Eric Gijsbers is one of the initiators of the Region New Brabant South East (NBZO) that started over two years ago. With his wife, he wanted to focus on the interests of citizens in his region.
As many technological developments enable decentralised production of basic necessities such as energy, food, health and education, we no longer need to rely on industrial mass production. This is becoming less and less relevant, and so is the rural design of our society. The founders believe the foundations of our society need to be rebuilt.
New Brabant Southeast was inspired by Bob de Wit's Society 4.0 and started kitchen table talks after a meeting. They have grown quite quickly. Now they have around 100 members and a core team of around 45 people actively participating. Through Telegram, they also reach another 650 people. Last April, they officially became a cooperative. There are several domains including 'food'. For each domain, there is a working group.
In our experience, working with entrepreneurs helps enormously in moving forward quickly. Especially with food entrepreneurs. At first, the founders wanted to set up a food business themselves with only volunteers, but that is not sustainable. Then they got in touch with an entrepreneur who himself had planned to bring food from local farmers into people's homes. This entrepreneur developed an entire platform: Local Food Eindhoven. Once a week, people get a crate of fresh food delivered to their homes. Since the cooperative has the same objective as this entrepreneur, they advertise its services to their members. In this way, they bring farmers closer to the people. Local Food Eindhoven's platform allows for easy personalisation and they have plans to create their own NBZO food app.
Lectures are organised for the various working groups and there is a film group that organises films around regional activities. Similarly, they have introduced their own regional digital currency: the "BANT".
BANT literally means "region" (Bra-Bant means "swampy region" in old Brabant). This digital currency is based on the same system as New Westland's "KASH" which they work closely with. They have received very positive reactions to its introduction. Now the next step is to find as many entrepreneurs as possible to join in. It is very easy for entrepreneurs to convert back to euro. This lowers the threshold enormously and therefore they are confident.
Movie BANT: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WNStvYKoRS4
