Microenterprise Builder: From Individual Projects to FNB Hobart Makers
There is a particular kind of failure that teaches you something the textbooks can’t. It is not the failure of running out of money, or the failure of making something nobody wants. It is the failure of realising that the system you were working within was never designed for the people you were trying to help — and that you had been, for a time, unwittingly propping it up. Microenterprise Builder was born out of that failure, and it is still being shaped by it.
Where It Began: The Question Behind the Work
The original question was straightforward enough: what do people do when conventional employment is unavailable to them? Not temporarily unavailable — not the between-jobs situation that careers counsellors are equipped to handle — but structurally, chronically, systematically unavailable. I am talking about people whose lives have been shaped by trauma, disability, housing instability, the justice system, or simply the accumulated weight of being overlooked. People for whom a resumé is a document of absences rather than achievements. People who have something genuine to offer the world but no legible pathway into offering it.
Microenterprise Builder grew from the belief that very small, self-directed economic activity — a person making something and selling it, or offering a skill in exchange for fair payment — could be a genuine alternative pathway. Not a stepping stone toward “real” employment. Not a transitional programme. A legitimate livelihood in its own right. The challenge was how to support that without co-opting it, without turning someone’s creative practice into a productivity metric, without substituting one kind of system for another.
Learning From Rustix: The Realities of Small-Scale Making
Before I could articulate any of this clearly, I had to live it. Rustix — the small metal and materials enterprise I ran for a period — was not a social enterprise in the formal sense. It was a making business. A small, gritty, often precarious one. The kind where the gap between the cost of materials and what the market will actually pay for handmade things is a problem you encounter every single week. The kind where the relationship between time, labour, and income is almost never straightforward.
Running Rustix taught me things I couldn’t have learned otherwise. It taught me that small-scale making is genuinely hard to monetise, not because the work lacks value but because the market is structured around scale, efficiency, and standardisation that handmade work resists. It taught me that the administrative overhead of running even the smallest enterprise — the invoicing, the record-keeping, the tax, the insurance, the marketing — is disproportionately burdensome when you are also the person doing the making. And it taught me that the emotional labour of sustaining creative work in the face of indifferent markets is enormous, and largely invisible.
These were not abstract lessons. They were the kind of lessons that arrive with a certain bodily exhaustion. And they made me far more cautious about what I was willing to promise people when I started talking about microenterprise as a pathway.
Cognitive Factory: Rethinking Work, Dignity, and Choice
Cognitive Factory sharpened the thinking considerably. The project emerged from engagement with people whose relationship to work had been mediated almost entirely by institutional systems — supported employment, sheltered workshops, day programs — that were ostensibly designed to help but which frequently stripped away precisely the things that make work meaningful: agency, choice, genuine relationships, and the dignity of doing something because you decided to do it.
What struck me most, working in and around those systems, was how thoroughly they had internalised a productivity model. Success was measured in outputs: units made, hours attended, tasks completed. The person doing the work was often almost incidental to the reporting. And the relationships — between worker and supervisor, between participant and program — were shaped by a fundamental asymmetry of power that made genuine collaboration nearly impossible.
Cognitive Factory asked different questions. What if the work was genuinely chosen? What if the pace was set by the maker? What if the relationship between the person and the organisation was lateral rather than hierarchical — tools and skills offered rather than tasks assigned? These questions didn’t have clean answers, but they reoriented the entire project. They moved Microenterprise Builder away from a service-provision model and toward something closer to infrastructure: things that support making without directing it.
Woodwork Warriors and the Limits of Productivity
Woodwork Warriors brought these tensions into sharp relief. The project brought together people who wanted to work with wood — some with formal skills, some with none, most with significant barriers to conventional employment — and tried to create a space where making could happen without the usual apparatus of targets, outputs, and managed outcomes.
It worked, in places. There were genuine moments of skill-sharing, of people discovering they could make something beautiful and functional, of relationships forming around the shared practice of craft. But it also revealed the limits of what a productivity-focused framework — even a gentle one — can do. When the emphasis was on what gets made rather than on who is making it and why, something essential got lost. The work became a means to an end rather than an end in itself. And for people who had spent years being treated as means rather than ends, that distinction matters enormously.
Woodwork Warriors taught me that the goal was not to produce more skilled workers for an economy that may not want them. The goal was to create conditions under which people could experience the intrinsic satisfaction of making — and then, if they chose, build something economic from that. The economic dimension follows the human one. It cannot precede it.
Woodcraft Adventures Tasmania: Making as Connection
Woodcraft Adventures Tasmania — the work Priscilla and I have built together here in Claremont — represents a particular expression of all of this. The handcrafted wooden animals, the timber art, the custom orders, the community workshops: these are not merely products. They are demonstrations that careful, skilled, human-made things still carry weight in a world that mostly produces cheaply and at scale. They are also a lived argument that a small creative livelihood, built on genuine craft and honest relationship with customers, is viable — even if it requires constant adaptation, patience, and a willingness to work in the space between commercial reality and creative integrity.
The workshops matter particularly. They are not about teaching people to replicate what we make. They are about opening up the experience of making — of having tools in your hands and material under your control — to people who might not otherwise encounter it. That experience is its own reward. If it leads somewhere economically for a participant, we are glad. If it simply gives someone a day of absorbed, satisfying work and a thing they made with their own hands, that is also enough.
Cherbourg and the Long Arc of Learning
The Cherbourg connection sits in the background of all of this, and I think it is worth naming directly. Working with and alongside communities that have been subjected to the full weight of colonial control — communities where the relationship between labour, dignity, and self-determination has been systematically distorted by decades of imposed systems — made the theoretical commitments of Microenterprise Builder feel much more urgent. It is one thing to critique productivity-focused employment programs in the abstract. It is another to see, close up, what those programs cost people in terms of autonomy, cultural continuity, and self-respect.
What I took from those years is a deepened wariness about organisations that position themselves as knowing what is best for the communities they purport to serve. The most useful thing an organisation can do is create conditions, offer skills, open doors, and then get out of the way. The community knows what it needs. The maker knows what they want to make. The role of the supporting infrastructure is to be genuinely useful — not directive, not possessive, not invested in the particular form the work takes.
Toward FNB Hobart Makers: Community as the Method
FNB Hobart Makers grew out of the recognition that Microenterprise Builder needed a community form — a living, relational expression of the values and practices that had been accumulating through all the work described above. Food Not Bombs, as a movement, has always understood something important: that the act of sharing food is also an act of solidarity, of refusal to accept the premise that some people deserve abundance while others go without. That ethos — lateral, non-hierarchical, grounded in mutual aid rather than charity — turned out to be a natural fit for what Microenterprise Builder was trying to do.
FNB Hobart Makers is the current community-based expression of Microenterprise Builder. It is rooted in shared skills, mutual aid, local makers, and the values that Food Not Bombs embodies: that resources should be shared, that people should be supported without conditions, and that the act of making and sharing together is itself politically meaningful. The makers involved bring their own skills, their own projects, their own timelines. The community provides tools, space, encouragement, skills-sharing, and connections — not a production quota, not a managed pathway, not an outcome framework.
The maker leads the project. They make it happen. We are the tools.
That principle is not a slogan. It is the whole architecture of the thing. Every structural decision — how tools are shared, how skills are taught, how connections are made, how economic activity is supported — flows from that commitment. The organisation exists to serve the maker’s project. The moment it starts directing the maker’s project, it has become something else entirely.
The Relationship Between the Framework and the Community
It is worth being precise about what Microenterprise Builder is and what FNB Hobart Makers is, because they are related but distinct. Microenterprise Builder is the framework and economic pathway: the set of ideas, tools, and practices designed to support small, maker-led creative livelihoods. It is concerned with the structural question — how does a person who is locked out of conventional employment build something economically viable from their creative practice? It is not tied to any single community or geography, though it has always been shaped by the specific communities it has engaged with.
FNB Hobart Makers is the current, living, community-based expression of that framework — rooted in Hobart, in the particular constellation of local makers and skills and relationships that have gathered around this work, and in the Food Not Bombs values that give it its ethical character. It is where the framework meets the ground. It is where the abstract commitment to maker-led livelihoods becomes concrete: this person, making this thing, in this community, supported by these tools and these relationships.
The two things need each other. A framework without a community is just a document. A community without a framework risks losing its shape when circumstances change. Together, they create something that can hold — something that can grow without losing its values, adapt without losing its direction, and welcome new makers without treating them as raw material for someone else’s agenda.
Where the Work Is Going
I want to be honest about the uncertainty. This work is not finished, and I would be suspicious of anyone who said it was. The questions that animated Microenterprise Builder in the beginning — how do people locked out of conventional employment build genuine economic agency? — are not easier now than they were then. The structural conditions that create those lockouts have not improved. The economic pressures on small-scale making have not eased. The gap between what handmade things are worth and what the market will pay for them remains stubborn.
What has changed is the quality of the relationships, the depth of the practice, and the clarity of the values. FNB Hobart Makers is not a destination — it is the current form of an ongoing project. It will change as the community changes, as new makers arrive and bring their own needs and skills and visions, as the economic and social landscape around us shifts. What it will not do — if we hold to what we have learned — is transform into something that serves the organisation’s interests at the expense of the maker’s freedom.
The goal, as it has always been, is to be genuinely useful. To provide the tools — literal and metaphorical — that help someone build a livelihood from what they love and do well. To share skills without hoarding them. To make connections without brokering them for institutional advantage. To celebrate what people make without claiming credit for it. To be the infrastructure that makes the maker’s project possible, and then to step back.
That, in the end, is what Microenterprise Builder has always been working toward. Not a program with outcomes and metrics and a five-year strategic plan. A set of relationships and practices and commitments that make it a little more possible for people to make things, share things, and build dignified livelihoods on their own terms. The work continues.
This post draws on the ongoing history of Microenterprise Builder, Rustix, Cognitive Factory, Woodwork Warriors, Woodcraft Adventures Tasmania, and FNB Hobart Makers. It reflects the personal perspective of Christiaan, one half of the team behind Woodcraft Adventures Tasmania.
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