Community Gone Viral

http://www.communitygoneviral.com/

Why?

Current models of real estate speculation, gentrification, and taxation aren't working to create the prosperous, and green communities we want. An enormous opportunity for change exists when people organize to create communities from the bottom up. After the hard work of creating a community is complete, awareness of what is involved is fully internalized, and members grow comfortable, the passion to grow and spawn new communities often tempers. We'd like to discuss ways to avoid this, ways to create an ever flourishing ecosystem of communities.

How?

There are many communities in the bay that embody sustainability, housing affordability, social inclusion, etc but there is not a funding mechanism which allows new communities to quickly and easily get started, and in turn spawn daughter communities. The purpose of this unconference is to explore the community models that exist, and to seek out new creative possibilities for making community go viral.

What?

3-D printers are fascinating. Why? It’s not the printers per se, but all the cool stuff that pops out of them. Similarly, we’d like to create a community printer, a standardized and scalable funding model that allows diverse communities to quickly get started, remain successful, and then financially contribute to the creation of daughter communities.

Focus Question

What kind of real estate finance, holding, and development entities could support the large scale creation of prosperous and sustainable communities?

Who?

The organizing team is Jacob Shwartz-Lucas of Robert Schalkenbach Foundation in NYC, Cohousing Coaches Raines Cohen and Betsy Morris of EBCOHO/Cohousing California/Planning for Sustainable Communities. Jacob brings questions from a group of folks interested in learning how best to apply the "Earth Sharing" principles of 19th century thinker Henry George to create contemporary communities for living and work.

As of yet, sponsoring groups include Open Door LLC/ Embassy Network, Shareable.net, SFImpact Hub, Cohousing California, and National Students of Cooperation (NASCO).

Participants include: