The last six months I have had a real change of mindset with regard to communities. I suppose I had been going through the “Every man is an island” stage. For the last six months I have been doing a Discipleship Training School with Youth with a Mission. There were eighteen people on the course (including staff) and we spent nearly all day together every day. One thing I have learnt was that while you can live as an individual, it is much better to live in community. Having your life closely entwined with others enables them to be there for you. It gives you opportunities to encourage each other and just makes life easier!

We were taking things to extreme by most peoples standards. We would often have times when we would write encouragements to every other person. Pulling out the good things that we see in them and building them up. Personally I was so blessed by this. My self esteem was built up – but not falsely, and I become much more confident to do the tasks that we had to do. I wish this wasn’t extreme. I wish that we did this kind of thing all the time.

So where am I going with this? Well one of the reasons I wanted to start this business is that I want to live in community. So I decided the best way would be to move to get myself in a place where I can do that. The business will be planted in a community and its goals will be around working for that community by bringing in work, developing local community based projects, social networks, encouraging and equiping people for life etc. I am not sure how all this will come together at this stage but I want to try and use it as a vehicle for implementing some of the things I have learnt about living in community.