Consultancy Services
Through the Offers and Needs Market (OANM) consultancy, you and your team will gain confidence in convening inclusive, focused events.
We offer personalized instruction on how to plan, promote, and run the Offers and Needs Market: a guided process in which community members meet (virtually or in-person) to identify and exchange their passions, knowledge, skills, resources, opportunities, and needs.
During the initial sessions with one of our experienced trainers, you will be equipped with:
- Strategies for adapting the OANM for different settings and audiences.
- Agendas and unique approaches to both virtual and in-person events.
- Communications advice for pitching the OANM to prospective participants.
- Deepen your understanding of human motivation and its role in effective facilitation
- Feedback and design iteration.
- Customized strategic advice about professional facilitation.
Cost is $125/hour
Your Consultants
Crystal Arnold
Director of Education
Post Growth Institute
Crystal is the creator of the Money-Wise Women podcast, recording over 100 interviews with women between 2016-2020. After graduating from Southern Oregon University in 2007 with a degree in international economics, she has designed and facilitated workshops, community events, and discussion panels about money. Her courses serve to illuminate the individual’s relationship with money and value. Her written work has appeared in journals, magazines, and in the book called Reinhabiting the Village.
Priyanka Das
Director of Development
Post Growth Institute
Pri is a facilitator and has long been organizing popular education programming and supporting mutual aid networks. Pri has a working background in healthcare, tech startups, and the international nonprofit space. During a fellowship at iHeartMedia, their research deepened their learnings about the colonization of the internet. Encouraged by their experiences as an immigrant from northeast India and having lived in multiple US states, they’re committed to decolonization and building infrastructure in resistance to the settler colonial apparatus.
dani leonardo
Director of Equity
Post Growth Institute
dani (they/she) is a facilitator, organizer and musician, with a background in Permaculture Design and youth mentoring. dani brings a grounding in ecological wisdom, perspectives from the margins, and a centering in Anti-Oppressive Practice. dani’s work centers around collaboration, co-liberation, creativity and justice. In their free time you can find dani at the piano, playing with their bunny Leftie, and exploring wild places. dani is a lover of the color purple and a nerd for plants, polyrhythms, and Hayao Miyazaki movies, amongst many other things.
“Crystal’s active listening skills + helpfulness in expanding the topic of the conversation and helping me reflect on my own goals around the offers and needs market; resource sharing.”
The OANM consultancy really got my creativity flowing, with opportunities and ideas arising. I gained the confidence to plan and run one. Afterwards, I noticed the shift in my body, I felt energized and sure of myself. I better understood how to adapt it to best serve my audience, and how to use the tools in the Toolkit. The communications guidelines are so helpful, as is the detailed run sheet. I sharpened skills that I’m applying in my personal and professional life. I plan to use this community organizing tool in my work encouraging engagement with the Time Bank and community currency project in Turkey.
The OANM consultancy really got my creativity flowing, with opportunities and ideas arising. I gained the confidence to plan and run one. Afterwards, I noticed the shift in my body, I felt energized and sure of myself. I better understood how to adapt it to best serve my audience, and how to use the tools in the Toolkit. The communications guidelines are so helpful, as is the detailed run sheet. I sharpened skills that I’m applying in my personal and professional life. I plan to use this community organizing tool in my work encouraging engagement with the Time Bank and community currency project in Turkey.
“We hosted a 50-person OANM within a government agency in New Zealand dedicated to supporting the innovation ecosystem. Participants were so excited about the variety of what was listed on the spreadsheet. Instead of depleting energy, time at the OANM generated energy. Afterwards, participants shared it was “An unexpectedly amazing experience! Makes other half-hearted collaboration attempts pale in comparison.” Part of the magic of an OANM is that in the experience of people coming together and being generous, a rapid sense of camaraderie develops. Another participant shared ““It was lots of fun and a great opportunity to meet and connect with others across the organization.” This process feeds people a nutrient that they’re lacking. As an organizational consultant who uses many processes, I see the return on investment in the OANM is enormous.” – Meg Buzzi, California July 2023
While participating in the New Economy Coalition’s Offers and Needs Market I got to thinking about ways this could be used for industry specific organizing purposes.
The OANM could provide a simple template for farmers and producers local to each other to communicate about some extra room in their truck, a bumper crop of melon, a market offer they weren’t able to take…There is a lot of momentum behind building out infrastructure for community owned food systems – aggregation, storage, marketing, distribution – this type of infrastructure requires a level of capital investment and coordination that makes it a long-term aspiration. What else can be done in the short term to keep the momentum going?”
Emilie Miyauchi – Project Lead for Food for the Spirit and Peer Educator for the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC