Sponsorship of the Ecovillage
In late 1989, a company called Constructive Individuals had been commissioned to run our building schools. One of their team, Melanie, had been commissioned to manage a corporate sponsorship campaign aimed at building suppliers to get donations of building products such as plasterboard, electric cable, roof tiles and copper pipe.
When I started around the same time, I expected the campaign to be in full flow; but it wasn’t. She showed me letters that had been sent to the project asking for materials with which to put together a professional fundraising ask. Nothing had been done at our end.
When Melanie realised that nothing had been done, she took it well, and she and I got to work. Over a long day we put together a brochure pack and letters to over 40 companies that she had researched as good prospects. We got a designer, who worked up a brochure cover, which was a beautiful drawing of what the development would look like, complete with wind generator, solar panels and vegetable plots. Across the top it said ‘Building an Ecological Village’. That was the first time we had used that name, and it stuck.
I knew this was the right name for what we were doing but was aware that ‘Planetary Village’ had been used by the Community since the early 1980s. But ‘Ecological Village’ would be more clearly understood, and at that stage we were focused on raising sponsorship from traditional building supply companies. The Community would have to put up with the change of name. If we had asked, it would have involved weeks of meetings and debate, as this was generally the consensus-making approach adopted for most decisions; but there was no time for that. It was not the last time in this project that we just got on and made decisions.
The good news was that no one even questioned the name decision. And the term has stuck, with a slight change. Today it is called the Findhorn Ecovillage and is part of a global network of ecovillages GEN which the Findhorn Ecovillage played a lead role in establishing.
We sent our sponsorship requests and packs to over 50 companies, requesting gifts in kind of various building materials. We prepared a rough estimate of the quantities of a range of items we would need for the four houses at the cluster we planned to build that year. We wrote to manufacturers and suppliers of plasterboard, electric cables and sockets, doors and windows, copper pipe, screws and nails, tools, tiles, hard hats and safety equipment, scaffolding and much more. I spent a lot of time calling up the people we had written to, typically to be told I needed to speak to someone else. In pre-mobile phone days, tracking people down by phone was not as easy as it is today, so this took time.
In those days the Findhorn Community has a reputation for being alternative and from time to time came under criticism for its entirely benign, but nonetheless different, way of life. For this reason, I was a little pessimistic as to the response of the traditional building industry.
I was wrong. We had a really positive response. Over half of the companies we approached came back with a yes. Letters started arriving offering us much of what we had asked for, and in some cases more. In one case very much more.
A lorry driver arrived at the office one day from a well-known manufacturer of electric cable. I came out to direct him to our modest storage area and saw he had an enormous truckload of electrical cable of all sorts and sizes.
“How much of that is for us?” I asked.
“All of it,” he replied.
I took a deep breath. It was probably enough cable to wire 50 homes. There wasn’t enough room to store it and I had to quickly commandeer additional storage space around the Community. I spent the next two days moving it off the side of the road and into various sheds and garages. Some of it lived outside for a long time.
By the time we got to April we had taken delivery of a huge quantity of materials. This made a massive difference. We charged each housing project the materials at cost, realising a surplus to cover the rising costs of our growing building operation.
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