Today, while trying to promote the 14th Nov workshop, I came across several French initiatives that we should contact. However, I donât have any official quality in the project and an Edgeryders email, so @BaobabUrbain and @noemi, can you please take a look and see if you can write to them?
Sustainable Brussels seems to be a group of tour guides who focuses on on-foot and bycicle tours of eco innitiatives in Brussels: About â Sustainable Brussels
I found some other things related to that, such as eco-creches, bike tours and other tourism things but I didnât think they help so much.
Status update: weâve had about 3 cancellations since we send the email to workshop registrants for 14th November, which leaves us with 10 people outside of our team, provided no other cancellations or no shows.
@BaobabUrbain@manuelpueyo please use today to share the invite and registration form with more people!!
Here are the texts that can be used in previous events. @BaobabUrbain, can you please look at the French version? My French is far from perfect.
EN (Français en dessous)
Thank you for taking part in this event. Tomorrow, we are having another workshop that you might be interested in. Itâs about how to live green when living with others. It will take place from 6 to 9 PM at AlleeduKaai, Avenue du Port 53, Brussels. We will be talking about cooking together, using less plastic, composting, sharing our things and any other idea that would make a more eco-friendly living easier when everybody in the community contributes. Are you in? Please fill in this form and join us: Explore Typeform | Create your own surveys, quizzes, forms
Hello! @noemi, how did the second workshop go? Were you happy with the number of participants and with the idea generation? I would be very happy to hear about it!
I have a question also: I want to already start promoting the last workshop, but I donât understand so well what it will entail. So:
Do you have a more detailed description?
I remember seeing in the video some scenes with someone drawing some plans on a paper. Do we also have pictures of that, that I can use?
@noemi, please use this text to post on the 2nd workshop FB event (you can of course adjust it if needed). @BaobabUrbain, can you please check the FR version again? Thanks so much!
EN (Français au-dessous)
Thank you for joining our workshop, we were very grateful for you staying up late with us and contributing your ideas to this project. We will be posting our conclusions on the Edgeryders platform, edgeryders.eu, in the following days.
We are taking this opportunity to invite you to the last workshop in the series that will take place on Thursday, November 28, and it will be all about co-designing how The Reef community should look like. How much alone time vs socialising works best for you? Should we pool money for some expenses? how will we deal with conflict to keep it a pleasant space? How to make it easy to be eco-friendly by design? Help us answer these questions and more, register for the workshop: Sprint to the Reef ! Co-design communal and green living. Join in Brussels November 28th
FYI @manuelpueyo@BaobabUrbain we will be running a few days of a twitter paid ad campaign to promote the workshop around Belgium.
cc @nadia: they wonât be appearing so much from the ER twitter account and risk spamming our usual network, so there you should only see the usual few tweets! They appear as scheduled in the twitter admin dashboard and they are different from the paid ads tweets. Itâs a work in progress⊠so bear with us!
Yesterday I was talking to a coworker (pacome beru ) and by chance i mentioned the reef. he has some experience in creating a group to live / buy together. he mentioned a key learning from his experience. (I shared the 28 workshop with him).
start to ask for money asap. so you make sure that the people are there are really committed. say, every member interested to join has to put x euros to the common pot. another benefit is that you need to be quite fast when a decision has to be made and having some money collected in advance helps to be agile enough to respond. in a context from high competition from companies with lot of money.
process is long: above 4 years. so is a marathon style run
Refering to the 3rd workshop, @noemi and I tried a paid Tweets strategy to get more people to subscribe. It didnât really work out. One of the things that might have happened is the fact that we did the tweets in English only. I stopped the promotion for now and I need your help to adapt it in French. There are two things I need help with. @BaobabUrbain, do you think you could help me with this?
I am not feeling confident in my French to do these things.
Translating the tweets from EN to FR. These are the three tweets.
Does the idea of living together in a community with other eco-conscious people in brussels excite you? Then you would love to be part of The Reef. Join us on Nov 28 in a workshop where we design together how the community#house would look like:
Weâre excited to invite you to the final workshop for The Reef, our concept of a green community living space in brussels. How should our community and interactions look like to support us and the environment? Help us visualise it by joining us on Nov 28:
Do you want to live in a green building in Brussels, with a great community around you that cares about the environment and getting along? This is what weâre trying to do with The Reef. Join our workshop on Nov 28 to design it together!
Tomorrow I am flying from Romania to Belgium, so I will have time to set up this ad in French if they are ready by then. If not, I will try to do it in the evening.
Safe travels!
PS If the ads are not ready by tonight to run tomorrow donât do it, there is no point because it will be too late better to cut our losses.
@noemi: Can you please add this message on the FB events of the previous two workshops? I will also post the message using Hootsuite on Fb, LinkedIn and Twitter.
EN (FR au-desous)
Heads up! Tomorrow we are rolling up our sleeves for the last workshop for The Reef; We will design together how this green communal living space in Brussels will look like and how should the community be organized.
to ask for money for what? To join an organisation with no assets?
I think when you ask people money you need to offer something in exchange: what we can now offer is only the guarantee that no money would be spent without having a place where the member is actively involved in - as a resident or steward.
If understood well this money is a common pot. it will be used for any kind of cost that is necessary to achieve the objectives of the cooperative (legal advice, guarantee to offer to a landlord, events,you name it.). but governed by governance rules we set up.
The question is then: when do you have enough credibility to start doing that? You would need a business and financial plan, already for the steps before acquiring a building.
as long as you have a minimum quorum of lets say 5 or 10 people interested you can start doing that. my friend said you should start asking from the beginning of the process. you ensure that people who participate in the meetings have a real stake on it.
Hello @ralu, good on you for trying something new (for us). I would be interested in your assessment of how it went in the end. These small experiments help us decide when (or if) to use social media.
In the world of US real estate, they call it âearnest money.â Not a down payment, which is much higher like 20%, earnest money is exactly as you describe: a way of expressing a serious commitment. And in this situation is means there is some money to work with.
Itâs not exactly the level of âburn your shipsâ like the commune I lived at for years. In that case I came into it as a teen who had $40. But that land was really bought mainly by one of our tribe who was an heiress who put in tens of thousands. People routinely cashed out their bank account and donated their vehicles. Later a couple showed up and donated their house in Washington DC, which we then took over as a communal satellite, and later sold. Now that is commitment. (Disclaimer: I donât expect anyone to go that far. Iâm not even sure how I would feel about it at this point myselfâŠ)
But I do think that the path to success in your endeavor will have many challenges where you will be tested. Having a âreal stakeâ in things means you do in fact have something to lose if it doesnât work. Strengthens oneâs resolve.
better to cut our losses.