That’s why there’s a crisis in confidence. The narrative, belief structure and expected return from your actions and investments has been shown to be built on a false premise. Part of that false premise is that growth is something you can always and infinitely expect to continue at an accelerating rate. People need to build businesses now that thrive with lower resource expenditures, that serve people who now have less money to spend, and where sharing the resources maximizes their impact. That means things like coworking. Coworking for social entrepreneurs is what I have in mind.

When you work in a coworking space, your eco footprint goes down by as much as 2/3, since you are sharing space, electricity, heating, cleaning, etc. that is being used by other people during other parts of the day. City Car Share for offices. You don’t need an office all the time. You don’t use an office all the time. It’s better on the planet if you share your office space, not have a fixed desk that you claim as your turf.

But you really only want to do that with people you’d really like to be around. People who would help you do the things that are important to you, or that are doing important things too. So the coworking I have in mind would not let everyone in. Being the top sales guy for a web analytics company and an all around good guy is not enough. The bar we’re lookng at setting is that you’d have to be actively doing something to change the world. We’d be most likely to attract the people who are using business to make that difference, though a lot of non profit folks who are using the earned income social enterprise non profit business route would also be at home there.

We’d just want the people we think, as we meet them, would want to help to build a supportive community that would be open to cooperating with others on their projects and startups and programs, as time and resources allow. Committing to help another member five hours a month is not the ante, but we’ll be looking for people who want to help and are likely to need help themselves. It’s not a requirement, but it is a fact that “pathologically sharing” to use Willie Foote’s term, is a characteristic of people involved in this movement.

Sharing space together, with a lower carbon footprint is only one of the ways they’d be sharing, as I envision a network of social entrepreneur focused coworking spaces rolling out.

Tags: community

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under boundary crossing conversations, networks, partnerships, social entrepreneurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.