People Power Stations (PPS) - a social enterprise

PEOPLE POWER STATIONS

I'm developing a demonstration project for a sustainable social enterprise called "People Power Stations" (PPS) that will bring affordable bikes to the BoP as part of a strategy to develop community access to money, water, electricity, and sanitation. This particular discussion is to help gather and share information and resources for this PPS project.

PPS consist of shops where people pedal bicycles that power electric generators, pump water, thrash maze, etc, as appropriate to the specific circumstance. The pedalers earn a wage based on "kilowatt hours" of production, liters of water pumped, etc, and they are paid in national money and/or SunMoney, as they choose. Purchase of water, electricity, bicycles and generators from the PPS is significantly discounted with SunMoney, generating a demand for this local currency that permits its additional use microfinancing agriculture, art, and other community enterprises. The very-local power grid also provides electricity for the ICT center of this local-money marketplace, facilitating libraries, schools, clinics, etc - all services that can be produced almost entirely within a local marketplace that has access to information through the internet - enabling economic self-reliance of these communities and thus permitting communities to protect their unique cultures. These ICT centers will also facilitate online access to the global marketplace for communities to sell locally produced products and services (such as art and song) providing access to national currencies that can in turn be used to purchase goods and services from around the globe.

All of the technology and strategies of the PPS have been proven. For example, there is a successful local currency discounting retail purchases in western Massachusetts, and ICT centers running on bicycle power in remote villages in Africa. However, there are currently no local currencies that I know about that discount essential commodities and services and so produce marketplaces founded on delivering essential commodities and services to those whom need them most. Thus, it is my aim that this pilot project proves this approach empowers communities and produces a model for a franchisable business that can end extreme poverty anywhere.

While the economy-of-scale of such a franchise strategy is a worthwhile goal inasmuch as it might speed the availability of PPS to additional communities, this discussion aims to make all of the information available for anyone to use anywhere. The demonstration project is to prove the concept, not to try to claim sole ownership, so this discussion is to share it and to improve it.

To provide a model for ending extreme poverty, the goal of the pilot project is to produce a scalable model for self-reliant community marketplaces that generate continuous development and sufficient prosperity to empower those communities to control their own destinies, especially to protect their people and natural resources from unsustainable exploitation. This model will also be flexible: by continually adapting the SunMoney discount to the rising level of local development, any community can achieve and maintain sustainable prosperity. For example, developing communities can discount taxes paid with SunMoney, boosting local trade; and regional power distributors in developed regions can discount electricity when purchased with SunMoney necessitating that this local currency is spent back into the communities developing local resources, such as roof-top solar collectors, and so promoting energy autonomy and ever-greater local prosperity. Thus, a PPS is a seed - especially for undeveloped communities - from which such sustainable prosperity can continuously grow.

I'll be posting links to relevant resources in this discussion and in the reference section of this 1BpP group, and I invite everyone to suggest additional links in comments on this discussion or on the wall of the 1BpP group. I also invite any and all comments, questions, suggestions, criticisms, etc. I'm not saying that I have all the answers, but having as many of the questions as possible in one place will be a good beginning. Your help is invited and requested, and the progress of PPS will be documented here as a record of the successes and failures for everyone's benefit.

I'm especially interested in employing Acumen Fund's life-changing, patient capital approach, as described here:
http://www.acumenfund.org/about-us/what-is-patient-capital.html
and so I will be organizing the progress of this discussion around the five characteristics of patient capital highlighted at that link. As stated there:

"Our aim in investing patient capital is not to seek high returns, but rather to jump-start the creation of enterprises that improve the ability of the poor to live with dignity."

That is precisely the aim of People Power Stations.

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Please join 1BpP to receive weekly updates on the progress of this initiative:
http://community.acumenfund.org/group/1bpp

TO REDUCE UNWELCOME MAILINGS, NO MORE WEEKLY UPDATES WILL BE SENT - INSTEAD PLEASE VISIT MY 1BpP BLOG FOR UPDATES ON 1BpP AND PPS. BE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE FOR EMAIL NOTIFICATION OF POSTS.

And please visit my SunMoney website for more information:

People Power Stations is a SunMoney initiative

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Tags: ITC, SunMoney, agriculture, art, bicyles, community, electricity, hunger, money, poverty, More…sanitation, sustainable, water

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Robert B. Vellani on December 31, 2009 at 6:02am

Kevin,

I love all the ideas contributed here. This is a timely idea. Comments from overseas underscore the need for bikes.

Now, I think 1BpB needs to find one spot - a collections of villages in an area in close proximity to one of our group members - Nigeria, Indonesia. Find out specifically the best use of bikes in that area. And then provide them with the bikes. Chart results. Then trumpet them in the cycling world.

Remember Greg Mortonson of Three Cups of Tea leaned heavily on his mountclimber tribe and trekers to help initiate his school building program in Pakistan. One such climber gave him 12k for his first project. This is a perfect match made in PR Heaven. There are many like the bike commuter in our group who really understands the connection between bikes and health and wealth.

Sincerely,

Robert Vellani

Perhaps there is a way to target one geograpic area and use that as the test market.

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on December 31, 2009 at 11:08am

I agree Robert, and I think this start-up/test-market issue was probably what Joe was addressing in his discussion on Social Enterprise where he asked me how I was evaluating pilot markets. I answered his question as if it were instead about evaluating the marketplaces that PPS creates rather than about evaluating the markets/communities to select ones where the project might be tried. So I want to give a complete reply here to both of your comments.

Your suggestion has four different elements, in appropriate order:

* Have someone on the ground familiar with the local culture. Culture can be defined as "what makes us different" and "Blue Sweater" informs us all that this is why local knowledge is a vital consideration.

** Identify local need. Some communities prohibit females from riding bikes, some have paved roads with lots of rain, some have mountainous terrain, etc...this comes back to local knowledge.

*** Delivery of the appropriate bicycles. Community members will be earning the money to purchase the bikes at the PPS, so my focus begins with the power stations supplying water, electricity, and SunMoney. Other 1BpP models might use rent-to-own approaches or other strategies that begin by supplying affordable bikes in quantity, but PPS will begin by creating a marketplace that delivers essential commodities including money to the poorest so that the bicycles don't merely add value to a sweat shop or other exploitive industry.

**** Scale up. As you say, "chart the results, and trumpet them" (evaluating/charting is what I addressed in my reply to Joe) to get the support from the cycling world that can bring the philanthropy to start-up the PPS at a level that facilitates economy-of-scale.

Putting these in order informs us about how to select the location because it highlights the goal of scaling-up: We aim to raise the BoP out of extreme poverty, not just prove that we can tweak a particular situation, and so our pilot projects need to illustrate that ending extreme poverty is truly accomplished; and in a finite world where we have increasing demand and diminishing resources this requires solutions that are not merely sustainable in the sense that that they pay for themselves during our generation but sustainable also in the larger sense of preserving the resources for our grandchildren.

I think the rapid economic development facilitated by affordable personal transportation in China (the literal English translation of the Chinese characters for bicycle, btw) is a cautionary tale. We live in a time where we increasingly encounter the view that the world is better off "decreasing the surplus population" - as Scrooge put it in Dicken's "Christmas Carol" - rather than increasing the strain on global resources that comes with raising the BoP out of extreme poverty. People sometimes point to mainland China as a case-in-point of how rapid global economic development is taking us passed the tipping point of planetary sustainability.

I reject that view. I believe that the unsustainable aspect of economic growth in mainland China and elsewhere has been driven by the same consumers who would sacrifice the poor of our world before they would give up their own unsustainable consumption. People with wealth almost universally believe they are entitled to special privileges - it seems to be human nature - as they become dining-chair quarterbacks for global solutions. Thus, as we squarely face the problem, we must take into account human nature: we need to eliminate poverty without exhausting resources, and so that must be structured into a fundamental solution rather than left to the regulatory hindsight that our global leaders are continuously trying and failing to accomplish. This is the sustainable solution that PPS seeks and that the PPS pilot project looks to prove and then scale-up: an economically sustainable solution that is also eco-nomically sustainable.

This is why my PPS pilot project will focus first on creating the SunMoney marketplace, and that is easiest where the demand for money is greatest. Or, in other words, where the need for bicycles will be a need for transportation to the PPS itself and participation in the alternative marketplace, because the PPS is where the money is. Such ideal communities exist in the middle of the poorest slums in the largest cities, where people sleep among mounds of garbage that they scavenge; and these communities are also found in remote rural areas where desertification has left the starving people to forage where the water is deep below the surface; and they are on islands where growing populations are exhausting resources and so opening the people to exploitation of labor by dangerous industries such as factory farming, which creates an endless spiral of deepening poverty and disease. These communities are everywhere where this alternative way to access essential commodities is an immediate solution AND doesn't compete with existing exploitive industry, so that charting the results does not gives ambiguous findings such as might occur somewhere that distinguishing the benefit of PPS itself from the benefit of locating the PPS near an industrial employer is difficult. I want the pilot project to prove this alternative local marketplace is a sustainable solution - an alternative to industrial development - so that the BoPcycle is part of the Earth's sustainable future and not just an even better way to exploit cheap labor.

Thus, I want to take the pilot PPS to where there is absolute poverty - the poorest of the poor - and create there sustainable prosperity, one person at a time. Founding this new marketplace - a parallel, metamarketplace - that delivers essential resources to those whom need them most where nothing else works will be the proof of concept necessary to attract funding to scale-up rapidly because those funds are already allocated and searching for this proof within the global community as money for disaster response and reduction. The international crisis-response community has recently begun to focus at its highest levels on resiliency and sustainability. Coupling this desire for long-term solutions for the increasing occurrence of acute crises that accompany poverty with the desire of industry to expand markets might be the fastest way to accomplish the end to extreme poverty we all seek.

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on January 1, 2010 at 6:54am

Here is a link to the introduction to a local-currency initiative I shared with the international community in the summer of 2006:

Introduction to the Birdshot Global Initiative

At a gathering in Davos, Switzerland, I met delegates from disaster-response organizations around the world and learned that people dealing with poverty on the ground where they live immediately grasp that lack of money is the greatest cause of poverty, not simply a definition, and thus local-currency systems are a real solution.

There are many billions of dollars allocated annually ahead of crisis, and resiliency is a new focus, but as with any new specific approach, a pilot project is necessary to prove the concept and so qualify for that support. My People Power Stations (PPS) demonstration project has evolved from that gathering for that purpose.

Since that meeting, financial crisis has brought the global marketplace to the edge of economic meltdown, and a new influenza virus has reached pandemic proportions. At the IMF and at the WHO, the status reports are identical: complacency is our greatest threat. And here at Acumen Fund Community, we know that plain old poverty is our greatest enemy, and all that's necessary for this evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing. I believe that strong local currency systems are the most powerful global solution to economic crisis, pandemic, and poverty. A PPS that produces a self-reliant community with money, water, power, and transportation is the goal of my project.

Permalink Reply by Joseph Joel Sherman on January 4, 2010 at 4:26pm

Keven,
This looks like a great way to build local development. I wonder if this could be applied to a place such as Azerbaijan.
Thank you,
Joseph

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on January 4, 2010 at 8:46pm

Joseph, I shared some ideas with Kritte Hoffritz in an open conversation on her wall

http://community.acumenfund.org/profile/KritteHoffritz

Kritte is a senior manager working with internally displaced persons (IDP) for the UN, and Azerbaijan has perhaps the highest number of IDP per capita in the world, with about 800,000 refugees and IDP. I believe that this is a very powerful solution for refugees and IDP because self-reliant communities/marketplaces can be created almost anywhere with a PPS - communities that are offer dignity as an alternative to charity. The problem of refugees and IDP is expected to increase exponentially around the globe by the middle of the century because of rising sea levels and diminishing resources.

Permalink Reply by Kehinde Oke on January 6, 2010 at 1:32pm

There is a great need for bicycles amongst Nigerian rural dwellers; we should however reflect on whether the rural dwellers can afford the cost of purchasing a bike. Nevertheless my organization is willing to collaborate with you. You may send an update to kennypauloke@yahoo.com

Kenn

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on January 6, 2010 at 2:06pm

Thank you for your collaboration, Kenn, and for your willingness to bring Ultimate Konsult to this work despite your doubts.

I use my friends list and group mail here to send weekly updates - please check your account preferences to be sure you've selected the option of having AFC email and comments forwarded to your address.

Kevin

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on January 15, 2010 at 8:26am

PPS Design

I need an architect(s) to draft a design for my People Power Station. The idea is a dome or yurt-like structure that is quartered so that each "quarter-pie slice" can be transported by the bicycle that it will house.

Overhead diagram:

Something like this:
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/09/05/recession-vacation-bike-pulled-c...

In this way, a PPS can be begin with as little as one person with one bike to pump and deliver water, generate electricity, and haul away waste. Imagine a million of these, with any four able to combine into a strong shelter. Imagine if we had these in Haiti.

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on January 19, 2010 at 7:09am

I've just created a Twitter account - peoplepowerstat

I'm going to be traveling by bicycle and ultralight to promote 1BpP and my People Power Stations social enterprise (PPS). Bicycles are central to my PPS - they create employment in their communities by paying people to use them to pump water and generate electricity - and ultralights are an increasing part of low-cost emergency response and conservation work and I hope to make powered paragliders a part of every PPS community where feasible.

And of course twittering will be an excellent way to network to complement my travel and activities.

I also have an email - peoplepower@me.com - and I've secured domain names: peoplepowerstations.com, .net, .info, .org, .me, and .mobi, and I have a squidoo page with that name - that I'll be developing to support networking PPS.

I'm an economist and activist working in disaster preparedness and response, and I've been creating simple web pages to share my work (and friends' work) for about 15 years (http://sunmoney.org), but I am new to Twitter, and People Power Stations is my first social enterprise. I expect to travel to Pune, India, some time during the next few months for complete training in piloting a powered paraglider, and so I'll be using my Twitter account - peoplepowerstat - to post updates on my adventures.

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on January 24, 2010 at 5:50am

I've chosen the "Techqua Wheel" - a Hopi shield that means "Together with all nations we protect both land and life, and hold the world in balance" - as the symbol for People Power Stations.

It's also the basis of the PPS building design. When the doors are opened, the structure looks similar to the Hindu svastika, an ancient symbol of good fortune, because the doors swing 180 degrees clockwise such that their curve is reversed. However, I won't post that image on this site because the swastika is outlawed in Germany as a symbol of an illegal organization. The Hindu svastika is considered an extremely holy image by all Hindus, much as the Techqua Wheel is sacred to the Hopi, and I deliberately borrow the image with profound respect for the cultural significance and a shared good intent.

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on February 11, 2010 at 8:50am

Kanan Ajmera (http://community.acumenfund.org/profile/KananAjmera) has volunteered her architectural acumen, and we will be meeting in Pune, India, in a few weeks to advance our plans. I'll be assembling the Flying People Power Station in Pune. This will be my "flagship" for showcasing the PPS technology. That technology will include IT and ICT that can be pedal-powered, and the new Shakti generator developed by Albert Hartman's (http://community.acumenfund.org/profile/AlbertHartman) Rollergen and High Tide Associates for our 1BpP initiative. I've also registered for Gijs Spoor's event - "Earth Day in Auroville, India" - where I'll showcase PPS to India's "Universal City in the Making". I hope to fly and pedal the Powered Paraglider (PPG) Trike the 1000 kilometers from Pune to Auroville, for the week-long event that commences April 15th. Grabbing this opportunity calls for a change of plans - I'll be delaying building the PPG from recycled materials and instead adapt available technology so that I'll be ready in time for the Auroville event.

Permalink Reply by Kevin Parcell on March 17, 2010 at 5:35am

Happily, I took to heart the advice I received about "getting things done in India", which was that I had better downsize my ambitions because plans often move very slowly here, and so I called a halt to my effort to complete the powered paragliding trike (PPG trike) on this visit. Instead, I'm focusing on training as a PPG pilot and using my time to investigate the support available here for a PPS project. I've been in Pune for just two weeks, and the emerging support and potential for basing the demonstration project in this area looks strong thus far. Indeed, there are some here who seem almost as anxious as I am to get started on the ground - certainly there are many here who move quickly indeed - but every day brings another reminder of the importance of local knowledge to build a strong plan, and so I'm willing to let this three-month visit involve mostly fact-finding and networking so that my false assumptions don't become fatal mistakes.

Kevin Parcell said:

Kanan Ajmera (http://community.acumenfund.org/profile/KananAjmera) has volunteered her architectural acumen, and we will be meeting in Pune, India, in a few weeks to advance our plans. I'll be assembling the Flying People Power Station in Pune. This will be my "flagship" for showcasing the PPS technology. That technology will include IT and ICT that can be pedal-powered, and the new Shakti generator developed by Albert Hartman's (http://community.acumenfund.org/profile/AlbertHartman) Rollergen and High Tide Associates for our 1BpP initiative. I've also registered for Gijs Spoor's event - "Earth Day in Auroville, India" - where I'll showcase PPS to India's "Universal City in the Making". I hope to fly and pedal the Powered Paraglider (PPG) Trike the 1000 kilometers from Pune to Auroville, for the week-long event that commences April 15th. Grabbing this opportunity calls for a change of plans - I'll be delaying building the PPG from recycled materials and instead adapt available technology so that I'll be ready in time for the Auroville event.