John Scarffe, Nederland. Nederland resident Marcelo Mainzer has designed a concept to give veterans ownership of their time and lives. The Egalitarian Eco-Village Makers Districts (EEV MD) would be run as a workers cooperative corporation, 3D built and run by 175 formerly homeless veterans.

The Eco-Village will be a community whose inhabitants seek to live according to ecological principles, causing as little impact on the environment as possible. The Makers Districts will be a 100-acre Planned Use Development of legacy homes, organic food and clean energy production, retail shops, community healing and educational centers, retirement homes and homeless shelters.

The worker cooperative corporation will be owned and self-managed by its worker stakeholders, under the one worker one vote rule. The proposed concept can clear a path for 175 veterans and their families to build their own economically, energetically and agriculturally self-sustaining Eco-village Makers District.

Mainzer proposes utilizing the EEV MD coop web site, social media and grassroots organizing to reach out to the 40,000 veterans who are homeless on any given night in the United States and invite them to apply for consideration as the first 175 mission specialists to build the first EEV MD. The application process will be a combination of private and military sector assessment testing geared to recruit individuals who are best suited to the work that needs to be done, as the project progresses.

When all 175 applicants have been selected, they are guided, by council, through the process of creating a prospectus to apply for, with their VA benefits, a construction loan of $75 million. Working capital can be found in Social Impact Bonds. This project is for-profit, mission driven and immensely scalable and is seeking $30,000 to $100,000 in seed capital to perform formal due diligence and begin the application process.

Mainzer said the response to the concept design has been overwhelmingly encouraging in applauding the idea. Almost every aspect has been proven in the real world for decades, he said. From the start, it would determine the most in-demand services and products to insure the greatest monetary income.

I firmly believe that catastrophic climate change may be as little as five years away,

Mainzer said. Communities that are able to produce the means to meet their needs will survive. EEV MD like communities can model an alternative to the current 19th century economic system we are addicted to, Mainzer said.

Mainzer, now 61 years old, is an immigrant, having arrived in the United States at the age of four from Argentina. His father escaped Nazi Germany when he was 14 years old and grew up in Buenos Aires in the 1950s, when it was the Paris of South America.

Mainzer said about his father, He was creative, intelligent, jovial and hardworking, and I think angry. I feel his anger was born of being exiled from the land of his ancestors going back ten generations in Germany.

His father thrived in Argentinas Jewish community, and at a relatively young age, he owned his own business, had a beautiful wife, young daughter and son. In 1963, an uncle told him to come to America, because the streets are littered with gold and all one had to do was stoop to pick it up.

His father believed the promise of America, so much so that he left his second home and brought the family to America. Quickly, he learned that getting that gold required great effort, so he worked himself up from a body and fender man, through traveling jewelry salesman in Los Angeles to owning a precision tool business and finally as an insurance broker.

His fathers big dream was to gather together a group of families and buy an island they could call their own. Mainzer inherited his fathers big dream, though not his dedication to meet his fiscal responsibilities.

Mainzer grew up in the late sixties and early seventies in The Valley, North Hollywood, and was a reading addict from the age of seven. I was an odd combination of brawn and brains that made me an outcast, Mainzer said. I was mostly bored academically and ended up doing construction for a living and accumulating data for fun.

Despite his hard-working fathers efforts, the familys economic situation fluctuated and they moved several times. Mainzer attended Waldorf school in his primary years and then a series of middle schools, two public junior highs and a high school.

At 11 years old, Mainzer had an epiphany that imagined military subscription being used as a coming of age ritual in public service for positive endeavors like disaster relief, an expansion of things like the Engineers Corp. or Americorps with nations globally supporting each other.

Mainzer has lived a Gypsy lifestyle, including the parts where he often found himself at odds with society and the courts. He lived in the San Fernando Valley, Saugus, the Hollywood Hills, San Francisco, Phoenix, Hawaii, Wisconsin and all over the Boulder and Denver Metro areas seeking a place to call home.

Mainzer has done significant experiential work including Path of Love with the Osho Leela folks and attended the Mankind Project, New Warrior Weekend. My career path has woven through construction, personal assistant and the sales industry. I am a poor employee.

Mainzer has been in Nederland for about seven months. He said: Id always heard that Ned was a place where a misfit might fit in. Mainzer has done work as a freelancer for Blacktie Colorado for almost a decade off and on and has tended towards one-man companies including Just Task Me, Concierge and Errand Service and A Handy Man to Have Around, construction services.

What I do best is innovate, Mainzer said. For at least a decade, I have billed myself an Imagineer; I see solutions in my mind then research whether they have already been tried or not.

That feeling of not belonging and his fathers big dream led Mainzer to many spiritual groups and practices, but he didnt find one that felt like home; a place where people worked together to support each others happiness, for love not money.

I was told, at a young age, that one must give away what they want most, to have it. I tend to give away too much, that combined with a lackadaisical attitude towards money have kept me near poverty my entire life.

In the past ten years, Mainzer has spent many hours working on a path to giving to others, and what he wants most. He says, To live in a place where we are all owners and take ownership, where the dominant paradigm is, By nurturing Self Realization in the individual, the community thrives.

Col. Dr. George Patrin once called Mainzer the real deal in his devotion to his work. He also connected him to Patch Adams who sent Mainzer his book, with a personal note encouraging him to continue.

For further information, contact Marcelo Mainzer- Founder, Imagineer, PO Box 472, Nederland, CO, 80466, civillianmarcelo@gmail.com.

(Originally published in the January 23, 2020, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)

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Nederland resident imagineers a veterans' ownership village - The Mountain -Ear