We read Zingerman’s CEO Ari Weinzweig’s ‘Create a Company Vision’ article, and have gotten totally addicted to Visioning!! This is our first draft at this, and this page will be dynamic, with new features in how we can interactively include our team and community in the drafting and co-creation of our vision.

Vision Statement – Village Green – June 10, 2012 – DRAFT – VERSION 2

“Let the beauty that you see, be the work that you do.’    -  Rumi

Green Breakfast Club launched on June 13, 2011 in New York City with a tiny vision of getting a group of green entrepreneurs together to share resources. After one incredible year of testing this and trying that, we’ve grown up into Village Green, and are laying down a vision for the next ten years to be as incredible, sustainable, profitable and positively impactful for people, planet, and all our pockets, as possible.  Thank you to all that made the last year possible. We’re growing from caterpillar to butterfly, and are looking to infinity and beyond over the next 10 years.

This document is the 10 year vision. We welcome and thank you for helping us make it happen. Now rev up your flux capacitors and zoom forward into our future.

Village Green – benefit corporation, non profit organization and fund – all stand for the best that is possible in triple bottom line entrepreneurship. The organization’s core ethic of service through entrepreneurship, and radical and humanist approaches to sustainability based business and social innovation, interweave into the backbone of the brand. Green means something again, because the people that have built this brand and the community that is integrated throughout, mean business. Not business as usual, but a new kind of business, a triple bottom line startup revolution that has swept the planet, and that has galvanized the global populace towards a greener good, where we are all stewards of the Earth, through enterprise. Village Green is the spark and the leader in the space.

The Grandiose Vision
Village Green is the global household recognized name in Triple Bottom Line Entrepreneurship and we have changed the game and are in hundreds of communities worldwide. The simple resource exchange, monthly event series format, and the development of a lean technology to help people help each other, grew far beyond Green Breakfast Club chapters. Once chapters were set up all over the world, entrepreneurs and innovators from local communities could find each other and find direct real ways that they could help each other achieve their greatest visions. When people could do this from region to region, simply and leanly through the technology, communities and cities could instantly capitalize each other through a clear coinvestment framework and approach. The green startups that people were launching needed all the help they could get, and the green startup revolution took hold in cities and communities worldwide because entrepreneurship became a vehicle that could transform our worlds, from the built environment to the rural. Helping others has proven more profitable than an ‘all for self’ approach, and giving and barter circles are the norm. Green Breakfast Club chapters are in communities far and wide, and Village Green centers for triple bottom line entrepreneurship are in every major city, and the brand is synonymous with the green startup revolution that changed the game and activated a global populace to collectively invest in themselves to change their worlds.

The Timeline
We launched Green Breakfast Club in prototype mode in June of 2011, converted and expanded into a B-Corp and Nonprofit as Village Green in June 2012. By June of 2013, Village Green is one year old, expanding Green Breakfast Club chapters to new cities is how we deploy our model and approach, and by this time next year, things are on the move!

The First Year – what have we done?

Year One – the wishlist we turned into reality

• Expanded to West Coast regional office, making Olympia homebase and PNW region
• Launched a global prototype by expanding to London and Nairobi in late Sep/early Oct
• Developed a new technology for resource exchange, that is a core part of our product
• Created our first Green Startup Club event at NYU to launch a B-corp in a weekend, and launched first Responsible Investing conference in PNW for regional smart growth
• Open up the first floor of the Village Green center in the East Village by June 2013
• Launched funky new green club events like green dance and green film club
• Secured amazing sponsors: Organic Caterers, Online Productivity Tools, Airlines and Hotels, Foundations, Organic and Outdoor gear of all kinds, East Village green building supplies, Energy saving services and product providers
• Established Founding Partners: Foundations, Collaborative Consumption Organizations and Funds, Green Building Firms, Academic Environmental Studies and Green MBA Programs, Tech Companies, Corporate Giving Programs, Government Depts, UN
• Booked inspiring speakers and formed a speakers bureau, with folks speaking all over
• Built an incredible team of beautiful people who are all on board by the end of year 1, all in the throes of taking the ten year vision and seeing it into fruition
• Capitalized our organization with seed funds, endowments and grants to scale
• Cured cancer

Village Green launched its global prototype by expanding  to London and Nairobi, and has become bicoastal between New York and Olympia, making the Pacific Northwest its West Coast Hub. The year was spent expanding Green Breakfast Club chapters, and charting our plan to grow to communities far and wide. We feel like we are spreading love everywhere we go, as we use the model to show others how helping others, going after our dreams, and standing up in the group and saying who we are and what we need, and then going out and getting it, and getting others to help you, and helping others – is just a vicious little circle, and is how we want to show up in the world.

As we expanded, we’d go into places like the Olympia Food Coop, or a green market in Madrid or Bangkok or Rio, and see organic and fair trade products. We know the founders of the companies, because they have spoken at our events. Many we’ve become friends with, and we now have places to go with friends all over the world doing amazing things, who have helped us expand.  We chose to expand GBC to new cities based on where there were wonderful people we wanted to work with, where the spirit took us, and where we were intuitively guided to expand to. The world opened up and both the team, and the business, truly got into the flow. We just knew where to go, and only expanded where invited. And the more we expanded, the more funding rolled in, and the more profitable we became.

The Third Year – how far have we come?
Year Three – the wishlist we turned into reality

• Expanded Green Breakfast Club Chapters to 30 cities worldwide, with hubs in Nairobi, London, Mumbai, Rio, Pacific Northwest
• The resource exchange technology and brand network of websites is active and running strong, with each local site turning into its own human capital asset for its community
• Launched new prototypes for corporate intrapreneurship, academic and alumni networks
• Village Green: the East Village Center for Triple Bottom Line Entrepreneurship is fully open and thriving
• Launched a Green version of TEDx of speaker videos which allied our global community
• The Green Startup Club event expanded to the dozen states where B-corp is in legislation, and became a means for Green Breakfast Club chapters to launch in the US
• The Responsible Investing conference in PNW for regional smart growth, expanded worldwide, becoming the annual event that complimented Green Breakfast Club chapters
• A complete Online Training in Triple Bottom Line Entrepreneurship has been created with content from our Speakers Bureau
• The funky green club event offshoots like green dance and green film club expand
• The Village Green Licensing product is now viable and being sold
• More amazing sponsors and partners hopped on the bandwagon: Global Organic Food Vendors, Leading Tech Companies, Banks, Foundations, East Village green building, office and interior supplies, Energy saving services and product providers, VC Firms
• Founding Team, Board of Directors and Advisory Board are all secured and on fire
• Fully capitalized organization with funds, endowments and grants for the 10 year duration
• Fixed Global Income Inequality

The Fifth Year

By year 5, we have got our groove. The center for Triple Bottom Line Entrepreneurship is up and running in New York City, it is the global headquarters for Village Green, and it serves to facilitate exchanges among members, between Green Breakfast Club Chapters, and among all stakeholders in the green business ecosystem. We are in the heart of the east village and the entire community has embraced us, with the building itself now so carbon regenerative that we win awards and student groups worldwide come to the east village to check us out. We’ve partnered with film organizations for neighborhood film screenings and events on social change. We launched an e-commerce site where we sell only green goods, only from our startup members, and it turned into a huge wild card hit, with local sites enabling local consumption and support of new innovations. After five years of expansion globally and across different verticals and niches, we figure out that it is all of our Wild Cards that turned out to be the most spot on, the least sensical on paper, the most profitable in the doing, and the most rewarding in the heart.

Globally, by Year 5, our wild cards of expanding cities, expanding technology, and in financing, are all in good stride. We have made it to 50 cities worldwide, creating effective models for Western cities like New York and London, for emerging market metropolises like Nairobi and New Delhi, rural market models, university models, alumni network models, corporate intrapraneurship models. The resource exchange has spun out into its own tech startup, a new technology for resource sharing and exchange, that could be used on any website in any environment where a user community wanted and could help each other. In the film and aid world, the technology really took off, and became its own version of a human capital form of KickStarter, with real impact in the form of incredible new movies being made, and new forms of ‘aid-to-trade’ models launching, working, and scaling.  The microfund for local co-investment, $1000 per startup per month, chosen by 10 members of the local community, with one vote from the whole community – worked. First in New York, and then one by one in each major city we expanded to, as the ecosystem was ripe and mature enough to invest. The top down traditional capital, coupled with the human capital provided by the monthly resource exchange, proved to be an effective blend to build capacity in a local green business ecosystem.

The Tenth Year
In 10 short years, Village Green has figured out how to integrate all of its passions, products and collective bodies of work into one interwoven framework, and one voice, and we’ve gotten major shit done! In ten years, Green Breakfast Club chapters and Village Green centers are everywhere worldwide, and communities across the globe are all helping each other get the resources they need to grow their startups, and to transform their worlds for the better. At the ten year mark, we do one huge carbon neutral retreat, set a collective global vision for the next ten years, dance our asses off on Sustainable Dance Club’s energy generating dance floor, and our CEO, yours truly Danielle Lanyard, will step down as CEO. At this point, New York City is a thriving global headquarters for triple bottom line entrepreneurship, we’ve helped make the Pacific Northwest a hotspot for green innovation, and we have sought and secured such abundance, that we can share it fully for the entirety of our lives, while the whole system we created thrives!