Community...A Business Plan, Part 3

One of the reasons we chose the name "thimbleberry" for our press is that the berry itself is so packed with seeds and the plant thrives is rough terrain. I'm not superstitious, but that seems like a good image to hold in mind when starting a publishing company during a recession: use every resource at your disposal to pack as much content into each bit of "fruit" you produce.

Summer is almost gone and the berry season is long past its peak, so it's time for me to get back to this company business plan I promised to write about. I haven't managed to tackle the portion of the plan that requires numbers yet (my partners have started that dreaded task but I'm keeping my head down for the time being). So, here is the first bit of our company vision statement...

Section 3.
B. Vision Statement:

Creativity drives economic development. Thimbleberry Press aims to combine the discipline of the arts with the discipline of commerce to flourish as a company, as individuals, and to help our community thrive. Our view is that high culture/low culture is a false paradigm depriving too many people of the richness of their own creativity and depriving the larger community of the potential fruits of that creativity. We envision contributing to the well-being of the community through the publication of books and downloadable educational materials that promote individual creative and intellectual development as well as cross cultural understanding.

That is a distillation (and I'm not happy with having used the word paradigm...where is my thesaurus?...) but it's a start.

We've also been developing the next group of publications (you can see some sample covers and learn more about these upcoming books at our website).

And if you know any teachers or parents who could benefit from downloadable, inexpensive materials about China for their children, send them to our web page for a free download sample of Draw On Culture.