Solari Invention Room | The Solari Report Blog

…Unless, that is, you’re friends with someone like Maria del Carmen Torres. In between serving up pupusas and plantain chips at local farmers’ markets, she runs an informal lending circle with 12 friends. Every Saturday and Sunday, they stop by her Folsom Street apartment to drop off $200 in cash. And on Mondays the whole pot – $2,600 – goes to one person until everyone has their turn…

Cesta participant Ingrid Orellana isn’t going to wait for that. She got the 12 women in her group to let her put twice as much money into the cesta so she will get paid out twice as much and move her toward her goal of opening a fruit and vegetable stand off Geary Boulevard. “I’m tired of cleaning houses,” she said.

Continue reading Traditional Lending Goes Mainstream

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Mapping Your Local Financial Ecosystems

Catherine, Daily Musings, Glossary, How To, Solari Invention Room, The Solari Report on March 24, 2009 at 5:03 pm · 3 Comments

I am working on a segment for The Solari Report about how to map your local financial ecosystems. I am getting more and more questions about how to do so, including a great group from The Leadership Summit last weekend in Cleveland. Read their report here. Click here to view Catherine’s slide show presentation given during her speech at the Summit.

Also see Thinking About Local Food Systems in Lewis County, Tennessee by Bob Waldrop.

If digging in to learn “how the money works” in your community is an area of interest, here are a few links and comments to get you started.

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Welcome to the Solari Invention Room!

Solari Invention Room on September 8, 2008 at 4:09 pm · 59 Comments

At Solari, the invention room is a place in our imagination where we go to collaborate on creating and developing great ideas. There are several protocols that apply in the invention room.

1. We stay in the positive. There is no such thing as a bad or stupid idea. If an idea does not strike us as particularly useful, we say that there are other ideas that are more “wonderful.” We also take personal responsibility to support and given energy as possible to the people in the invention room with us.

2. We avoid decisions. The invention room is for expansion, communication and invention. We don’t contract into decisions in the invention room. For that, we leave the invention room and go to a decision room.

3. No time consequences to the participants. Just because you have an idea, does not mean that you can be held responsible to implement it or anything else that would require your time. Your having an idea in no way commits you to anything that would use your time.

We have been getting more and more communications from our readers with lots of ideas on how to make our world a better place to live. We thought we would create an invention room here on the blog as a way for you to post these ideas.

I would like to add another protocol for this particular invention room..

4. We encourage you to promote ideas which you believe you or yours can implement on a financially sound and attractive way. We think there is nothing more powerful than useful ideas that can create income for the entreprenuers who implement them as well as create income and jobs for others. So if you think what you do can help our readers, please feel free to say so and post links. If we disagree, we reserve the right to not approve your post.

If you have ideas or comments that you would like to reach the Solari community, please place them as a comment to this post.

Thanks!

Catherine and the Solari Team

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