How many times have you heard them?

Two words.

“Happy New Year.”

Probably people have wished you a long, healthy life as well. Happy and healthy. I have to confess, every time I thought, healthy, fine, but there are so many other things that are important to me. That’s what I think when you’ve been working on our value canvas for a year, quality of life suddenly becomes much more than health, and yes I can testify, you come a bit of a ‘quality of life nerd’ as well 🙂

I don’t know about you, but to me Christmas and New Year’s is the time to take a look in the rear-view mirror. Before we look ahead, I want to take a quick look back gratefully on 2019, the year of build up.

2019, the year of build up

With a dozen meetings – lunches, cakes or drinks – in 4 cities, Leuven, Antwerp, Ghent and a first one in Mechelen, we took our first steps in building our community, with several international connections already forged as well.

At these meet-ups I met all positive people who want to build a more value driven society and economy together, people who also give their own quality of life a boost. If there is one New Year’s message I’d like to share in these times of fake news, rising work pressure and climate change, there is a lot of hope and energy to put sustainable transformation further on track.

On our side, of course, we kept going. Our ‘Pension Plan’ workshop, which shows you how money influences your behaviour, was completed and already reached a few hundred people. The speakers from our network of speakers – active at 10 events – undoubtedly more. The first freelancers were guided in their search for a better quality of life and our Federation, a group of value driven freelancers, started the guidance process for value driven entrepreneurs. Together with 3 other partners we started LoReCo, an ambitious 3-year project where we want to install a complementary city currency in a Flemish city, built on a new money design.

Of course, not everything went smoothly. The development of Slingshot, the company model on which we were working, was delayed because we ran into a few legal – mainly tax – challenges.  The board game didn’t get any further because of unforeseen issues with the financing of the prototype. We will leave both obstacles behind us in 2020.

2020, the year of activation

2020 will be the year where we finalize some products and solutions,  the Slingshot corporate model, the board game and Tribeforce, the software that supports building sustainable organizations.

We will also roll out our existing activities more structurally in Flanders, if all goes well we will be active in 5 cities at the end of this year with an antenna in each city, the first partnerships have been concluded in the meantime. Finally, we will furtherbuild up the foundations for our international presence  For example, our site will be translated into 7 languages and we are actively looking for value-driven talent to further develop the Federation internationally.

As you can see, a challenging menu, we are looking forward to it! We hope your year will also be full of plans bringing you enthusiasm, joy and meaning.

On behalf of everyone in our organisation, a happy 2020.

Bruno