The other thing that immediately comes to mind is the work done in community business development that used to be called capacity building. It’s gone out of fashion now, but we used to think that enabling key people in say, disadvantaged geographical areas like Newtown or Castle Vale, providing them with resources etc and training and stuff would pull the whole economic development effort together. And even if it didn’t do quite that, it would provide a pool of voices on the ground who could then speak for themselves, and in some way, for their wider sphere.

I am seeing that same idealistic feel through some of the language here, although I guess what is also going on is some reactions to traditional aggressive advertising or marketing and references to more cause-related marketing and csr type stuff. It’s all really quite inspiring.