Members of Berlin Industrial Development and Park Authority met with the Women’s Rural Entrepreneurial Network last night. It was AWESOME!
Why? Because it was a group of beer-drinking men with wine-drinking women. Confident, capable, smart, funny, energetic, creative entrepreneurial wine-drinking women. Just the kind of women (and people) Berlin needs to kick start the next version of the city’s economy.
Berlin has those people now. I’ve said before, people like Andre Caron and Pam Laflamme fit into that category. So does Stacia Roberge, Sylvia Poulin, and Tim Cayer. David Poulin and Ryan Landry, along with Mr. Cayer and others are trying to bring this creativity to city government. There are people looking to create their own success in Berlin, thinking beyond the “mill mentality” and making things happen. But the fact is the city needs more people like them; it needs to figure out how to support and produce them.
WREN has amazing resources, which they said helped transform Bethlehem. They are resources that would give Berlin residents the tools to move into the 21st century, and help shake it lose from its industrial past.
(There will be an in depth report of the discussion that went on at WREN headquarters in next week’s Berlin Reporter.)
The members of BIDPA were receptive to a partnership with WREN, if unsure what they bring to the table. What I see BIDPA brings to the table is property. They could give WREN a building so they could open an operation in town, and the long term effects would far outweigh the monetary value of a property. There are problems with that, because then every non-profit in the city would approach BIDPA to give them a building, but few if any could do what WREN can for the Berlin’s economic future.
The discussion between these two groups was awkward and halting, but it was moving toward a shared goal—to bring entrepreneurialism to Berlin. The discussion lasted about an hour, but it was clear it could have gone on for days. Berlin is aching for this type of resource, and WREN needs to understand the challenge it’s looking at.
People who were trained to work in a mill can be trained to work for themselves, but they need to learn what it is they don’t know. This partnership would give people the tools to look outside the box, something they have never had to do.
Last week I heard a commentary on Marketplace from Charles Handy, the founder of the London Business School, about the new economy, and how people have to learn how to make their own work. They need to learn skills they can offer people that people will pay for, he said, because the time of employers taking care of everything is over. Berlin understands this better than most places, but its isolation keeps people from gaining the tools to reinvent themselves. The community college is a great resource, but if you can’t afford it what good is it?
Enter this new model, where training cost $40 instead of $4,000. There is opportunity here to build the 21st century workforce and mindset in Berlin, without abandoning those already there.
Mr. Handy learned these new skills at 49. He said you are never too old to reinvent yourself, which is something Berlin is hoping to prove. But it needs the energy, the creativity WREN can bring. It needs to figure out how to get WREN there, and sooner rather than later.