permaculture

["Marsha Hanzi" <hanzibra@svn.com.br>]

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 NGO´s 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 don´t 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 don´t 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 don´t have to create the expensive infra-structure necessary to do so much paperwork.  And I would suggest that  creation of NGO´s 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 year´s 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 (NGO´s 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 NGO´s.  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

http://www.geocities.com/ipbbr