreprenuer’? the kind that these times call for? Ethical, ecological, resilient – the new entrepreneur seeks to be part of the solution, starting up ventures that create livelihoods, benefit communities of people and living things, and will be economically self sustaining.
This workshop can run as one or two full-day session, focusing on four themes: Leadership & Values, Innovation & Networks, Models, and ‘Pitching’ for Resources. Includes interactive discussion, handouts and resources. The two day workshop offers more time for prototyping and developing your project.
How to Transform Your Local Economy in One Day
This one-day training delivers the essential know how to undertake and run your own Local Entrepreneur Forum and a fuller ‘community-supported entrepreneurism’ strategy. It’s delivered in three sections:
- Preparing the Soil – assessing current state of readiness and developing plans to build fertile conditions for a successful LEF – relationships, networks, funding, etc.
- Planting the Seed – planning and implementing your first event, including timeline, communications, programme, recruiting and coaching,
- Growing the Garden – leveraging the LEF into a broader community-led economic strategy.
Recommended for social enterprise networks, development and regeneration NGOs, community groups, and local authorities. This one or two day training delivers practical step by step instruction and advice based on 8 years experience with this approach. It includes online resources.
Skilling Up For Local Economic Resilience
This two or three day course is designed for members of community groups, organisers, activists, local leaders – anyone, really, who is interested in making real economic change where they live. Based on our experience in Totnes and elsewhere, this course will include useful ideas and theories, and lots of practical tools. Participants will come away with a solid understanding of local economics, how to organise change making project, and a real feeling of confidence. Topics include:
- economics – assumptions and aspirations
- community engagement
- key ideas in local economics
- mapping and assessments
- networks beyond the usual suspects
- messages and frames
- design charrette
Recommended for community organizers, activists, entrepreneurs, civic leaders – anyone who is interested in making real economic change right where they live. Participants will come away with a solid understanding of local economics, how to organize projects, and a real feeling of confidence.
Citizen-Led Economic Transition Seminar
We’re in times of climate emergency which requires rapid transformation of our economic systems – the ways in which we meet our needs for food, shelter, energy, culture, and so on. We must change rapidly while we also create the conditions for long term adaption, regeneration and an ecologically wise society. This framework provides a guide for actions at the local and bioregional level for developing adaptive, resilient economics, led by citizens and supported by community groups, local governments, anchor institutions and transition-oriented enterprises. It asks us to think in terms of systems, creating the conditions for new economic actors, relationships and models to emerge and thrive.
In this seminar, we’ll cover:
- how to catalyse the emergence of a transition-oriented entrepreneurial culture
- ways to mobilize local know how and capital
- approaches to develop ‘enterprising ecosystems’ that provide productive pathways to change
- how to weave ‘convergence’ networks, aligning the work of diverse communities of change makers and creating the conditions for innovation and diffusion
- complementarities with social enterprise, solidarity economy, commons, ‘community wealth building’, ‘community economic development’, Degrowth and other ‘new economy’ approaches
- theories of change and strategic development
Participants will bring their own questions and challenges to be addressed in the seminar, learning together how to apply this framework to their own places and contexts. Recommended for local economy activists and organisers, members of local government agencies, academics, enterprise leaders.
Enterprising Ecosystems 