Hey shrunk @reef-inclusion, I attended the cross-team task force with Vicky and Richard from team finance yesterday. Most tasks that Lie mentionned in her document have been taken up by team finance/legal (investors as members of asbl: yes or no, maximum term and rent for tenants, return on investment). It was also confirmed that a bigger unit will be difficult to implement (organisations who could finance it will need much more precise information than we can provide them with at the moment). The idea therefore would be to pick our brains on organisations we want to work with when renting out the studios - this would make it easier for people to picture the inclusive units (in terms of “target audience”) and easier to agree to a proposal which we’re supposed to present at the plenary on the 22nd of February (as agreed on in the coordination meeting tonight).
What are your thoughts on this? Do you want to have a quick meeting to distribute tasks/get started on the proposal or can we do this on this thread?
Do we need to discuss together some more “in questionning” points? (like brainstorming a bit before the proposal for the 22nd?)
After the meeting with tea finance, what are the tasks left for now that inclusion team would take?
I’ve assumed that the “rooms” that would be rented to elderly people would have been IF we would have been into creating a big collective unit.
The one task left for team inclusion in Lie’s document is “How many inclusive units would we like to have?” but I guess adding “Which organisations (and hence target audiences) could we work with?” might also be worth bringing to the plenary.
Ping @Laurianne, @Lara and (tentatively) @Lee: I have started working on the proposal on inclusion for the plenary on the 22nd. Would you be willing to have a look and comment on it/add things/delete passages? Some paragraphs are from Lie’s document on inclusion, I hope that is ok with you, Lie (I have mentioned you as an author, no plagiarism ;))? Would you say we need a more general introduction (like the first page of said document) or is the proposal already too long? What about the level of importance - is it actually reversible?
And finally: Do you think it would be useful to contact the/some organisations at this point in time? I’d be happy to prepare a first draft e-mail.
@VickyVanEyck and @RichardB - I know that Team Finance is super busy at the moment - if you have the chance to look into the question of investors, feel free to add to that section (for now, I have simply copy pasted Lie’s questions there).
Thank you everyone 
P.S.: @Laurianne any luck with your friend from Habitat et Participation?
Count on me!
Will also take a look in the coming days 
@Lara, @Lee and @Laurianne - just a quick note that I have a friend visiting this weekend, so any input before would be highly appreciated. I also thought that the proposal could be peer reviewed by @BarbaraG and @Nic (thank you both already) so they would need some time as well. Thank you
Oki
Ok!
@reef-inclusion and @Lee, just to let you know that I’ll be having someone from Pass-Ages (a chousing doing inclusion) on the phone tomorrow afternoon. Let me know if you have any specific questions you’d like me to ask
Quick resumée of the phone call:
Basics
- 10 apartments, out of which 3 are social units
- Financed by inhabitants of 7 other units
- Smallest apartment: 1 room (50/60m²)
- Cooperative model
AIS ( Logement pour Tous )
- AIS decides on the rent and whether to adapt it to inflation (problematic for tenants)
- Able to negotiate to choose tenants themselves (process of presenting the project, interviewing people, clear criteria (age, volunteering in the project, revenue)
Finances
- Bank: Crédal
- Apparently it’s more difficult to get a loan if your 50+ years old
- They had to bring 30 % of the value of their apartment (solidary mechanisms: some brought less, some more, 30 % of the value in total)
- Got a loan from the bank for 900 000 euros
- Plus « prêt proxi « through the city of Brussels (5 or 8 years): private individuals can invest in cooperative
- Subsidies through PYSI (prove your social innovation): Prove your social innovation - Innoviris [@reef-finance could that be of interest to us?)
Cooperative
Accompagnement: https://saw-b.be/formation/cooperative-quoi-et-qui/
Great work @Sophie_Beese! I only inserted one tiny comment on Abbeyfield.
As to answer your questions:
- I don’t think it needs an introduction. I find it reads super well and super to the point.
- I think the proposal is slightly irreversible, because what I would like to achieve is a consent round about giving the green light to Koen and my dad, so that they can fill in Team Building’s survey for le programme. Nothing is impossible of course, but it would be a bit awkward to have to backpaddle afterwards.
- I don’t think it’s necessary to contact the organisations at this stage. My prediction is that we’ll be flooded with requests as soon as word is out. That being said: I am not ready to fully give up on the big unit (I’ll explain the details later on) and so I wrote to Hubbie (when I was still in Team Inclusion). They haven’t answered yet, which I’m afraid is an indication of their answer
And then one question from my side:
- Do you think it would be feasible to include a couple of pointers about the convention / agreement we would make with the investors, or would you prefer to postpone this for a plenary after the end of March?
Thanks a lot, Lie, also for having tried to contact Hubbie! For the convention, I imagined @VickyVanEyck and @RichardB to fill that blank (where all the questions highlighted in yellow are for now), I think Team Finance had a meeting today
Hello @Sophie_Beese ,
In my opinion, the proposal is very clear.
I don’t have a clear opinion on the (ir)reversibility. What Lee explained about the process for Koen and her dad makes then sense to me.
About the organizations, I share Lee’s opinion. In any case, with this kind of units (if we do talk about the individual ones; it might be a different scenario with a collective unit?), we would anyway find people (the ones we aim at providing the inclusive units) so it is not an emergency to contact them even though it is better for us to have at least a vague idea. I guess it will be more appealing to them once we’ll have the site. Will we have as well to think about some adaptations of the unit infrastructure somehow ? (depending on factors that we might not suspect according to the person’s singularity)
And what we summed up the other day :
- only indivicual units (complexity on different levels of a collective one; Lee has inputs to bring, though)
- private investors, no public ones (matter of the Reef’s independance)
- having an idea about which potential partners we have but not an emergency so to say
I uploaded some notes about the systemic training Lee, Sarah and I did in December.
https://c301.nl.tabdigital.eu/apps/onlyoffice/56408?filePath=%2FThe%20Reef%20shared%20folder%2FLearning%2C%20training%2C%20knowledge%2FNotes%20about%20the%20training%20in%20Systemics%2012.2022.docx
There are some things we would have to be aware of in the possibility of being wholy inclusive. It would be anyway a cowork with the “conflict management/community” team.
hi @reef-inclusion , below are my notes from my meeting with Lie’s dad Marcel.
- Agrees with us that we should go for private investors (and not professional ones) who do it because they want to do something good for society and not for the return on the investment. Even though its not complete charity, they do get a return, even if small, but their primary motivation is charitable. He strongly suggested to look for people in our network .
- Agrees that investors should have the same responsibility as landlords i.e. if there is an issue with the flat, they have a duty to fix it. However, he did point out that with new built appartments, there will be less issues that will need fixing. In some instances, the community can also help ie a letter that needs to be translated etc. In conclusion, both the investor and community is expected to help with this more social aspect. However, in the case of some investors, they just won’t have time to help with this social aspect.
- His experience of working with “agences d’immobilière sociale” was not great - they rejected his appartment to house refugees because of the way its designed, he found them restrictive. He usually houses refugees and he’s found his tenants through a contact at the commune of molenbeek and Minor Ndako also contacted him once.
- He gives his tenants 3 year contracts but with special conditions i.e. €400/month if they don’t have a job, but €450/month if they do. He says that nobody ever stayed 3 years, which is a good sign because it means people have been able to move on and find something better
- I asked his opinion about the kind of vulnerable people we should consider offer housing to. He said that refugees had the least help in our society (something that I strongly agree with), and that he had positive experiences. They are generally positive people, happy to have a home to rent at an affordable price. He was more cautious about other vulnerable people (ie people with mental issues) as they may have a negative impact on the community
- He agreed that investors should have a special status in the community, they cannot really be part of it, but they can help.
@Sophie_Beese can we have a quick chat on Sunday afternoon ? I can add my bit in the proposal but it would be good to have a chat before sending it off to the plenary.
Thanks a lot @VickyVanEyck! I took the liberty to correct two little things (you’ll see it in the notification). Hope that’s ok.
Hey @VickyVanEyck, thanks a lot for your notes, super interesting! I can’t do Sunday but Monday or Tuesday evening would work. @Lee: How are we for topics for the plenary next Wednesday? Would it be possible to postpone this topic so that we can work a bit more on the section on investors?
@Sophie_Beese, we’re actually a bit short of topics for the moment, so if this can be an option for you, as things are now, it would be really great if we could do the part on inclusion this Wednesday. We can always do the part on investors later (if anybody actually cares about the details of that anyway).
Ok, let’s do that then. @VickyVanEyck and @RichardB, is there anything you’d like to add in the section concerning investors or should I take it out for now and we make it a separate topic? @Lara anything you’d like to comment/change?
@BarbaraG and @Nic, if you have the time to go through this proposal with a critical mindset before Wednesday, that would be greatly appreciated! Thanks a bunch!