Autor: Baumhaus Berlin

I did not do an official count but I would guess there were at least 90-100 people who made it out on Friday Feb 7 to the first Sustainability Drinks event at betahaus.  I was feeling pretty excited about giving my talk on „Broad Spectrum Sustainability“ but the audience was a looking a bit tired after they had just sat through an hour of introductions and the first presentation.  So I decided to take a chance and do an experimental interactive warm up exercise where I quickly divided the audience onto 3 groups and got each group to sing part of a groovy loop.  People warmed up to it quite quickly and it proved to be a humorous interaction for everyone in the room.  At this point I gained most everyone’s enthusiastic attention and an atmosphere of good will and fun filled the room.

My goal was to get people to think more broadly about the concept of sustainable development by stepping beyond the typical perspectives of ecologic and economic frameworks to also consider aesthetic, personal, social and cultural perspectives of sustainability.  This portion of the talk focussed on an understanding of the idea that sustainability = the ability of a system to maintain balance, and how that could be interpreted considering all six perspectives.

Later the talk evolved towards showing how these perspectives on sustainability were used to develop the Baumhaus concept, it’s design and event programming as a „platform for broad spectrum sustainability“.  I included part of the video from of our 3-d fly through as part of the power point slide show that the audience seemed to enjoy.

During the fly through I told people that the Baumhaus is a project to build a public space in the form of an indoor tree house in the Wedding district of Berlin as a platform for collaborative sustainable development.  I spoke a bit about one of the fundamental ideas behind the Baumhaus project: utilizing the transformative super powers of aesthetics, art & design as functional tools to create an environment dedicated to the idea of inspiring people to come together and engage with each other in meaningful ways.

The last part of my talk focussed on giving an example of a how I used a flexible contextual framework called, „The Inner Commons,“ that I am developing to explore my own sense of personal sustainability.  The looks on people’s faces were great; I definitely sparked some curiosity, confusion and even started cultivating a few new collaborations…

At the end of my talk I made the big announcement that the Baumhaus has a new partnership with the Thomas Mampel & .garage, a well respected business coaching institute here in Berlin.  The .garage and Baumhaus are now going to be jointly developing a hybrid program for developing and coaching social start-ups with broad spectrum sustainability perspectives.  As part of our partnership the .garage has offered to fund significant part of Baumhaus overhead costs during our design and building phase.

We are really happy to have Thomas Mampel and the .garage as partners along with many of you in our common quest to use frameworks of sustainability as tools to develop more humanely balanced communities and businesses.

Peace,

Scott

p.s. [it might take a bit of editing but I will eventually put parts of my presentation online]

All photos – Andrew James

… in the Baumhaus space…  Yesterday morning the heater got installed, yes!  It looks like it may take a few more days until the gas line is hooked up and we can begin to work in a warmer space…

Also yesterday we had another meeting with Thomas Mampel at the Stadtteilzentrum Steglitz e.V. and it went very well.  We will be making some big announcements about the results of our meeting at the first ‚Sustainability Drinks Berlin‚ event on 7.2. which will take place at Betahaus starting at 19.30h.  Scott will be giving a presentation on the topic of „Engaging in Broad Spectrum Sustainability“.  The event is being organized as a regular monthly social and professional networking gathering for people who are curious about or interested in engaging in sustainable development in Berlin and is organized by Dr. Marco Blumendorf and Florian Weingarten.  The event is free to attend after you register for a free ticket.  We hope to see you there and we promise it will be an informative, entertaining and inspiring evening!  You can also spread the word via the Sustainability Drinks facebook event page.

We had a great meeting with Thomas Mampel and Sven Dönni from .garage business coaching center and Thomas wrote an entry (auf deutsch) on his blog that is really worth reading if you want to see the real potential of the Baumhaus project….

Yesterday we had our final bank meeting with the Berliner Volksbank.  This was our best chance to get the Baumhaus project financed…

Before we left in the morning we were debating whether to take the train or a taxi because we were bringing along one of the actual (and heavy) glass panels made by Isaac Abrams as an example of the high quality art work to be installed.  It turned out to be a good thing because there was plenty of slippery ice all over.

Hergen Wobken from the IFSE accompanied us there to back up our solid business plan presentation with the experienced voice of a seasoned banker.   Many thanks to Hergen for all of his great advice and support.

We had a very nice meeting with Manja Paczoska and another of her colleagues for 1 hour and 11 minutes… our lucky number!  We went into granular depth about how the Baumhaus will operate as a social business and how we plan to manage the building process as well as the running of the space as a platform for people who want to be active in making the world a better place.  We answered all of their questions thoroughly and backed everything up with documentation from our 160 business plan and some extra summary documents we put together over the weekend.

The good news is that the Berliner Volksbank really liked our concept and is still considering giving us the loan.  However, we still have to see if the Bürgschaftsbank and IBB will offer to guarantee the loan, keep your fingers crossed!  We are one big and important step closer to getting funded.

Afterwards, we had a meeting at the .garage, an start-up coaching center in Steglitz where we have been working with the great coaches like Daniela Koch and Stefanie Rätker to help us develop our business plan over the last 14 months.  We met with Sven Dönni (Projektleitung) and Thomas Mampel (Geschäftsführer) to discuss some possible collaboration to develop a new social business initiative…  It was a good day.

We are starting out the new year with a creative session to plan the first Baumhaus installation, the back room. This room will have multifunctional uses for events like seminars, dining, film screenings, performances, design thinking sessions, yoga sessions, dancing and eventually a holo-deck.

18 people participated in our design session and we came up with some really great concepts that will be integrated into our final design. The next step will be refining our ideas.  Below are links to the original invite and some documentation photos.

rsvp + info :: facebook / meet-up

18:30h – Step into our warm and cozy nest on the 3rd floor, have a drink, ask some questions, share some ideas, embrace old friends and meet some new ones.

19:30h – We go down to the Baumhaus space on the ground floor to observe the unfolding drama of 40qm cavernous space with some exposed structural elements and a 4.6m high ceiling. Feeling the space, understanding it’s limitations/potential, observing the existing aesthetic themes of the building and practical functions will be discussed.

20:00h – Back upstairs to review some initial strategies, for construction and aesthetic character development. We will have paper, reference photos, perspective sketching templates of the room and a small scale 3-d model to play with; modeling materials will also be available.

Discuss, sketch, experiment, eat and take breaks whenever you want.

21:30h – Short group and individual presentations and discussion. We will also document our ideas and consider how to proceed for our next session.

22:30 – We are in „Party Mode“… as soon as we clean up from our creative session.

• please bring prepared food, snacks and drinks to share. Just reply here and let everyone know what you are bringing and things should balance out nicely.

• feel free to bring your favorite drawing tools, sketch books, cameras and other recording devices.

We’re looking forward to getting stuff done while having fun!

This Friday we were invited to meet with the nice people over at Berliner Sparkasse to see if they will fund us…. wish us luck!