• Growing traction around sustainable businesses
• We need to train people to solve problems that haven’t occured yet
• Need for efficient use of resources, housing planning needs to include this thinking — same as regulations around various businesses
• Our roads haven’t kept up with our desire to be on them
• New paradigm for business building - don’t build biz around functionality, but passion - needs institutional support (if I care about YOU, then I’ll care about your BIZ) focus on benefit, not output — not the profit, but what the profit can do
• Community - unity needs to come first - is everybody you need to talk to in the room, are they aligned
• Need incentives for green development
• Assets not fully understood or leveraged
• Now is a really great time for the future
• We need to align and connect the ~10,000 non profits in RI to eliminated duplication, leverage their capabilities and compensate them appropriately
• Stay engaged with the community after planning, but into and through execution to be sure projects stay on course, strategies applied in proper conditions
• Non profits need to put “place” in their mission for auto-alignment
• Put non-profits back into neighborhoods
• Some RFPs are requiring multiple non profits to collaborate
• Businesses also have untapped passion and energy for improving place
• Frame desire not in terms of what you want to eliminate/avoid, but in terms of what you want to achieve
• Self-created econ dev project to bring innovation at scale to housing/planning/greening/regenerative-restorative communities

We’ve already gone over our time limit, but the group conversation continues. Your humble (not) scribe needs to ‘itty off on his oddy-nocky and make some pennies for himself.

Next Providence & Beyond event on April 11. Keep an eye out for it.