Use of the Common Good Balance in Roeselaere Belgium

Description

Evi Swinnen:

"Rsloppost.be is a project of the City of Roeselare in collaboration with OCMW. Next month a 3 years consultancy by Timelab / school of Commons will come to an end. the goal of the project is to create an infrastructure in the city of Roeselare where people in poverty can feel at home without being pushed in any program of what so ever. Education, integration, etc So we created an open space, the formal postal office of 3500 sqm, including an open makerspace run by a divers group of people including people in poverty. Also an open shared kitchen project and an open event space for partners.

We used several tools from the School of Commons (schoolofcommons.be) including the ecogood balance https://www.ecogood.org/nl/

The building is owned by OCMW, the users are mostly OCMW organisations, but also kringwinkel.

To avoid private space for each of the partners - because we want to create a commons, right - we decided to give the partners more insight in the value of the space by applying the eco good matrix. We used is as an (self/group) assessment tool. All partners audited their own work and that of the other organisations. The test was adjusted to the local context. The price of the sqm was based on the score. And even more.. the owner agreed that if they to better in 4 years, they get a discount on the price. This was a great principle and we got it through at the level of the decisionmakers.

What it brings us is the knowledge that we can use tools like this to get the partners more aware of the value and also, in this exercise they did agree to share more space and did appreciate each other more. So less competition, more shared space and a notion of value that includes social, ecological, democratical and economical value." (email, December 2019)