What's a trans-local entrepreneur? Like cosmo-local manufacture, the aim is to share practice and resources, across many borders
from Fast Company
The ReEconomy network (based in Totnes), and its director Jay Tompt, is always one of our favourite change-making networks. One of their upcoming events (Thursday, November 26, 2020, 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM (UTC+01:00)) is titled a “Trans-Local Entrepreneur Forum for a regenerative economy”.
We have been talking here about cosmo-local production for quite a while - its slogan, design global, make local - so we wondered what lay behind the trans-local definition.
As they outline on the Open Collective page:
So, what's a 'trans-local enterprise'? For our purposes…
Ethical, sustainable, regenerative, etc.
A trans-local enterprise would be an enterprise, not a charity - creating value, exchanging value with the aim of financial sustainability
Would aim to connect many local entities with a platform, methodology, technology, training, etc.
Would seek to ‘scale-out’ existing models from one place to other places, e.g through franchising, a toolkit, prototyping, etc.
The event brings together three groups, who will make their pitches around their practice of trans-local entrepreneurship:
sPark It Liverpool (UK): “We’re taking over the streets of our city, celebrating imagination, fostering collaboration, and starting a conversation about what we want from our urban landscape.
The project aims to:
Provide a platform for community groups, independent businesses and creatives
Excite, inspire and challenge through inspired reinterpretations of land use in urban areas
Build stronger community networks, provide opportunities for training, employment and volunteering”
Bern Unverpackt (Switzerland) “We are an association that promotes an alternative, fair economy and wants to reduce the waste in everyday household waste.
“We do this by including regional and fairly traded products in our range and offering them unpacked. In this way, we give our customers the opportunity to make their daily shopping more sustainable and with less waste.
“Under the roof of the lively district center Villa Stucki, we also want to bring added value to our district. The shop has developed into an important part of the district over the last 2 years. Our offer is unique here and is aimed at the needs of a loyal and growing clientele.”
TiQuest (Luxembourg): “It’s time for electronic receipts. Every year, in Europe more than 3 million trees are used to print 150 billion paper receipts with a cost for shops of 750 millions euros. In Luxembourg it represents 3600 trees wasted for 180 million receipts.
“It’s time to act. In collaboration with merchants restaurants and retailers, TiQuest is implementing an infrastructure for digital receipts in Europe. We are starting in Luxembourg with the ambition to make it the first totally paperless country in the world.”
We’ve been searching around for any other material around this… and have found this 2019 paper, where the author notes the interesting shift from “refugee” entrepreneurs to “trans-local entrepreneurs” among Bosnian communities scattered across Europe:
Formal diaspora networks usually revolve around a particular aspect of shared identifications such as nationality, ethnicity or religion, forms of more abstract or ‘supra’ group identities. Also, there are many more informal diaspora networks and practices with much stronger social glue representing relationships based on family background, kinship, friendship and place of origin, such as a particular region, city, village or neighbourhood. These bonds play a very important cohesive factor in diaspora, as they very often link different individuals and groups to a wide global network of likeminded people—a phenomenon also described as ‘trans-localism’.
Sign-up to the event is here.