Dear OSList: I would like to share this white paper with all of you about a survey we conducted over the last year about applying self-organizing methods to the formidable challenges facing communities to generate sustainable energy and economies. This field survey represents an interdisciplinary effort to introduce change management and OD thinking into the mix now mostly dominated by energy engineers and finance people. I thank members of this list for responding to my solicitation last year to be survey participants, and in the interests of confidentiality will thank you each individually. We are most excited because we did this research in NYC amongst Wall St and other observers for whom these concepts are quite new, and maybe even quite shocking!
There is a rich opportunity for beginning-to-end community co-design methods to fill a gap that actually addresses the needs of communities, activist movements, project developers, politicians, AND institutional investors with ethical, social, patient capital objectives, or just plain reliable predictable actuarial long-term fixed-income tax-advantaged returns unattainable the last 10 years due to the legal/regulatory and other "socially constructed" conditions (I will use that term with you) of US democracy at the moment! I am delighted to share this white paper with you and show the tangible links of self-organizing principles to real returns in the coming years. We are pleased to announce the release of our survey "Real Returns: Linking Communities to Investors for Sustainable Development" produced as a collaborative project through the 2010 Cleantech Executives Fellowship at NYC Accelerator for Cleantech and Renewable Energy. This survey conveys the findings of interviews with mayors, town council members, city planners, economic development professionals, energy project and real estate developers, activists in all areas of sustainability including energy, food, water, waste, permaculture, and practitioners in multi-stakeholder and community engagement. The survey participants also uniquely include project finance and institutional investment professionals, with EU as well as US participants. The overall findings reflect an opportunity in communities for co-design of sustainability projects and greater use of management methods that can reduce risk and increase attractiveness of smaller deals to prospective investors. These findings also reflect an opportunity for greater use of communication and networked collaboration tools to reach a much broader audience for education, awareness, and knowledge sharing about sustainability options in every domain. Finally, we see an opportunity for innovation in financial services to reduce cost of smaller deal sizes in local community projects, and in skill building to originate projects and increase access to patient and social capital investors who are seeking stable returns from long-term infrastructure or local enterprise projects. The survey was developed by Cleantech Executives Spring 2010 cohort participants Brett Barndt, Wendy Brawer, and Lakis Polycarpou. We are pleased to distribute this discussion and findings to you the many participants in the survey who provided such valuable information and insight, as well as numerous stakeholders in the NYC clean energy, green economy, and sustainability sectors who expressed interest in these findings. We look forward to continuing dialogue with each of you and identifying opportunities where these findings for new beginning-to-end process could be applied in practice around the US, and with our participants from around the world. Please consider opportunities where these ideas and practice might apply to your projects. We would like to engage with organizations already active where best practices in community organizing and crowd-sourcing can contribute to successfully originating and financing new projects in community co-design settings. Please let us know your reaction and thoughts. We want to thank each of the participants for the time you spent with us last year, and we hope the results of this survey make a contribution to your approaches to doing business and developing new projects. Yours sincerely, Brett BARNDT Mob: +1 917 517 4726 http://GreenMap.org/greenhouse/files/RealReturns_whitepaper2011.pdf -- Seek first to understand, then be understood. Stephen Covey * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
