The Living Business Model

The Living Business Model is a set of tools and approaches designed to create a supportive ecosystem around a business, non-profit, or other organization. This project is a dynamic example of the Living Village philosophy of modeling our solutions after nature. By combining a series of elements like permaculture site plans, green energy microgrids, and sustainable architecture, we are able to create a holistically sustainable environment much like nature does - through a variety of mechanisms and organisms all working together within one ecosystem.

By structuring a business environment in this way it is possible to convert expenses into revenue streams, as overhead costs like electric bills turn into revenue from selling excess clean energy back to the grid, and property maintenance costs turn into revenue from selling organic produce in the community from established permaculture sites. The Living Village Business Model is a customizable approach that gains effectiveness by being adapted to the specific geographic, economical, social, and political realities of the location being developed, just as ecosystems and the organisms within them evolve from the conditions of the surrounding environment. By making our organizations into organisms, we can leverage the power of nature to support any kind of project as well as the people who make it possible. 

Earth Home Building System

The Earth Home Building System is a project focused on making high quality, low cost housing a universal reality. Our building system uses a dome design - nature’s strongest structure that gives the thin shell of an egg the ability to protect the growing life inside it – and a material called air-crete. This combination lets us create buildings that are eco-friendly, natural disaster resistant, mold and fire proof, aesthetically exciting, and buildable at costs around 1/5th of the national average. This building system meets all of our essential criteria around functionality, accessibility, and environmental standards, and we will open source the plans to maximize the impact of this initiative beyond Living Village projects. 

The nourishment network

The Nourishment Network is an approach to providing fresh, organic food in urban environments. The project aims to address issues of food security, food autonomy, community development, and public health with a process that doesn’t cost too much time or money for farmers and consumers. Urban agriculture is most efficient on a small scale, but the needs of urban areas make small scale farming an insufficient means of producing the necessary amount of food. The Nourishment Network is an ecosystem of small scale indoor farms, linked by a web platform that enables individuals to order fresh produce being grown in their own city.

By distributing the network across an urban area, it becomes possible to select locations citywide that have the optimal conditions for growing indoors (like sunlight exposure, average indoor temperatures, controlled environments), and this enables local residents, businesses, schools, and governmental organizations to generate revenue from otherwise unused space within their facilities. The web platform handles all aspects of the transaction, enables people to select their food to be fresh-harvested that day, and tracks data trends in order to continually reevaluate our crop selections and make sure people have access to the kind of food they want to eat. By creating a dynamic network for food production, an essential component in any ecosystem, we can turn urban environments into living cities that nourish and support those who make their home there.