I have been mulling over a business strategy.

To be accurate, I am trying to develop a business strategy.

To be even more accurate, I am trying to establish a collective project that generates revenue. And this revenue would be used to support a social enterprise. And this social enterprise does what exactly?

I am trying to do this as I have a need for a setting that allows me to test myself against a set of occupational requirements in a supportive setting. I need to go “hands on” and  obtain a sense of my strengths and weaknesses. In the identification of weaknesses I will find targets of opportunity that I can seek to improve upon.

If I have these needs, I suspect they are common to others with TBI. And since the symptoms are similar to stroke, and we have a rapidly aging population, there is likely to be a growing number of persons who share these needs.

The interview of the other day in which I was shotgunned with questions without an opportunity to deliver a full reply simply overloaded me and made me frustrated and angry. That setting was completely non-supportive. It was negative and antagonistic. And that is what passes as “health care” of some kind. There was no kindness in it.

The second factor revolves around a need for social activity. In my struggles with the health care system I have frequently ended up ground down, chewed up, spit out. I should not have to fight like this simply to access basic medical care. I have been wait listed for a family doctor for over 14 months now, with no signs of any form of response.

When I go on walks, I encounter other people and we speak informally. This is very positive for me. I realise that I am not just a “ground down nobody” a worthless cast off rejected by the health bureaucracy, but a person quite capable of interacting with others, not as a “defective,” not as someone who is viewed as an object to be treated, or ignored, but as an ordinary human being with whom it is possible to interact as a human being. This gives rise to the third factor: no bureaucracy.

And I think that leads toward the fourth factor. That the project must somehow be a collective work, a part of the community, not a hived off breakers yard where the old and those labelled as decrepit are cast off and abandoned. It should be an entity pulsing with its own vitality and this vitality should derive from its links to the greater community.

And here it gets difficult.

There is a work by Jane Jacobs I have been trying to fight my way through (due to my own set of problems, not the quality of her writing) and she speaks of commercial development and draws an analogy with a natural Eco-system. This is an analogy that I have tried to use before but Jacobs anchors it in a way I have not yet been able to achieve. And I think in here there sits the sixth factor which is bound up in organic notions of growth within the ecology of the local community as the frame of reference.

And I was trying to puzzle these various threads out, follow them to their conclusions and this lead to the image above. And this somehow triggers another set of associations and thoughts. So that from the ashes of Collected Works the phoenix of collective works may take flight.

• Supportive Environment
• Occupational Development and Test
• Social Interaction
• No Bureaucracy
• Collective Project
• Community Ecology