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Welcome to Economic Gardening Economies

Here's a new web site for Economic Gardening, a potent approach to building prosperity in communities "from the inside out".

The model, first developed by Chris Gibbons in Littleton, CO, is now spreading widely. Georgia is using economic gardening as the framework for its entrepreneur-friendly communities initiative, for example.

Northern New Mexico Connect is relying on the model to extend the reach into its region from the Los Alamos National Lab. Missouri is using economic gardening in a range of pilot projects. There's an active economic gardening group in Australia, and new efforts are underway to introduce the model to Japan. The U.S. Small Business Administration has embraced the model. (You can read more here.)

In August, the Lowe Foundation will be offering a training course in Economic Gardening for economic development practitioners. You can learn more by e-mailing Chris Gibbons.

Keeping up

You get the idea. Keeping up with the accelerating pace of economic gardening is becoming a challenge. To help meet this challenge, and to provide eaasier access to the emerging stories, resources and networks of economic gardening, I-Open has launched this site. I-Open (the Institute for Open Economic Networks) is a non-profit organization that promotes the development and rapid deployment of network-based models of economic and workforce development.

Contribute to Economic Gardening Economies

We'd like you to contribute your stories of economic transformation. Becoming an author for this site is simple. Just go to this page, and set up an account with a user name (your e-mail, usually) and a password. Membership is free.

We set this site up after our latest gathering in Steamboat Springs. It was very clear that our group needed some additional power on the web to post files and even handle on-line registrations for the next gathering. So, this site may help us.  

The 2008 Steamboat Springs Gathering

The sixth annual gathering of Economic Gardening took place in Steamboat Springs in June, 2008. You can learn more about what took place in Steamboat, as well as view the presentations from this page.

Economic Gardening Google Group

This site provides us a little more power and interactivity than our Google Group. If you are not a member of our Economic Gardening Google Group, please join the conversation. You can join here.

While the Google Group is our core communications tool, this web site can help us keep track of files and presentations and other materials. This site is interactive -- there is no web master. The members of the site maintain it themselves, like a good camp ground.

The Back Story

If you curious to learn more about how this site came about and who is behind it, you can read more here.