My Arms Wide Open Community Business Model

Description

Warren Te Brugge:

"My Arms Wide Open® is a Canadian Federally registered foundation that I established to work with mothers, children and youth to crate change in the communities by creating sustainable community based businesses, education systems and infrastructure built entirely around the needs of their communities.

We start within each community by facilitating our Iziko Labahlali (Hearth of the Community) program that focuses on mindset, helping the participants to see themselves as deserving, contributing members of their communities. Through the course of the program we identify needs and skills within the community and then work to develop opportunities to establish economic activity around those needs to build community based enterprises, transferring in the gaps in the skills. We make the initial seed-loan start-up investment and set up a management board comprising of members of the community and commit to a full 5 years of working alongside the employee members of the community as they earn the shares of the company. In rural South Africa, as we set up these endeavours we do not use a co-op model for this because of the high incidence of co-op failures generally. We use what is called a closed corporation which the government recently moved into a private company structure.

Through the charter of the company the participating members agree to a number of items and make a commitment to these:

• They must have attended and completed our Iziko Labahlali program;

• Be permanently resident in the community;

• Agree to ask why things are done not how - we believe they learn how anyway, which is simply learning a process. we want them to see the bigger picture of why each action or component is important;

• Through the 'why' they learn every aspect of the business and create transparency in reporting and accounting - creates an open system where each person understands what is happening and how they each contribute to the success of the business, creating a real sense of value and worth.

• Agree to remain fully active within the business for a full five years for their shares and warrants to vest - we evaluate personal growth (skills), team support and community support and development annually making share grants that accumulate to each person as determined by their own commitment and participation so that by the end of the 5-years they own the entire business and a portion of the businesses they have helped to create and support (see below);

• Agree to invest 25% of the bottom line each year into new community based business that is started by new Iziko Labahlali graduates in either their own community or another community we are working in - by doing this we grant a seed-loan forgiveness amount each year until the value is depleted at which point they can continue to make investments if they choose - we encourage this of course;

• Mentor and support those new businesses - they have a vested interest

• Act and conduct themselves in the best interests of their fellow 'owners', the business, their families and community.

What we achieve is we create a web of businesses within the community that are all connected through a common and vested interest in each others success. It is our goal to develop 1,000 of these communities throughout Africa to create a web of connected and vested communities." (email, April 2012)