An Organization to Carry Us into the Future
This month we are excited to be re-launching our landscaping cooperative project under a new name, Reinhabit Cooperative, and we’d love for you to get involved! I have been working with our partners for the last few months to solidify the business model, rebrand, and create marketing materials. I believe that Reinhabit can address the needs of people who are not being served by existing organizations to obtain the things they need to thrive. We all need food, shelter, learning, health, belonging and purpose. Reinhabit is a cooperative structure for us to create these things for ourselves. Check out the Reinhabit page to join and keep reading to find out how we plan to accomplish this.
There are three ideas that we are taking from brilliant thinkers to achieve this lofty goal.
Managing the Commons
Following the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrom, we can manage shared pools of natural resources on a small, local community level. We can wield this community biological potential to create abundance for the ecosystem and everyone involved. By creating small, intimate networks of people who are connected to the land, we will develop rules and systems and improve them over time.
Developing People
We will create a Deliberately Developmental Organization as described by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey in their book by that name. We will change the employer/employee relationship in ways that support employees to constantly develop their skills and mature. As workers become more self-aware and observant, they make better decisions and work more cooperatively.
Distributing Decision Making
Frederic Laloux described a new kind of “Teal” organization in his book, Reinventing Organizations. These organizations honor the humanity of the people doing the work by allowing them the authority to decide how to do their own jobs. These more horizontal organizations push decision making to the edges, creating a more agile and responsive system.
I believe that these three ideas; regenerating the commons, developing relational capacity, and distributing authority can combine to create a force for good greater than anything we have ever seen. If you are as excited as I am and want to see what we can do, please join Reinhabit Cooperative today!