The Offers and Needs Market
Join us to connect and exchange passions, knowledge, skills, and more at an Offers and Needs Market. A truly transformative experience!
Bjoern and Vanessa Michael, our facilitators from the Post Growth Institute, will take you through this two-hour guided process in which community members meet to identify and exchange their passions, knowledge, skills, resources, opportunities, and needs.
It’s a fun and effective way to connect, get more comfortable expressing your offers and needs, and begin conversations with interesting people.
Through Offers and Needs Markets around the world, participants have found employment, connected with like-minded people, learned organizing strategies, and met an accountability buddy. The process is a proven way to boost self-esteem and trust, while dramatically increasing a sustainable and community-centred sourcing of quality goods and services.
What’s more, the Offers and Needs Market is proven to catalyze and deepen relationships. When we share what we have to offer, we see our own value in a new light while making life easier for each other. The same counts for sharing what we need, with the opportunity to find a connection and solve practical problems of all kinds.
When sharing offers and needs, each participant can determine their availability and location, the urgency of their need, and whether an exchange involves payment, barter, negotiation, or is gifted. Afterward, there’ll be a vibrant networking session.
Watch this short video about what to expect: http://www.offersandneeds.com/
What others have said:
“This is what makes the Offers and Needs Market so special and unique: it’s a short process that makes our needs and our gifts tangible and communicable. The Offers and Needs Market is useful and sustainable for needs that are both personal and organizational. It’s a connecting force and reminds us that what we need already exists and what we have to offer is needed and welcome, we just need a chance to connect.” — Tannur “SheWrightz” Ali, of www.shewrightz.com
“I was floored by the efficacy and utility of this practice. The clarity, freedom and personal responsibility inherent to the process setup allowed for a great diversity of needs and offers to be matched.” — Ellie Lanphier, Program Manager, Philanthropic Services, RSF Social Finance
“The Offers and Needs Market is a powerful process that heals our deficit culture. It shifts our relationships in a profound way. This is empowering people to be more than just consumers; they become engaged citizens caring for one another. In a world where people understood sufficiency, we would be thriving, and everyone would experience prosperity, not because of accumulation but because of what they share with each other. Contributing gives you an experience of your own fullness. I want to be known for what I allocate, not what I accumulate.” — Lynne Twist, Founder of the Soul of Money Institute
Additional Details
Event Timezone Reference - United Kingdom
Presenter(s) Bio
Vanessa Michael, Certified Offers and Needs Market Facilitator* Vanessa is passionate about systemic sustainable living and -business, and believes that a prosperous future within planetary boundaries lies beyond overconsumption and the growth dogma. Originally an experienced packaging engineer with a background in nutritional science, she discovered her purpose for helping people to help the planet and has shifted her path to being a Global Learning professional. Vanessa is also Director of Wellbeing & facilitator at the Post Growth Institute. A long-term practitioner of systemic sustainable living, as "The Vintage Environmentalist" she publishes articles, delivers talks, and provides eco-coaching & sustainable-living consultancy support to help people live a more ecological and conscious life. Vanessa is originally from Germany. With her husband and daughter she now lives a nomadic life in service, by exploring, facilitating and sharing learnings about sustainable community life in practice across Europe.
Posted By - Alison Whybrow
Email - alison@alisonwhybrow.com
Spare Field - Not in use - <strong>Björn Michael, Certified Offers and Needs Market Facilitator*</strong> Björn is a life coach and facilitator, who believes that fulfilment and contentment make people peaceful and generous. He is passionate about creating safe spaces for sharing vulnerability. As a mentor, Björn enables people to feel comfortable and serves them to achieve a sustainable life transformation. Originally from Germany, he moved with his wife and daughter to the UK in 2015. Björn aims to make people happier and more confident. He also writes about personal development on his blog. He is an advocate for empathic communication with his podcast Eine Dosis Empathie (A Dose of Empathy) and the Empathy Lounge he founded in 2020. He is experienced in virtual facilitation. *https://offersandneeds.com/certified-facilitators/
Spare Field - Not in use - Post Growth Institute bio: The Post Growth Institute is an international, not for profit organization working to enable collective wellbeing within ecological limits through three strategic levers; 'Reimagining Economics', 'Reorienting Organizations' and 'Revitalizing Communities'. Within those, the Post Growth Institute's research explores how to create a fair and sustainable market economy as the basis of their published articles, community presentations and the forthcoming book, How On Earth. The community economy and not-for-profit forms of business offer the greatest hope for designing a thriving, sustainable economy. Hence, the Post Growth Institute offers training and consultancies focused on processes that spark local exchange and provide people with the knowledge and resources they need to develop successful, nonprofit enterprises.Under the #postgrowth banner, the Post Growth Institute builds a movement, amplifying the messages of other like-minded individuals and groups. Their cooperative social media service, for example, creates engaging, original content for member organizations, and uses their collective reach to ensure the widespread distribution of each post. The Post Growth Institute (PGI) brings creativity and clarity to complex economic challenges by articulating the causes of the harsh realities that underlie our current global predicament, whilst outlining specific steps toward a thriving, alternative future focused on better, not bigger.