Courses – Stephen Hinton Consulting

5 P WORKSHOPS: exploring potential for local economy, markets and enterprises

Economic progress has been uneven to say the least. People and the environment are still experiencing stresses even in countries with higher living standards. Could re-focussing the local economy be part of the answer? A regenerative local economy includes all citizens, recirculates money to ensure thriving local businesses and it works to ensure a sustainable use of resources.

But there is a lot to learn. You could organise presentations and lectures from experts. Another way to explore the potential of revitalizing the local economy is to simply simulate the experience to see how far a group of people can come. Continue reading “5 P WORKSHOPS: exploring potential for local economy, markets and enterprises”

Coming soon! Training in using the Commons Finance Canvas

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The Commons finance Canvas is a tool to help intentional communities like eco-villages or CSA food projects to plan their finances. The canvas helps groups produce a prospectus and business plan. This free online training is coming soon so do sign up if you’d like to know the moment it is released!

COURSE: The Community Finance Canvas

Length: 0.5-2 days
Purpose: Using the CANVAS approach teaches participants how to use the canvas to capture understanding of the financial flows in order to create the basis for a business plan
Why attend? Learning to use the CANVAS will give you a good tool to help take your initiative from idea to viable enterprise.
Main contents: The CANVAS method, how to unitize your offerings, finding alternative funding solutions and understanding membership
Includes: How to capture data for Business Plan, Manual and pro-forma business plan in Excel.

Creating a business model in a conventional way is daunting enough. But how can you create a viable financial model for a whole community, sustainable initiative or social enterprise? It IS possible as many initiatives up and running demonstrate, but you need to find a balance between achieving sustainability, creating the operations you want, and balancing the budget. The CANVAS is based on a participatory approach using a large board. The canvas method is designed as a way to work through possibilities to, for example, plug the leaks in your local economy, to grow from your Transition initiative into a Reconomy- initiative social enterprise or to make your Permaculture design into a thriving enterprise.

Continue reading “COURSE: The Community Finance Canvas”

Simulating the five P’s of the local economy

Length: 0.5-1 day
Purpose: learn about local economy and the role of currency by participating in a this simulation
Why attend? By taking a step back and simulating the local economy you can quickly gain deep insights into how the local economy works and could work with local currency. By creating your own currency you gain deep insights into how money works that you would otherwise only gain from literature study.
Main contents: Using a form of the complementary currency MINUTOS the simulation goes from a market with turnover assets of zero to creating functioning market, organisations, products and thriving citizens.

Learning: a separate group of “reporters” follows the simulation to gather data on how money and feelings, negative and positive, connect. They gather learning on essentials of money systems and collect statistics of how “economic growth” proceeds during the simulation.
Includes: The 5 P’s: place, people, products, payment mechanism and projects (organisations). Continue reading “Simulating the five P’s of the local economy”

Workshop: Simulating how the market based instrument flexible fees works

Aligning economic policy to physical constraints and people’s needs

Length: 0.5-2 days
Purpose: to simulate how flexible fees stimulate the development of the circular economy. This will give you insights into how economy, ecology and sustainability overlap and what can be done practically and on policy level in this age of constraints. Continue reading “Workshop: Simulating how the market based instrument flexible fees works”

Training: innovating with Imagestreaming

Length: 0.5-4 days
Purpose: teaches how to access and apply creativity using the technique of imagestreaming
Why attend? Imagestreaming makes you tens of times more creative and effective. Find the best solutions fast!
Main contents: After teaching the techniques delegates apply them to their own challenge
Includes: how to frame an innovation assignment as well as start implementation

As the challenge of transforming the Industrial Growth Economy becomes more critical, so does the need for innovations with a totally new approach. We are facing new situations where experience from the last 80 years is no guide. We need to recover the wisdom of our ancestors, who, without fossil fuels, survived and made our life possible. Many call this the period in history of the Great Turning.

Is there a way to just ”come up” with solutions ”out of the blue” given a concrete problem to solve? Leonardo da Vinci and Einstein seemed to have this gift. What did they do? Did they close their eyes? The same thing for our ancestors: they did not have the luxury of wondering about where they could import technology from. They solved problems using what they had at hand.

Years of research into innovative strategies by Dr. Win Wenger have synthesized findings about the mental process of innovation into a set of techniques called Imagestreaming.

But to go from insight to action requires innovation too. This workshop addresses these alike. Stephen Hinton, former Program manager at Ericsson and Managing Director of Purity AB, a water purification company has developed and used these techniques to produce the book ”Inventing for the Sustainable Planet”.

The techniques are remarkably simple to learn and apply. Continue reading “Training: innovating with Imagestreaming”