Vintage Communities is going live!

It is just three months since Vintage Communities was set up, and we wanted to give a very brief account of our progress, and to say thank you to some of our colleagues.

Vintage Communities has had incredible support and assistance from friends. Sian Lockwood Community Catalysts offered to review our business plan and gave us very positive feedback. We are grateful for Sian's time and value her expert opinion. Helen Bowers, National Development Team for Inclusion has offered the services of NDTI to evaluate our first demonstrator sites. We recognise the importance of robust evaluation and are delighted with this offer as NDTI share similar values to Vintage and are the ideal partner.

Cormac Russell, of Nurture Development has helped and advised us enormously, and we are so grateful for this and his inspiring and inclusive approach. We plan on working with Cormac a lot more in the future, utilising the principles and practices of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD).

We are currently in the process of establishing Vintage as a co-operative. We have Mervyn Eastman Change Agents and Sion Whellons Principle Six a Co-operative Enterprise Hub to thank for this, as they were inspirational in sharing their experience and making the case for co-operatives. We are now convinced that the only way to achieve co-production is through working as a co-operative.

We are in the process of recruiting demonstrator sites, and have already had a couple of very productive meetings exploring the possibility of working in new areas. If you would like more information, please contact us (Deborah@vintagecommunities.co.uk) and we will send you a briefing paper setting out our offer.

Whilst we will be meeting with and talking to people as much as we possibly can, to pool our ideas and our vision, we also plan to use this blog to share our news, viewpoints and to find ways to work together with others who share our passion. We want to keep these posts fairly short and promise not to send them out too often (we all know about e mail overload!)

We will share stories from the citizens we meet and work with in neighbourhoods on this web site but we would also like to hear about your experiences in sharing gifts and assets within neighbourhoods. Please send us your good news stories so that we can share them on our facebook page.

Please visit www.vintagecommunities.co.uk to learn more about us. Or, give us a ring!

Deborah and Marc

May 2012