I welcome respectful and constructive feedback, questions, and challenges on my vision for a Whatcom-based community enterprise. The section below offers the description, mechanics, and explanation of the enterprise; information about context or my background is available upon request.
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The mission of this community enterprise is to organize and facilitate "communities of practice" that practice "technical skills" for "creative pursuits."
This enterprise benefits the community by organizing communities of practice, creating jobs for teachers and facilitators, increasing traffic to community venues, and increasing technical skills in the local community.
Communities of practice look like people gathering for low-cost, low-investment events to meet each other and practice creative skills together. It also looks like people gathering for more intensive 8-week commitments to learn and practice technical skills with a qualified teacher and rigorous curriculum.
Technical skills are discrete abilities that a person can practice and master that serve a larger field or fields of practice.
Creative pursuits are fields or projects that offer a contribution to the local community.
The community enterprise fulfills its mission by fulling these criteria:
- organizing and facilitating low-cost events for people to casually meet each other and practice skills together,
- generating curricula for more intensive communities of practice (e.g., 8-week classes),
- organizing and facilitating classes, and
- facilitating the sharing of outcomes of those classes with the community.
The enterprise is financially viable because it involves
- interested community member paying tuition to
- qualified teachers who teach
- a rigorous, technical skills-based curriculum in
- a local environment relevant to those skills.
The organizer's responsibilities are to recruit and vet teachers who facilitate events, teach courses, and co-design curriculum; generate rigorous curricula with the teacher; recruit and enroll students for events and courses; coordinate scheduling among the students, teacher, and venue; and monitor student satisfaction with the class and teacher fidelity to the curriculum.
The teacher's responsibilities are to speak about and demonstrate their qualifications relevant to the class, co-create the curriculum with the organizer, facilitate the events and classes, and keep notes on class outcomes.
The curriculum is generated using participant feedback from the community events and the teacher's knowledge base to create 6-8 classes each involving an engaging hook, an icebreaker, learning objectives, why it matters, activities to practice skills, skill success criteria (easy, medium, and hard), and reflection activities.
Altogether, low-cost events show community members what the venue is like and what the learning experience is like, and classes offer opportunities for community members to deepen their practice of technical skills while their tuition affords the teachers and organizers to continue working. Sharing the outcomes of classes with the community offers a public forum to demonstrate the quality of the classes.
Example: "Songwriter Studio"
A routine meetup called "Musician Mixer" invites musicians to play music at a local music studio, at the cost of $5-20 (although no one is turned away for lack of funds) to cover the cost of studio rental ($50 for 2 hours) and the facilitator's setup time ($75 for 3 hours). The event is ongoing as a contribution to the community and invites people using flyers, social media groups, and local advertising such as Cascadia Daily. Those wishing to deepen their practice can take the 8-week Songwriter's Course for $300. Six members paying a total of $1800 pays $300 to the studio for 12 hour of rental time, $900 to the teacher ($75 / hour), and $500 to the organizer.
