THE MARSH FARM ORGANISATION WORKSHOP
Whilst the Coulters factory would provide a perfect base for our new social businesses, we also knew that if we were going to achieve our aim to provide work opportunities for our residents who were most in need of a job, we needed to find a capacity building and business start up process which would be accessible for all of Marsh Farm’s people, including our most excluded residents.
After looking at dozens of different approaches used by other communities or development practitioners in the UK, we were left completely uninspired by so called ‘best practice’ until we were introduced to an approach called ‘The Organisation Workshop’ (OW).
The OW had originally been developed in Brazil in the 1950s by social activist Clodomir Santos De Morais, who was a good friend and colleague of Paolo Freire the well known adult educator and champion of the struggle for social justice. The OW had achieved great successes in releasing the organisational and entrepreneurial skills of communities, most notably of ‘hard to reach’ and excluded citizens, and had empowered them to make positive changes to their communities by creating sustainable jobs and incomes in places where there were previously none at all.
These successes are mainly due to the OW’s use of a process called ‘capacitation’ as opposed to the more standard ‘capacity building’ approach that is so widely used in the UK.
Capacitation is a process whereby support is provided for new start up community businesses within a carefully designed ‘pressure cooker’ environment of ‘learning by doing’, with real contracts to deliver, all necessary tools and equipment on hand, on site expert mentors to help participants achieve smooth and safe delivery, wages for work completed and accredited qualifications earned during the process - rather than as a pre-requirement to joining in at all.
All of this makes the OW a much more accessible and people friendly environment for attempting business start up than the standard, classroom based approaches, which exclude large numbers of people, particularly the ‘hard to reach’.
