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Hello Scott!
I gratefully acknowledge that sometimes a barefoot
Permaculture teacher can spark something new in a place-- after
all our
Institute is direct outcome of your course in Porto Alegre! ( As well as a
course I did before in Hawaii with Max Lindegger and Lea
Harrison). And I recognize that there are still places where this
first seed has not been planted. But also ( happily!) in many places these
seeds are sprouting and we are moving into another phase of the work. It was to
this new phase that I was referring.
I am also passionately interested in how to finance
these projects, and have come across a marvellous legal model ( which is similar
to something being done by the women of SEWA in India):
It is called "Community Participation Holdings"
. A group of some 100 people get together with the intention of making a
mother firm with will finance local daughter firms-- in this case specifically
to create micro-firms for new local enterprises. They contribute a certain
sum per month ( it does not have to be equal for all), which until now has been
between US$25 - US$200, still viable for a large portion of the
population, from lower-middle class ( teachers etc.) on up... After 12 months,
they transform this accumulated value( which is in fact considerable)
into stocks , proportional to which each person contributed. This
money is then used to help kick-start new firms. The stockholder can
propose new ideas, which are then evaluated by a professional team ( in terms of
viability etc.). The "community holding" thus owns stock in the new
firm, which eliminates or greatly diminishes the quantity of bank money needed (
with exhorbitant interest rates). This is also socially significant, as
the 100 or so members of the holding will be very interested to see that the new
enterprise goes ahead , as their money is invested too... Income is generated
from increase in stock value...
This is an incredible bootstrap operation, whereby
small investors can create a patrimony for themselves which otherwise would be
virtually impossible, while at the same time financing local
development.
As far as I understand, the legal structure is a
holding, no different from any other. But the twist is that it is
specifically applied to local development through small investors.
This model is well-established in the South of
Brazil, and we will start the first one here in the Northeast( in the town of
Tucano) in mid-May( to finance agricultural projects-- one of which will one day
result in a drylands intentional community). Luckily I found a consultant
in the South who is orienting all the steps ( via Internet!) free of charge...
In the same town a cooperative bank has just opened, so
financing of new projects, access to land, etc. has become infinitely more
accessible than it was before..( We also have a new mayor and a new local
priest, both a great leap forward...)
As to aid and big-foundation financing-- after
doing one project with this kind of financing, where we drowned in
enormous bureaucracy and paperwork, our Institute functioned some five years
without outside financing. This works to a point, but limits your
flexibility and scope. Fortunately in the meantime a lot of foundations
have des-bureaucratized ( a new word!) their processes. And there are some
NGOīs now who help create this bridge-- they administrate the funds. There
is such a one here which administrates funds coming from European
churches. It is just marvellous-- they know everybody personally,
the proposal can be simple-- you donīt need to prove the necessity of the
project with lots of statistics etc. because they already know the local
situation-- and money is released in 2-3 weeks. It is a dream to work with
them.
There is another NGO that we work through in
Holland which creates bridges between projects and Dutch institutions.
They know the profile of each financer, and can indicate exactly which would
probably finance that specific project, the name of the key person, and what
kind of proposal needs to be made. It saves a lot of time and energy spent
in knocking on the wrong door...
At one point Alan Bates of The
Farm mentioned to me the possibility of their serving this role, of collecting
and distributing money to small projects, as they have infra-structure and
a well-recognized name which can concentrate one bureaucracy for a bunch
of projects.. I donīt know if he went on with this, but it would be a great
idea.
Finally, a person just wrote us here offering his
services in making projects. Apparently was a professional at this in
Brasilia before moving to an intentional community, and is offering this help to
intentional communities and small local projects.
If we can hook up with this kind of intermediaiton,
then we donīt have to create the expensive infra-structure necessary to do so
much paperwork. And I would suggest that creation of NGOīs with this
specific role ( as the one mentioned above) would be immensely beneficial to
each region. Once this NGO has gained the confidence of the
financers, it helps everybody get their projects off the ground. And it
saves so much time which would be spent in fumbling around trying to find
someone who will sponsor little projects...
As to the big aid money, as much of it has to go
through governments, it is exteremely hard to have access, unless you have
access to non-corrupt government institutions-- which DO exist-- but not
everywhere...Well, Brazil is a champion in this-- as are the African countries,
I understand-- in receiving money for projects, making lots of advertisement,
and then the money slipping off somewhere. The latest scandal, which was
for the "development" of the drylands, is already computing some 1.2
BILLION DOLLARS which were simply siphoned off. As long as the aid
agencies insist in working through local givernment, we will have this kind of
problem.
It would also be very interesting to create some
mechanism for rotating funds, which sometimes is all it needs to get projects
off the ground. I know of one project in the drylands which helps farmers make
"cabbage-cement" water cisterns ( they substitute the red nylon bags
from supermarkets for the chicken wire of ferro-cement) by giving them the
sacks of cement and wooden forms necessary and teaching them how to do
it. In two yearīs time the farmer has to repay this loan in the double
amount of sacks of cement ( the wood forms are re-usable). They have
financed some 1,500 cisterns this way. They also finance improved races of milk
goats ( crosses of local goats with good milk strains). The farmer
receives 2 she goats and one he-goat and must return four young
goats to the project over a period of time. It is a form of self-financing
which is working very well, needing just the initial seed-money (no longer sure
of the actual numbers, but the principle is that the farmer always returns more
than received- in kind- thus increasing the number of people
benefitted).
For example, land in Tucano costs some US$50 per
acre, but you harvest more than that in the first year ( with the polyculture
model). A small revolving fund , with technical assistance, could give
access to land to a lot of people...
The problem is that all this takes time, and would
be a pity that the person who is doing the project( Scott for example) has to
waste his/her time in making proposals and fulfilling the paperwork. And it is
expensive for a local NGO to hire someone for this job,
thus increasing tremendously their overhead. Creating structures (NGOīs
etc.) specifically for this in each region of each country, could help
immensely to get small projects off the ground. Of course the
confiability of that structure is fundamental, because if corruption happens
there, the ship will go down. But in my experience until now, it has
functiond extremely well... This may be a key element to making things
happen locally, and to ensuring that money goes into the right hands with a
minimum of expense in bureaucracy...
A second advantage to this intermediation NGO
is that it knows what is going on in the region, the local projects ,
initiatives, local knowhow etc., a beneficial side-effect of their function,
helping in local networking.
And there is a lot of knowhow which
accumulates in such specialized NGOīs. The NGO in Holland I mentioned
above( "Both Ends") has begun to compile their information into booklets
and on their homepage which are great little goldmines of information of how to
locate and administrate funding.
Marsha
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