Thanks to Champion Jim for this reflection about a tsiMORAY organised event for social enterprises.
Lucy Morrison of tsiMoray organised an afternoon visit to the recently opened Social Enterprise Hub in the park at Findhorn Foundation. We walked up the runway to first see the intensive recycling system recently set up, with a row of what looked like normal black bins, which reach up to sixty degrees centigrade once fermentation is full-on – definitely not normal.
Next stop was at the new sunken open air music venue. It is petite, with masses of mosaics and resembles an alien spaceship that has landed belly down, creating its own crater.
The main stop was next, two brand new buildings, the social enterprise hub, one for offices and the other for manufacturing, each with space for meeting and networking with the other people based there. This three year project, funded by Leader Moray, is a beautiful creation that made many of us visiting wish we could move into one of the offices. In the manufacturing building, the networking already seems to have taken off. The three ventures there are around coffee, ice cream and seaweed, with talk of seaweed flavoured ice cream mentioned.
The final visit was to the beautiful and seductive Universal Hall where we heard about its creation by “people who didn’t know what they were doing” – but it is a work of art, so well done to them. Many famous people have performed there, including one comedian who called it “a hippy palace in a trailer park”.
We were hosted and looked after by Foundation staff, who made excellent and informative guides, as I have come to expect from this first class “trailer park”.
When I reflect on the origin of the Foundation – three spiritual people living in a caravan, growing
vegetables – now fifty years later, it is unrecognisable. It has over one hundred full time staff and
attracts visitors from all over the world to its courses and seminars. I have heard it called “a spiritual
theme park” but its entry course, the Experience Week, changes many lives, including my own as I
did this course over ten years ago.
I cannot help but wonder where the Hub will be in fifty years. Who can tell, but Findhorn Foundation
has set the bar extremely high. We must all continue the good work and keep the Hub charging
forward.
