Principles

1. A community should be able to produce the things it uses

Pervasive low-quality mass-produced goods cost little to create, command a high sales price, but do not meet the needs nor desires of the consumer nor the community. This creates an opportunity for local producers who can, with the help of the community, learn to make far better quality, better fitting, uniquely Eugene goods, at a matching price.

2. Higher education should be part of daily life

To develop skills needed to help each other, and to offer high-quality goods and services, members of a community must be casually and continually involved in education. They need to be involved in the education of children, adults, and themselves, maintaining a continuous curiosity. This needs to be facilitated, by creating educational opportunities that are not separate from daily life. Children and adults should be able to see people working, making things, proud of their art ... all the time. A workshop should be visible to the public ... this is good for business and good for the public.

3. A community needs to commit to finding local talent, tackling difficult problems, and producting world class quality

If education and work become more closely tied, more people, young and not-so-young, will have more opportunities to find work they can commit to, work that fits their abilities, and work that makes them feel whole.

4. Everything needs to solve as many community problems as possible

In order to create an economy that interleaves education, entertainment and small-scale production, people need to develop the habit of producing things that solve as many problems as possible. When making changes to the community -- constructing buildings, improving political structure, etc. -- these must solve as many problems at once, for the whole, as possible. then the community becomes more vibrant, more whole.

5. Organizations & individuals needs to work actively on mutual support

Individuals are stronger when their individual strengths combine to make a more interesting and lively environment. But they must actively make connections among themselves. Various kinds of mechanisms can facilitate this, from bulletin boards & media to active coalition-forming organizations.

6. Good things must be preserved, dead things must be made alive

It is important that people use theiur feeling, in the presence of something, to determne whether something is good, or needs help. the effort to preserve good things -- small businesses, individuals, historic buildings, organizations -- must be more active. As must be the efforts to fix things that are clearly not working.

7. A mix of non-profit incubation and small scale manufacturing brings the best results

There are many approaches to fixing communities. But small scale efforts are more robust than major recruitment, even though they do not look like as big a "win" on paper,

8. Protecting of local independence & freedom is very important

Community-building is impossible if people do not genuinely feel free. It is the purpose of government to protect people's rights, but clearly this has not always worked. Community-building means active participation in governance, and we believe the mechanisms for doing this need to be improved upon.

To implement these principles, and given our existing non-profit assets, and community strengths, we have developed a list of projects we would produce downtown. The general quality of these projects:

• Tap the potential of small-scale & handmade local production of goods & services, to achieve levels of quality, grace, feeling & functionality not available in mass-produced imports.
• The primary means to bring this force to bear on the repairing of downtown Eugene, will be the special-purpose community center.
• The special purpose community center gathers community interest and skill in a particular field, and concentrates it, to produce a catalyzing space for the advancement of that field.
• In this way, a center is a school, training center, advocate for its field, host to highly-focussed non-profit projects and incubator for the same, and an incubator and host to appropriate mutually-supportive small businesses, and incubator for others.

By the way, we use the tern "life" heavily. What do we mean by "life? In isolated trials, in the presence of two physical objects, 95% of experimental subjects agree upon which one "has the most life", which one "has the most feeling" and which one "reflects your true self". Independently, we all agree on this. People do not agree on questions of "which do you like the most", or "which do you think is better". The 5% who do not agree on the above questions, are either trying to make a point, or do not want to answer the question. So something objective is going on here. We intend to tap into it, to create life.