OS applied to Sustainability in Communities

[Harrison Owen]

Most useful an many thanks! I have forwarded to a wonderful group in China.
Hopefully they might join the discussion.

ho

Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
USA
Phone 301-365-2093
www.openspaceworld.com
www.ho-image.com (Personal Website)
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-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Brett
Barndt
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2011 4:21 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: OS applied to Sustainability in Communities

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

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