No – you are not reinventing. There are models. One could be Amway. Although they and other multi-level marketing companies often promote themselves in uncomfortable ways, they are nevertheless community-building powerhouses. It would be worthwhile to look at what they and similar groups do and see if it can be adapted to your vision. They organized around a model of making money. Another, perhaps more comfortable, might be cooperatives. I am in the Houston are now, but when I was in New England I was a sometime member of the Brattleboro Food Coop. Their model was organized around obtaining healthy food at an affordable price. A third model is Kibbutzim in Israel – they organized around building a nation through agriculture and socialism. Perhaps a fourth model is employee-owned businesses – they organize around fellow employees working together to enable all to be financially successful and satisfied with the value of the work they do and the workplace in which they operate. A few tentative ideas drawn from these models: determine what you want the group to achieve as a group. From there, you may be able to select an output which would enable you to bring together a suitable group of people to achieve it. Does everyone need to be able to do everything? Do you want to develop specialists? Then you can start pre-marketing: marketing your ideas as a core plan to enable you to bring in like-minded partners, so that the plan can cooperatively be fleshed out.
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