I could have slapped myself yesterday when I realised I have been missing a massive opportunity for activating regenerative development projects with communities through regenerative syndicates
I had the concept but hadn’t really packaged it in my head as a stand-alone ‘thing, product, service’… Excuse to do the work
Every time we have been invited to come and talk to a business or community group, I have been thinking about how we can help their project by raising money and always starting with setting up an equity pool of local money instead of external investors so that the ownership and profits stay in the community as much as possible first
On yesterday’s beach walk, I was thinking about our construction syndicate’s strategy to activate the work in place and how we are currently looking in the Hunter Valley, and the thought occurred to me: ‘Why aren’t I partnering to invest with the local community through syndicates?’ Like… the very most obvious question I should have asked at the beginning
Impact and System Change Investing
Having raised $200k of the $1M target through my construction syndicate to start our regenerative property portfolio, it’s a good enough start to begin thinking of our strategy for our combined goals. My only mandate from them is to make money, and mine is to activate system change through the investment… these are not mutually exclusive concepts, let m…
I think the answer is twofold. I don’t like looking like a property developer because I’m not and they give people the ick, and I didn’t want to approach communities like I was trying to extract from them, which would be the case If I invest in a place I don’t live
On the flip side, partnering with communities in their projects would not only show that I have skin in the game, but it would be a much more enjoyable process for me and has the potential to activate projects that might not have come to life
I’m also talking like all communities are the same, or even each person in a community is the same, which is obviously not the case. I’m always going to get along with some more than others, and I haven’t even taken the time to ask them
The more I type this out the more sense its starting to make from a resilience model as well… What if it wasn’t a colonial model but a co-evolving of living nodes through a resourcing mycelium network?
What if we helped Regen Places (RP’s) in the Regen Places Network (RPN) create their own place based syndicate that partnered and invested in other RP’s markets to help strengthen and activate each other while creating resilience through the network through diversification against general market conditions?
What if this is one of the key drivers for establishing the greater whole of a regenerative economy from bioregional/watershed-based localised ones?
What if this was the step we’ve been missing in creating a national network of Community Land Trusts in Australia, by baking in the profits into nested community groups first to strengthen them to then establish CLT’s
What if this held true not only Australian-wide but as RPN grows internationally? We could start networking global communities through co-investment in land-based projects delivered through our lineage of regenerative development, activating more system change and actualisation by giving power back to the people focused on socio-ecological harmony, while developing each place into higher orders of potential as a reflection of their own essence
Veridian creating localised regenerative syndicates for RPN to network, to activate more communities through regen dev projects on the ground…
Is this a place-sourced model or a regen wrap on colonialism… I cant tell, I need to walk it out
Someone somewhere is developing, generalising, and extracting from these communities already, and the money is not going to the community or conscious of the environment, so that’s one frame
I think we just found Rupert’s role…
4:17am on a Saturday morning… might be a bit early to wake Willow up…
Fingers tapping desk…
…..
That’s really frustrating
Woooooosaaaaaaa….
If it's for under 20 people, isn’t open-marketed, and has less than $2M raised, we can have private conversations to set this up in closed groups and not get slapped by ASIC or need a financial services licence. Not sure on the rules for joint ventures of syndicates I’ve never had to think about it but will chase up on moday
Either way, it circles back to finding land-based projects in each RP… the hunt continues, and a long weekend ahead
