Shared Value Communities - Trust, Sharing, Collective Intelligence

A famous 16th century Portuguese poet, Luis Vaz de Camões, once wrote: necessity refines ingenuity. In our brave new world of scarcity, ACAF Portugal is focused on delivering social impact to improve this country’s low level of interpersonal trust (one of the lowest levels in OECD countries). This lack of trust undermines cooperation, initiative and sustainability, a trend we aim to stop. We also want to help prevent poverty and unemployment through our Shared Value Communities, a way to generate and manage collective intelligence and resources.

We are also looking and finding social needs in unusual places, namely inside private companies that are facing the growing financial problems of their workers as their households become more precarious through unemployment and fiscal austerity, forcing corporate social responsibility to become more and more a critical internal sustainability issue. As we provide private companies and NGO’s a new outlook on what social entrepreneurship really means: to generate self-sustained high social value with scarce resources, we are mentoring these two separated actors into active partnerships where they all win, by the power of the sharing economy.

Shared value communities is a concept built on the self-financed communities’ principles and methods, but also on stakeholder engagement and mutual benefit cooperation, between:community members, private companies, local governments and NGO’s, aiming to create self-sustained solutions to unmet needs, in the same way that mother nature’s ecosystems generate mutual benefits, innovation and balanced prosperity.

Crucial to these innovations is the mix between self-finance of all ACAF’s worldwide with acompetence sharing system (Knowledge Store) inspired by Local Exchange Trading Systems. As a unified method of administration and transaction, these self-managed communities are changing the way communities consider their unused resources and become aware of their true collective intelligence, resources and autonomy. To make this possible we deliver accessible methods for self-financing, but also methods for competence mapping and management (which have been a privilege of the private sector and outplacement/transition cycle processes for skilled executives) so that anyone can benefit from simple yet powerfulself-knowledge skills. People and communities become empowered by managing available competences to reach their individual and collective goals, not by voluntary work, but by a non-financial competence transaction market.

The most impactful and holistic solution, both by self-financing and by competence sharing is the Social Investment Community, a method to create new self-sustained social solutions for unmet needs and local entrepreneurship programs between people, companies, local government and NGO’s, by which everybody wins.

Of course we thought of family fun and so we are developing with IADE - Creative University in Lisbon, a board and online game called Partlandia© so we can share with you, that yes, it is possible a world where everybody wins.

ACAF Portugal’s team:

Tito Damião – Executive Director | Daniela Jerónimo – Planning and Partnerships’ Coordinator

Find out more in www.acafportugal.org.