We fund the three things a community-owned business actually needs.
Our vision is a world where people work together to build sustainable and empowered communities.
Our mission is to enable community-based enterprises to develop, grow and create positive change — through facilitation, education, and seed capital loans or grants.
A local embedded facilitator
A trusted local person who lives the context. They understand the language, local values, and the local relationships. The facilitator’s success is measured by the degree the community becomes self-empowering.
Education the community asks for
Education that the community asks for. A community translates its vision into a strategic plan. This plan includes their identified learning needs. Examples of learning needs are: bookkeeping, product quality, cooperative governance, and so forth. The measures of success are the realization of the goals of their strategic plan.
Seed capital loans or grants
Financial mechanisms — loans or grants — for a business the community plans, owns, and manages. Some loan repayments are recycled into the next community. Many successful Community Evolution communities become trainers and facilitators for other communities.
What the process looks like
A community identifies its own opportunity
We do not arrive with a program. We respond to a group that already has an idea, a vision, and the will to run with it.
Partnership assessment and agreement
Together with the community, we assess the community’s capacities, strengths, and assets. Then we set up a partnership agreement and engage a locally embedded facilitator.
The community’s planning and capacity building flows from its collective vision
The business, organizational and learning plans are developed by the community. Training and technical assistance fill the specific gaps those plans reveal.
Loans, capital and execution
Capital is released according to the plan — as a loan (6% interest) or a seed grant. Collaboration, engagement, and resources are mobilized with partners, experts, public services, and private enterprise.
Monitoring progress and resilience
Members generate the data that tells them how they are doing across the five capitals: financial, social, human, natural and physical. The facilitator steps back as local leadership takes over.
See the model in a real community
Read field updates from the enterprises our partners are running right now, including dates, outcomes, and what is still unresolved.