“Participatory crowd-funding” as a tool for achieving the bottom-up town development

Abstract

ENJOYWORKS focus on the bottom-up approach to development to create town and communities with diversity and sustainability. In order to achieve bottom-up development, providing opportunities for people to get involved in the projects over a period of planning stage, building renovation, and even after starting operation is the most important. We utilize investment crowd-funding as a tool for participation. Investors not only support the project financially and receive revenue share, but also are able to involve in project in various ways such as, putting comments about renovation idea on SNS, joining events that cultivate empathy and understanding for the project and build a sense of community, and attending investor meetings that they can think about idea for an improvement on operation. We call this “Participatory crowd funding”. We believe “Participatory crowd-funding” contributes to have them feel like becoming a project member and have a strong and long-term relationship with the project. Actually, there were more investors whose purpose is to contribute to liven up the community or the project, than investors who just focus on their return, according to our actual cases.