Dear Nangu community, it’s been a few weeks since our last update. Many things have happened and we are excited to give you a short update on the main events. We are now concluding our second cycle of the roadmap. We decided to prioritize the creation of the first Nangu Whitepaper where we plan to explain in detail the vision, the model, the plan to make it happen and the key lessons from our research. We hope to share it in the upcoming weeks. The governance team made important progress both in the actual structure we plan to use and in the use of different legal entities to fulfill our broad organizational requirements. During this cycle we had the absolute honor to add new members to the core team. They are all people we admire and it is a pleasure to present them to you.

Governance

Since day one, governance has been one of the main focus areas of Nangu. We understand that to build a decentralized global movement it is imperative to have a clear definition of the “rules of the game” that give structure to the members participation in the network. We have prioritized a democratic, worker owned and purpose driven organization as the formula to achieve our goals. For a long time we have considered coops as the most promising way to structure and incorporate organizations within the Nangu Network. The coop approach has taught us many valuable lessons and at the same time it showed us some key limitations. Every country has a very particular interpretation of how coops are meant to operate. Some allow multi stakeholder coops while other countries don’t even consider this format. Coops have limitations on how investors can participate, how to reward founders and how to organize decision making. These limitations have good reasons to be like that, but it made us realize that they don’t cover all of Nangu’s needs.

In broad terms we think coops are great, but we have struggled to find strategies to make it more entrepreneurially focused and have the possibility to give monetary incentives to founders and members who add an extraordinary amount of value to the organization. Through B-corp and purpose-economy.org as examples, we’ve learned that there are other formats of purpose driven, market oriented and worker owned organizations. This broadened our perspective of the range of organizations that can be a part of the Nangu Network. It sounds quite basic, but it was a big “aha moment” for us and it will have profound implications in our governance design. In short, coops are great, we will use them, but they are not the only organizational choice for Nangu.

Core Team

Since the last update and improving our social media presence we received a lot of interest from remarkable people that share our dream of a better way to live, do business, relate to nature and each other. We feel extremely honored to receive support from people of this quality, selflessly working to achieve the Nangu vision and being an early supporter of the movement. Let me introduce them.

As a regenerative agriculture and agroforestry expert we have the honour to work with Itai Hauben. He has led many regenerative agroforestry and permaculture projects in Costa Rica and abroad. A brilliant and critical mind paired with a huge heart makes him ideal to undertake such a challenge. We are already fine tuning the agroforestry plan to be converted into financial projections in the upcoming weeks.

Sabrina Baron Cohen is joining the core team as a U-Peace intern. She is conducting research on two main topics, first she is exploring organizations around the globe that work with landless farmers to learn from their success and failures. The second topic is the reality of landless farmers in Costa Rica that ended up working at industrial farming estates. We want to better understand how they got there, current living conditions and the perspective of joining Nangu.

Silvia Majo is helping us define the Learning Journey that each aspiring member will have to undergo to become part of the Nangu Network. Silvia’s passion is to facilitate community engagement processes, being the bridge between the supporting organization and the people being empowered.

Karl Hutt is defining a new communication strategy and brand identity. His enthusiasm and passion for Nangu is contagious! With his help we will soon improve the way we interact with our global network of supporters and allies.

Since the beginning of this journey we’ve had the key support of Bram Van der Lec and Paul Bernstein through our sister organization Polis. Although they are not a new addition to the team, we felt it was fair to recognize the work and leadership to define the governance architecture of the Nangu Network. Without their support, it is hard to imagine all the progress we’ve made so far!