Start your own sustainable place in Brussels

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About

Citizen Spring is a citizen movement to make our cities more livable and fun, with space for people and nature.

The Citizen Spring Academy is a new citizen initiative to support citizens who want to start new businesses for the 15-minute city. We want to foster the creation of new businesses that will be financially, humanly and environmentally sustainable.

The Brussels chapter is currently facilitated by Leen Schelfhout and Xavier Damman.

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Values and principles

We help each other and we take care of each other

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. If the project is not humanly sustainable it won’t do any good to the community. We take care of each other and we proactively invest in our relationships. We make sure that we all take time off.

We create sustainable and meaningful jobs for locals

We hire local people within 15 minutes distance (walk, bike, public transport). We make them part of the journey. We invest in people. We share equity and profit with them.

We embrace the diversity of where we live

We thrive in our diversity. We do what we can to engage with and hire people coming from the different communities living in a 15mn radius. We contribute as much as we can to the well being of our local community.

We are pragmatic, done is better than perfect

We don’t need to be more catholic than the Pope, a cooperative is not always the best legal structure to provide a good service to the community, it’s ok to serve cow milk as an option with your coffee (but maybe don’t make it the default option), etc.

We share with the world

We share what we learn. We share our business plans and financial plans. We share our recipes. We share because we understand that we are all contributing to the knowledge base of the world. We embrace open source technologies (without being dogmatic about it, you don’t have to run Linux on your computer).

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