What is the Friends of ESTA Local Loop Group?
ESTA Local Loop is a series of projects designed to facilitate a local circular economy of things (objects/stuff), which encourages households to take an actively creative role in helping local organisations and businesses create a thriving local economy that helps us live within the carrying capacity of the Planet.
ESTA Local Loop is part of the Ethical Small Traders Association CIC, which seeks to play its part in transforming local economies into something that helps people and planet to thrive, to strategically nudge people, businesses and organisations to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
We are now launching our Friends of the Local Loop supporters’ group. This will help bring households into a more direct strategic relationship with local re-producers and businesses actively engaged in facilitating a stronger circular economy of physical items.
It is believed that this will spill over positively into other local service areas and help develop a wider culture of transparency and openness of process between local businesses, community organisations and households.
Why we use the term "households": First we want to get away from the term "consumer", which we think is an insulting way to describe people. Second, a household is not the same as a person, as it also defines a place where people live. Third; a household can describe any number of people from one to many. And its within household spaces that routines develop to move stuff around, which, if you think about it, is what we, as human beings tend to spend most of our time doing. "Household" is an active adjective, rather than a passive one, which restores agency and circularity to the relationship between people, businesses, and community organisations.
Becoming a Friend of ESTA Local Loop actively registers you as a person who is committed to working for effective change through action and helps us create an active distributed network of smart doers and transformers. For £7 a month you will be helping to resource the organisation of the Local Loop Network and be an active supporter of the project. It will also sign you onto our regular eNewsletter mailing list and give us a way of contacting you about all the good things that are going on within the Lancaster and Morecambe District and beyond.
You will also be invited to play a role in community-business conversations, on and off-line, where we hope to establish a fruitful dialogue between people who need things (usually called customers) and people who can meet those needs (often but not exclusively businesses. Our ambitious aim is that, over time, we can provide an alternative to the mythical but seemingly dead invisible hand, which allegedly steers the marketplace with a living heart, which will take the form of an active consultation and brokering service between product and service providers and those (everybody) who need goods and services.
We also plan to link up with other projects, initiatives and organisations in the area who are also working to create a more sustainable, economically, and socially just community and society, which we think is what making ever more transparent circular connections is all about, and which we think is the most effective way to get us all to where we need and want to be.
So do get in touch and join us.
info@lancasteresta.org
Michael Hallam
ESTA Network Coordinator
Images by PIXABAY