Natural Enterprise

Welcome to NaturalEnterprise.org, a website to help prospective community-based "green entrepreneurs" discover
• the work they were 'meant' to do,
• how to find appropriate partners for their enterprise,
• the essential competencies needed by the partners of a successful Natural Enterprise, and
• how to do world-class market research, to co-develop products and services that meet real human needs.

The site was originally designed as a companion site for Dave Pollard's 2008 book Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work. (The book is available through Amazon and your local bookseller; a synopsis of the book is here.) The book defines a Natural Enterprise as:
A small, collaborative, egalitarian, agile, community-based multi-stakeholder business:
• that responsibly and sustainably provides products or services that are unique and which meet deep-seated human needs in good times and bad;
• that allows each partner in the enterprise to do what they love, and what they do best; and
• whose partners' strengths and weaknesses are complementary, and whose partners possess, among them, fourteen core business competencies.
Readers of the book have found it valuable, but have told Dave that a book alone is not enough for someone who has been brought up to believe they must rely on others to create jobs for them, to take all the steps needed to effectively and safely create an enterprise of their own from scratch. What is needed, they say, is an extensive curriculum in Natural Entrepreneurship (with learning occurring mostly in the community not in the classroom), and an entrepreneurial network to support, encourage and enable the successful creation and operation of such enterprises.

And since Dave's book was published, unemployment and underemployment have soared, as have income and wealth inequality, and it has become increasingly clear that the interests of the executives of large corporations are in direct opposition to the interests of 99% of citizens. These large corporations have sucked trillions of dollars in bailouts, subsidies and tax credits out of the global economy, ravaged environments and exploited workers all over the world, and reduced rather than increased employment over the past four decades. Their excesses, and the monstrous and unsustainable debt-loads that have resulted from them, are likely to plunge the global economy into a long-lasting Great Depression, further worsening the plight and prospects of workers and new entrants to the 'workforce'.

So what is clear is this:

1. It's up to us as individual entrepreneurs, working collaboratively in our communities and with no help at all from governments or the corpocracy, to learn how to make a living for ourselves, learn the competencies we need to do so, learn what the unmet needs of our communities are, and learn how to meet those needs effectively.
2. The existing educational establishment has no interest whatsoever in meeting these learning needs; universities are funded by governments and corporations totally invested in protecting the status quo. And the high school system is hopelessly broken and dysfunctional, relegated to providing long-term daycare for teenagers waiting fruitlessly for opportunities in the traditional "job market" that will never come.

So we have to find some way of learning what we need to make an effective, sustainable living for ourselves, in our communities, by ourselves. Where do we start? How do we start? Who do we need to bring together to create some "working models" of Natural Enterprise "incubators"?

Send Dave Pollard your thoughts on these questions at dave@naturalenterprise.org . And stay tuned to this page -- we will be setting up discussion forums to pursue answers to these questions (most likely on Facebook and Google+) and will provide links to them on this site as they are established.