July 14, 2013
Erik Badger

As one can imagine, starting a new school and then starting a social business to help fund it can be a complicated business. There are many interesting questions to be answered and many problems to be overcome.

Today at the Children’s Academy I had the privilege of being present at a meeting where we took on one of these many questions: What should the social business bakery that will support the Children’s Academy be called? Should the name be a variation on the school’s acronym – ADECA – to make clear the connection to the school?  Or perhaps all it needs is a catchy name, one that is easily remembered by customers?

In order to tackle this problem we did what we often do when challenging questions come up – we took it to the community. Every other Sunday we hold an open community meeting. Today we began the meeting with this discussion (see picture above). Though we didn’t settle on one name, we considered a number of possibilities, learned a lot, and continued to strengthen the school’s ties to the community in the process.

Afterwards we had a short seminar led by a local agronomist and community leader on grass roots organizations and leadership (see picture of small group work below). This, too, was well received and helped us work towards our mission of the Children’s Academy not just being a quality school, but also becoming a center for learning for the whole community on a host of topics of local interest.