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I went to the open day of a Christian organisation running community projects recently. I saw them drawing together volunteers and money to run a number of projects that helped the community. They were doing good work supporting people with a variety of needs. Their resources (i.e. people, money and time) were largely gifts from a variety of sources.

There is a problem with a gift based economy i.e. where do the resources come from that are redistributed by giving. Look at it this way. I go to an NHS hospital. i receive the medical care I receive for free. The government has taken our money in (i.e. we pay taxes) and redistributed it to provide a hospital building doctors etc. They take money from people who have earned it and used it to help all. This might not be the most efficient way of funding healthcare but at least it does provide healthcare for the population at large. The money for those services has to come from somewhere.

A service funded by taxpayers or donations can become vulnerable when people no longer have the ability to financially contribute. If incomes go down, say a company goes bust and people lose their jobs and companies they bought supplies from don’t get paid then how can they pay taxes or make donations. People may have time to donate but the expectation is that they will be paid travelling expenses. This is just one of the things that will cost the organisation money that is related to the extra help given by a volunteer. They may have a lot of man hours that they can use to provide services but still struggle to provide services because they need money. What is worse in that kind of situation many organisations find that there is an increasing demand for their services.

People running voluntary and community projects have been encouraged to diversify in terms of where the money comes from to run their services. Money coming in can be seen as arriving via four different routes. Donations include things like street collections where money comes in small amounts or legacies left in wills which can be quite large sums. Grants are larger amounts from trusts or funds set up to fund voluntary and community work. Contracts awarded after  another organisation has invited a number of organisations to compete to provide a product or service for them. Trading is obvious as it is where goods and services are sold to bring in an income.

All of these ways of bringing in money are getting difficult as the economy worsens. People cannot give or buy as their disposable income declines. Fewer contracts are available as the government makes spending cuts. There are fewer grants as these are often made out of the interest on capital as this is at a very low level so they have less to give. Increasing competition makes it harder to find any money from any source.

How can this situation be changed? If people cannot give because they have nothing to give how can they be helped to gain more money so that they have more to give? Even during difficult financial times there have been people who have prospered. There were people who became millionaires during the hard times of the 1930s. Some say more people became millionaires during that decade than any other. If any one people group has struggled with persecution more than any other it must be the Jews. Look how many of them have prospered. Surely there is something that we can learn from these people.

Yes it might sound a radical approach within the Christian community but we are in a radically different situation. Not only that but there are many voices that say will get harder rather than easier for the foreseeable future. Some say that we are in a recession now but that a depression is coming and after that there will be a global financial collapse. Remember the stories of hardship that came out of Germany between WW1 and WW2 and more recently Zimbabwe about the horrors of hyperinflation when money became worthless. Some say that we are on track for a similar situation with the dollar i.e. the currency of the world. Look at the struggles in the Euro zone. If these voices are right then how are we going to cope with all the needs within the community. Of the four basic methods of increasing income only one has stood the test of time and helped people through hard times i.e. trading. This is true for both individuals and organisations.

This is why the aim of Lily the Pink Ministries CIC is to gain most of its funding from trading. It is also why one of its initial is to develop ways of increasing their income from trading. There are two specific categories of people we want to help. One are Christians so that they can give more to those in need. The other is those who are in mental distress because they are at the bottom of the heap. This includes people who have survived on benefit for a long time because they did not know how to earn a living within their personal constraints such as disability, medical conditions or family responsibilities. Such people at the moment are increasingly at risk of having their benefit cut.

Our long term aim is to pull people up and enable them to develop organisations and businesses that meet the needs in society. If government keeps on reducing its community support activities such as adult  education or business support then someone will have to fill in the gaps.

All of this takes time to setup and get off the ground so we need to be preparing now. We all know the art of forecasting is notoriously difficult. Taking the hints from the present and making up a picture that reflects the realities of tomorrow is not easy. The beauty of setting up this kind of organisation is that it does not matter if the future does not turn out as bad as some have predicted. it provides a solid foundation for a future where things are going well or where they are going badly. On the other hand it may well prove to be the only model that will enable voluntary and community projects to survive the financial Armageddon that some are predicting.

Last Friday night I was watching the TV when and I heard someone predict that over the next two years there would be increasing food shortages even in the UK. It was even suggested that we would be approaching a famine situation. My ears pricked up and I wondered what on earth we should expect next.

I had started to prepare this course but I needed to put some finishing touches to it. Hearing that TV programme made me realise that it was essential to make this material available as quickly as possible. I spent Saturday making sure that it was all set up properly and released the course. At least that way if things do wrong in the future I will have done what I can to help people prepare for the future.

It is available here.

If you think it will cost you a fortune then you will be pleasantly surprised. The price has been set as a ridiculously low £5. In fact most people will find that they will be able to save more money by taking the advice on this site than the cost of getting access to it.

Do you find technology frustrating? I know I do at times. I know what I want to do and think I have found a way to do.it. I then try putting that plan into action and it all goes wrong. this is exactly what happened to out web presence during April and May. working out what went wrong and putting it right was a nightmare. Talk about learning how to do things the hard way.

One result is that we have taken the material from two separate web sites to create the static pages for a new blog i.e. this one. Another is that the whole way that we set up online courses has been changed. We were going to use the same software as we had always done but when we wanted to move to a new hosting service we had to update to a new version of the software. This new version was so different that the quick and easy way of moving courses could not be used. If we had to move everything the hard way anyway we could take our pick from a number of other types of software that could do the same thing. We chose one that our customers are more familiar with and that can still hold all the  material that we had already prepared or are in the process of preparing. There is less of a learning curve for everyone including ourselves. However because everything need to be reorganized it has not been the instantaneous process that we had hoped the change would be.

Ever seen one of those comedies where the cleaning crew comes in and everything they touch falls apart. They try and clean a window and the window frame falls out. They try and wash the paint work and the wall crumples into a heap of bricks and plaster. That is what our supposedly simple and seamless pack up and move process was like. Except at the time it felt more like a tragedy than a comedy. It it had worked out as it should have have done it would have taken a day or two as it was it took three weeks.

There is something to say for such experiences. We have the choice whether thy make us bitter or better. The challenge that arose could have led to the entire being abandoned. What did happen was that a way through the challenges was found. Some things have had to change as a result, mostly for the better. It has taken time, energy research etc, but we have come through to the other side stronger and better able to face the future.

Now what about you? it is unlikely that you will be caused mental distress from the same sort of problem. Yet most of us know what it is like to do something for the best of reasons only for the whole thing to collapse round about us and the end result to be disastrous. The thing about challenges like this is that they show us what our weaknesses are and if we are wise we will learn from the experience.

What weaknesses did I recognize in myself in this process? The most obvious was my tendency to act impetuously without doing the proper research or carrying out the appropriate checks. In other words I would do something and then when things did not go to plan realizing that I had done the wrong thing. One reason for this was that I had not done all the research that was needed so did things in the wrong way. Another cause of the problem was that were things that I did some things the right way but because I did not do the right checks at the right time I did not find out that the system I was using had not worked until it was too late to go back and redo the process. Annoying later when it was not so critical the same system worked really well.

The whole experience has given me some good compost. Err what? Compost. If you have you read our ebook Sowing and Growing Information Products you will understand. In the chapter on ways of improving the soil it talks about compost. The idea is that our mistakes are thrown onto the compost heap and then left to mature and change into a product that can be used to improve the soil. Plants that grow in ground that has had compost added to it or seedlings that are grown in just compost grow better, well they do until they have exhausted the nutrients in the compost. 

We have set up a survey to help us decide what we should do next? We have had some ideas but would love some feedback on them. 

http://www.lilythepinkministries.com/WhatShouldWeDoNext

Thank you for dropping by to see what we are doing at the moment. Come on in and look around and see what you think.

Our online learning materials

We have set up some web sites that you can access to find a variety of learning resources. There are videos, mp3 files, workbooks even some action mazes and crosswords. Sign up to the newsletter to find out more.

Supporting people in mental distress

The first step in doing this is to provide the sort of learning amteials that will help people overcome the issues that are adding to their distress. The hope is to expand these into other ways of supporting people in mental distress once sufficient fudns have been raised from the online courses. If you like what you see and want to join in with what we are trying to do, please sign up for our newsletter so we can keep in touch with you about what we are doing.