About Community Ventures

Community Ventures is a non-profit incubator for companies that put profit back into the community instead of taking it out.

The idea comes from Newman's Own, which ran successful businesses and gave its surplus to causes it cared about. Community Ventures is building that structure as a repeatable model: socially conscious people building real things, with surplus flowing back to the people and communities it came from.

There is no profit at the top. There never will be.

How Community Ventures works

Community Ventures brings businesses, projects, tools, skills, and people together under one umbrella.

Funding businesses operate with the intention of generating a surplus. The first is Community Workshop, a sustainable job-training operation that uses real workshop equipment to train people with disabilities. Its surplus goes into the Community Investment Fund.

The Fund supports projects that benefit members and the wider community. Some projects receive loans and repay the Fund with cash, interest, shared resources, or a combination. Others receive grants and return value through community benefit, resource-sharing, or work that cannot be measured in dollars.

Member projects can be almost anything: restoring a train, growing food, fabricating, teaching, painting, repairing, investigating, or building a business. The most active project today is Flobot, an automated watering system that helps people grow food at home who otherwise could not.

Every project does not need to become a business. Every project does not need to generate revenue. The system needs to pay back.

The Community Investment Fund

When the Fund considers an application, it looks at four things:

• Whether the request is better suited to a loan or a grant
• How much is being requested
• What the community gives up by funding this project instead of another
• Where the reward from the investment will flow

A loan might be repaid in cash. It might also be repaid through shared resources. The Train group, for example, pays Community Workshop 6.5% APR and makes restored locomotives available for training programs.

The Fund holds business surplus, membership fees, repaid loans, returned grants, and investment income. After operating expenses, what remains expands access to tools, programs, and members.

Membership

There are two ways to participate.

Free membership is open to anyone. Free members can participate, learn, and contribute at a basic level. They do not pay to join, but they pay retail prices for rentals, materials, classes, and programs.

Verified membership is granted through referral from an existing member. It unlocks the benefits that depend on trust: voting on decisions, borrowing shared tools, and member pricing on rentals, materials, classes, and programs.

A member might submit a project, donate a tool, use or share equipment, buy or share material, teach a skill, contribute an idea, or help build something that does not exist yet.

Who Community Ventures is for

Community Ventures is for people who care more about solving a hard problem, helping someone learn, or seeing something they built get used than about extracting profit from the work.

We are looking for builders, makers, sharers, and teachers. Your thing might be code, hardware, food, art, fabrication, repair, restoration, or simply showing up and helping. Community Ventures is built to give people access to the tools, materials, skills, and other people needed to do that work well.

What comes next

Today, the founding members decide where the Investment Fund lends and grants money. Every application is considered openly using the same four measures.

Once three funding businesses are sustainable, Community Ventures plans to build an AI arbiter with human oversight. Its decisions, formulas, and constants will be visible to members. Members will be able to vote to change the constants and help improve the system over time.

When the model works in several places, Community Ventures can help seed similar organizations in other communities and fields.

The revolution, briefly

The standard business structure takes profit out of a business and gives it to owners. Newman's Own showed that a business can work differently.

Community Ventures is building the structure so people who want to do the same thing do not have to invent it from scratch every time.

A business joins Community Ventures. It runs. Its surplus flows to the Fund. The Fund supports projects. Projects return value in cash, resources, or community benefit. Members build more. The next business forms.

We're at the start. The workshop is open. The water is flowing. The next project is yours.

How to join

Free membership requires a general waiver. Tool-specific waivers may also be required, usually beginning with a short safety acknowledgement.

Verified membership is available by referral from an existing member.

Community Ventures is being built in public by the people who use it. If that sounds like the kind of community you want to help build, you may already be the kind of member we're looking for.