Money makes the world go ’round?
When we asked the nine UrbanExperimenters that are part of the UrbanCommunity project what they wanted support on, the response was resounding: they wanted advice on making their community-driven, justice-oriented projects financially resilient.
This is a common concern for sustainability and justice projects. Community- and impact-driven projects tend not to fit as nicely into the most mainstream, profit-creating business models. They tend to rely on volunteers and providing services free of charge. This is, in many ways, what makes these projects so special — they provide people with much-needed services without financial barriers. Is there a way for projects to continue to be community- and impact-led, while also being financially stable and viable?
When we asked Yoon-Joo Jee-Duchatelet, Co-founder of Snowball Effect, this question, she came back with ideas, examples, worksheets and exercises to help find some solutions!
In the simplest terms: all projects and organisations have costs and sources of revenue. So, our goal is to find models and innovative tricks and partnerships to reduce costs, increase revenues, and maintain high impact with respect to justice, equity and sustainability.
This is, of course, easier said than done. And, it might require doing a whole new stocktake of your projects’ strengths, assets, opportunities for partnerships, and what a new business model could look like. This is where bringing in a facilitator like Yoon-Joo can be helpful to present new ideas that may have never occurred to you, and to help you see new assets you hold but may have not yet identified.
The discussion prompted one UrbanExperimenter, Teresa Ditadi (Città So.La.Re Cooperative) to bring forth the example of Casa A Colori, a hotel that offers tourists rooms at full price, and uses this revenue to make additional rooms available to those who are housing insecure. To maximise impact further, the hotel also employs vulnerable workers.
“If we just have money, we will not have impact. If we just have idealism, we will not have impact. We have to bring these together.”
— Christian Röser, Starkmacher e.V.
Christian Röser, Co-founder of Starkmacher e.V., joined us to talk financial resilience. He summed up the discussion perfectly, emphasising the value of collaborating on projects, and merging different approaches to address challenges.
Christian got us to think about the “currency” projects currently use to sustain themselves and be resilient — such as impact, trust, motivation — and made clear that projects’ resilience relies not only on having funds, but on having access to money as well as this other currency.
As Christian so eloquently put it: “If we just have money, we will not have impact. If we just have idealism, we will not have impact. We have to bring these together.”
