The low-down on NOMAD

So what’s up with NOMAD?  Man have we made progress!

You last heard about NOMAD and our adventure at SF Soup only two months ago. April seems like a faint memory at this point. On the eve of our first fundraising event at The Ramp, we have made leaps and bounds as NOMADgardens is close to realization.

Let's take a moment to rewind and reflect. What have we been working on?

Meetings

In May, NOMADgardens won over "The Agency" ie. the SF Redevelopment Agency with a stellar presentation. From there we set our focus on inspiring the Mission Bay Citizens Advisory Council in June. We were happily surprised by a large presence of gardeners at the meeting. Their advice from within the community was informative and positive. They warned us that our little project might be far more popular than we first thought.

Next month we look forward to presenting our project to the San Francisco Urban Agricultural Alliance at their next meeting to help foster connections within the urban ag community.

Want to join in on the fun? Attend one of our own brainstorming meetings at the SF HUB every 2nd and 4th Wednesday evening of the month. Check out nomadgardens.org for more info.

Fundraising

NOMADgardens entered into the GOODMakers Challenge, an award competition sponsored by GOOD Magazine with a prize of $5,000. To enter the competition we created a short video explaining our project. The filming was a fun but challenging process. We have far to go before we will win any film awards but we learned some valuable lessons that will help us with our next cinematic campaign. We also made important advances in securing funding. Although details are not yet finalized we hope to share more good news in the near future, so stay tuned! We also are widely excited about hosting our first public fundraiser June 27th at The Ramp Restaurant. We hope to share a lively evening with friends and family on the edge of the SF Bay. Keep a look out for a report of the event.

Marketing and PR

Our website is live thanks to Ian Wilson! Check it out at nomadgardens.org. Gone are the days of splash pages, we have matured. Please share the link with your friends and check back often as we will continue to add content. 

June 27th we are launching our first NOMAD gear. T-Shirts for all! Here is a preview. Thanks to the guys at Selfless Tee for making it possible.

You also might come across a NOMAD business card or flyer as we have ramped up our marketing efforts to help spread the word. We are also on Twitter. Follow us!

As you can see we have been hard at work. Our goal of opening our initial 30 plots in August is fast approaching. Before then we must launch our Kickstarter campaign and rally support. Please help us! With all the progress we have made in the past two months, two more months although daunting seems totally possible. Keep on gardening!

 -h.nomad

Eat Sleep Breath Business Canvas

Wow have we been busy!  So many new things to talk about. ;-)

So…it’s always been a priority of mine to write a business plan, but as I’ve immersed myself into the world of entrepreneurship, I’ve learned the business plan I created in grad school was just that… academic.  The textbooks we used were all static and archaic in their approach. 

When Katie, Kim (UM business consultant) and I decided to apply for HUB Ventures – a seed-stage accelerator program here in SF (we will blog about it!) – we learned of a new approach to business planning from a recommended book, Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur.  If you don’t own it… rush to the store and buy it TODAY!  It has become our BIBLE for generating different business model ideas.  It’s been a joy to learn about business and to apply it to our new heart throb Urban Matters. The authors laid a phenomenal 9 part canvas that helps you understand the whole picture.  It’s a great way to visually see how your business model works and helps you get a handle on who your customer segment (see Katie’s blog) is and the value that you’re bringing them.

Oh and before we began business canvasing, we spent time developing our mission statement and core values.  I highly recommend doing this step first, as it’s going to be difficult to define your value proposition unless this is understood.

So here’s our (Urban Matter’s) mission: drum roll please

Urban Matters establishes and empowers citizen-sustained communities

And here are our awesome core values:

1. Collaborate Deliberately

2. Innovate Disruptively

3. Create a Joyful Impact

Here’s the 9 part canvas (the book recommends doing the canvas in this order, and so do we!)

1. Customer Segment

2. Value Propositions

3. Channels

4. Customer Relationships

5. Revenue Streams

6. Key Resources

7. Key Activities

8. Key Partnerships

9. Cost Structure

Interested to see what a business canvas looks like... check out Urban Matter's! 

Our office walls have become great vertical brainstorming surfaces…we can’t wait to add idea paint and corkboard…stay tuned.

So if you ever hear us say we’re “business canvasing” this is what we’re talking about. 

So what’s next?

Katie mentioned our next steps are to chat with our customer segment to find out our true value!  Can’t wait to get crack’in on this.

In tandem we’ll be updating our website to reflect our mission and values…tailored to our well-rounded customer segment SPACE ACTIVATORS!  Thanks for sharing in this journey with us.   Space Activators we can’t wait to meet you and Key Partners we are truly excited about working together with you!

Other News:

Our next posts will be more about NOMADgardens – our first customer segment project, brought to you by yours truly.  It’s our baby at the moment and we (SUCH AN AMAZING TEAM) have worked so hard to make it happen….and it’s about to!  We are putting the finalizing touch on our first fundraising event...so stay tuned!

PS. Business Canvasing ROCKS!

- iheartcities   

refining our customer segments

We have been working on our business plan, model, and canvas the past two months and I never realized how much effort, thought, and number crunching goes into it! At least once a week, Steph and I have been dedicating a full day to flushing out ideas, refining our purpose and goals, and narrowing down our market segment. With project commitments, this is the best way we can stay on top of it, although we frequently discuss hashing it all out over the course of a weekend.

Urban Matters has now narrowed down to one customer segment - Space Activators! These people come in a variety of shapes, sizes and capacities. We have community activists and/or organizations who are passionate about a positive improvement for his or her neighborhood, similar to our own creative director Stephanie Houston who developed the NOMAD garden idea. There are also social enterprises doing good each day through human and environmental initiatives, along with collaborative work spaces creating areas of entrepreneurs to work together, share ideas, and provide flexible space options. Along with the three above, we are targeting the oh-so-familiar (at least to us in architecture) city government and land developers/owners. The City of San Francisco provides us the perfect test bed with progressive government officials, like Jay Nath and Shannon Spanhake at the Office of Innovation, and thoughtful, creative land developers, like Seth Hamilian at Mission Bay Development Group.

So what’s next up for us? Getting out there and querying our market segment! If you feel like you fit into one of the categories and want to find out what we can provide for you, please contact us. We'll be reporting back with our findings soon!

We are not alone in this effort either. Our very talented friends have been giving us guidance and feedback along the way - Kim Sokolnicki, Raul San Nacio and Shawn Ardaiz, among the many!

-kc

Urban Matters participates in its first Hack-a-thon!!!

No we’re not tech geeks, although we secretly wish we were, but it’s true, Stephanie and Katie spent 48 hours this past weekend hacking it up with new friends and colleagues.  It was quintessential in meeting every one of our core values here at Urban Matters, especially collaborating deliberately. The aim of the hackathon was “to help reshape the systems of exchange in Mid-Market by supporting disadvantaged residents in overcoming inefficiencies and barriers to their prosperity,” as stated by Creative Currency, the curator of this amazing event.  The event is also supported by the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, the HUB SF, the City of San Francisco (Office of Innovation and the Mayor's Office of Workforce Development), Shareable, and American Express; all stellar organizations that are positively shaping change.

Out of the 48 hours of hacking came a very powerful story of Sarah, a young homeless female we met while walking around the area to gather site information.  The event that unfolded in the short 15 minute walk made apparent that the problem that we were trying to tackle was a public health issue - not a piece of technology -  the lack of access to water.  So RefreshSF was conceived, a public health awareness campaign marked by a dignity station that provides pop-up refreshing stations in existing vacant lots for the public. These will be places where residents of Mid-Market and the Tenderloin along with the general public can go to shower, rinse off, clean themselves and refresh. As we hacked out our ideas it became apparent that our most important goal for this weekend was to provide a solution that had the lowest barrier of entry, which ended up being a hardwired place, one that lacked digital bells and whistles. 

Having said that, we also proposed a technology component that uses existing infrastructure - Clipper Card. Check out the presentation here: http://www.refreshsf.org/ 

We are so thrilled to be working on this project, to be collaborating with amazing institutions that are helping support us and provide the biggest impact on lives.  Team RefreshSF is meeting this weekend to discuss our next steps.  Stay tuned, it’s a project you don’t want to miss out on.  

So, how many of you took a shower this morning? In the last 48 hrs? 

It’s a privilege you and I share every day, one we take for granted.

- i heart cities

NOMADgardens at Soup SF

Our community-driven pilot project, NOMADgardens, was accepted to present at Soup SF on Sunday, April 22nd and we were thrilled for the opportunity! This was the second Soup SF gathering at Red Poppy Art House and the gist is a benefit dinner to support community projects where you get a bowl of soup and a vote for $15. What a great concept adopted from Feast in Brooklyn and Sunday Soup in Chicago for the Bay Area! Our competition was Neighboratory - a week-long art workshop series in the Mission - and Mission High School Video Arts teacher seeking class funding.

We put together a very thorough and visually-stimulating presentation of the transportable community garden. Here are a few of the slides:

the vacant, deserted-looking site in Mission Bay

phase 1 with 12 garden plots

perspective view of garden with Mission Bay in the background

Unfortunately Mission High teacher beat us by a few points to win the loot but we met new supporters and collaborators for NOMAD. Onward and upward for our garden project! Stay tuned for our TED City2.0 submission, details on Mission Bay community festival, and prototypes of the transportable garden containers.

Thank you Soup SF and Red Poppy Art House for putting on an incredible event! We look forward to the attending the next one and seeing more inspirational community projects.

-kc