Cooperative Ventures for Sustainable Practices
Today we are all facing a challenge of surviving economically and socially, and our physical well being is also compromised. We are living a challenged life where prosperity and peace are hard to find. We as species are dying a slow death leaving behind a legacy of more chaos for our coming generations.
Sustainability, health challenges, polluted natural resources, crashing economy, environmental damage, profit driven competitive living are issues that are affecting us directly and indirectly. We have challenges in business and job, sickness in the family, inflation in the market, polluted and chaotic cities; disturbed and violent society and we are all both creators and victims of this system.
Capitalism did a very good job for creating abundance for many at large but also it brought its side effects of instilled short term greed and unlimited wants on a limited planet which has created problems for all while giving control and power to selected few who turn by turn come on a ruling seat and exploit everything till they rule!
The corporate bottom line of profit at the cost of people’s health and environmental damages and centralized abundance for select few groups is taking a toll on people making them work as slaves for money and missing out or compromising on important things in life like quality relationship, good parenting, community participation, time and space for leisure and self growth etc.
It is now time to thing for us and realize that only by changing the pattern we can solve this problems making an collective effort.
We are focusing on few important areas mentioned below to create a better model:
- Sustainable practices
- Holistic Healthy Life Style
- Low cost living
- Jointly owned cooperative ventures
It is crucial to create a decentralized economic model which self-sustains itself, where no one encounters the insecurity and stress of living in a competitive world.
We have hired-agencies everywhere to run our lives and we fall under their rules compromising on many great things possible; if we ever had taken responsibility of designing our own way of living in this world bringing abundance and happy-living for everyone; we could have been living a stress-free, healthy, highly satisfactory life even with less amenities, facilities or technologies.
Considering the present challenges of environment, life style and social chaos; we started exploring various practices done globally on sustainable way of living. Many community groups in developed nations are trying to get out of the rat-race of corporate life style and are looking for new alternative way of peaceful and joyful living.
Our Analysis:
We observed what measures are necessary for making life easy, eco-friendly and low cost by using sustainable technology and good scientific practices that are in harmony with nature while not compromising on our requirements for living and giving us scope for overall growth without creating imbalance at any level.
This exploration over the last few years, made us understand the use of sustainable technologies, understanding scientific methodologies, understanding the importance of creating better and open education platforms and learning systems without being dependent on wrongly structured institutes like private schools, private colleges and government dominated bodies or corporate influenced education systems that are driven for profits only. The solution finally emerged to us in the form of a new collective participatory system.
This solution is the initiative of creating publicly and/or community owned enterprises to create abundance and security for all members of the society
The Transition With any large scale change, transition is the real challenge more than the designing of the idea itself. It is a challenge to transit from our current competitive liv.ing based on ‘selfish motive’ paradigm to a cooperative living based on ‘Benefit for all’ paradigm.
The current system provokes you to think only for yourself or your family which is only effective in short term, and this short cut to survival has created a stressful society infested with deep rooted feeling of insecurity that affects us all. Today we have become dependent on organizations, which have “profit” as their bottom line; and even the noble professions like health care or education are not spared from this devastating trend.
While studies have proved now that human brain is influenced by environmental and social conditions, it is also true that people who become aware go against the flow and create new breakthroughs for change and in fact this attitude and motivation is the only thing that has brought change in the world in the face of collective crisis.
The idea presented here focuses on looking for long term benefit for self and your family by creating a better society which values natural resources, friendly living practices, passion oriented integrated learning, health care as devotional service and social development as a collective legacy building for future generations.
Choosing partners to create successful public owned enterprises It is crucial to choose right kind of partners or like-minded individuals with entrepreneurial capacity those who would be interested to participate in designing a new system for wealth creation and abundance for the collective group; here people can put their passion and best skills to the system and reap rewards for their contribution without any competition.
Profit is not the bottom line No venture can sustain itself without profiting but it would be foolish to profit through wrong practices and wrong kind of products and destructive marketing trends. Currently our system is creating products of falsely induced utility in huge quantity for people at large in order to make profit out of it while using degraded media promotion.
This thoughtless system corrupts the society at large leaving us all vulnerable as victims of this trend or by turning us into perpetrators of this collective crime.
As the bottom line is profit at any cost, people tend to create services and products which can be marketed at large to mint fast and easy profits. Few examples of such institutions:
-Pharmaceutical companies influencing medical professionals to promote their expensive remedies
-Companies selling GMO seeds, pesticides and fertilizers for profits influencing farmers to consume more without educating them of the damaging effects
-Companies selling false health solutions not allowing alternative measures to be accessible
-Companies selling food which slowly kills us
-Companies selling products which damage our environment
-The entertainment industry selling us cheap entertainment while degrading the overall morals of the society
-Education and Health Care have become industry for minting huge profits today
All such issues also bring circular affects from the area our family to politics leaving us victim to all the vices of the system.
Cooperative Initiatives - The Decentralized Power System The cooperative model of creating ventures for sustainable practices has key important factor which is, the distribution of power and wealth to many at large rather than leaving it with the select few, which would stop people over powering others and would not allow exploitation to happen.
A decentralized power model, using cooperation and competition as a balanced strategy, a model with individual responsibility instead of hierarchical structure can bring change for us today. This model may not want you to become altruist or do charity as compulsion but can help our society to grow holistically and become better while giving you reasonable rewards and satisfaction for your individual efforts. The goals of Cooperative Ventures for Sustainable Practices
-Wealth creation with eco-friendly products
-Wealth creation platform for individuals while leaving the power & economy decentralized
-Creating platform for community partnership
-Doing good for community at large in order to create a better society for ourselves
-Use of interdependence for being self-dependent
-Using Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds for community at large
-Giving platform and opportunity of being self employed to innovative minds
Participation, Investment & Benefits Successful participation in a cooperative venture may require you to a clear understanding of the goal of the venture, the purpose of the action and the benefits of being a part of a greater society.
Investment in such ventures could be as low as 25,000 to 50,000 INR per individual projecting double the returns of your investment in a year or two while creating employment and eco-friendly business opportunities for local members.
This is very beneficial model as people are involved through each other's consensus while having specific guideline for action, planning, profit & loss sharing, team work, individual responsibilities while identifying the need of important skill sets in the members who participate in the ventures.
This helps creating healthy and eco-friendly products and services for the society at large and good wealth and self-dependency for the members who participate in the ventures. This model can be a powerful tool to reshape our society's economic model and creating a social system focused on wealth and well being for all. A great change is always a work of persistence and united efforts; this model needs our collective understanding and action. We invite you to join us and gain more insight into this idea and offer us your support and suggestions as well. Together we can bring the change by uniting our spirit and our hands, generating a force that will create a truly abundant and harmonious society, a world of joy and freedom for all.
Contact us for participating.
Intentional Resource Sharing
Intentional Resource Sharing is an activity for people who believe in efficient management of resources and want to cut cost and manage the wastage of resources and save on personal spending over resources which can be commonly owned. This obviously needs like minded people and people willing to act.
Why Intentional Resource Sharing?
1. Over consumption of resources is a thereat to our ecology and our sustainability on Earth.
2. We can survive on Earth without profit motive as resource management is a technical issue and can be sorted out through education.
Why should we share our resources intentionally?
1. Intentional Sharing is important to save Earth from over and unnecessary consumption and maintain its ecology.
2. It is good for ecology and earth as it stops unnecessary
consumption of resources and also decrease unwanted production.
3. It is antidote to profit motive as profit motive always wants to promote mindless consumption thus destroying our ecology on Earth.
What can we share in common?
-Books
-Lawn mover
-Not regularly used sports instruments
-VCD player (people will decided, what they want to share) This can be managed online.
Building an additional Resource Library
-We can jointly buy products and own them jointly.
We need to discuss list of resources we can buy jointly in a close group as many such products are used rarely in our day to day life.
These products can be part of the resource library.
Example products:
Projector
Digi Camera
Microphone
Even a car
Oven
(People will decided what they want to have in this library and buy things jointly)
Why Intentional Resource Sharing?
1. Over consumption of resources is a thereat to our ecology and our sustainability on Earth.
2. We can survive on Earth without profit motive as resource management is a technical issue and can be sorted out through education.
Why should we share our resources intentionally?
1. Intentional Sharing is important to save Earth from over and unnecessary consumption and maintain its ecology.
2. It is good for ecology and earth as it stops unnecessary
consumption of resources and also decrease unwanted production.
3. It is antidote to profit motive as profit motive always wants to promote mindless consumption thus destroying our ecology on Earth.
What can we share in common?
-Books
-Lawn mover
-Not regularly used sports instruments
-VCD player (people will decided, what they want to share) This can be managed online.
Building an additional Resource Library
-We can jointly buy products and own them jointly.
We need to discuss list of resources we can buy jointly in a close group as many such products are used rarely in our day to day life.
These products can be part of the resource library.
Example products:
Projector
Digi Camera
Microphone
Even a car
Oven
(People will decided what they want to have in this library and buy things jointly)