Place-based Doughnut Design for Business tool

Workshop for a group of local businesses to engage with Doughnut Economics through a place-based perspective.

Posted by the DEAL team March, 14, 2025 3 likes

Overview

This workshop tool guides facilitators in convening local businesses to run a Doughnut Economics workshop. It helps local business communities identify their most transformative ideas for becoming regenerative and distributive in their strategies, practices and impacts, and then to identify the design changes needed to make this possible.

Below is the tool. You can also view the tool here as Google Slides or download it as a PDF here (or see Downloads section below).

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Who is it for?

This workshop is for people bringing together local businesses to engage collectively with Doughnut Economics in a way that is connected to a particular place. For groups or networks with 'Doughnut' or 'Donut' in their name, this is the tool they should use to engage with businesses.

Duration, format and materials

This workshop typically takes between 4 to 6 hours . It allows for flexibility so you can adjust as per your needs!

It is most effective with groups between 10 to 30 people, but can be used with smaller or larger groups too.

The workshop can be held in-person or online. Activity canvases are available in Annex A as both printable pdfs (for in-person) and on Miro (for online workshops). See Annex A towards the end of the slides.

Other DEAL tools for company-level focus

This workshop facilitates a broader group discussions among businesses and does not provide specific action points for individual businesses. For company-level action, see DEAL's Doughnut Design for Business core or taster tool. These other tools can be used by any company for internal reflection, or be facilitated by organisations registered with DEAL (who don't have the term 'Doughnut' or 'Donut' in their name).

DEAL's policy for business

To balance openness with protecting the integrity of the concept of Doughnut Economics, DEAL has created a policy applying to businesses (including consultants in their work with business clients). This policy contains seven main principles:

Focus on the deep design of business
No ‘company doughnuts’
Public facing claims only about redesign of business
Doughnut and business events must be based on the tool
Additional guidance welcome but, for now, no new tools related to business
Share back learnings from using the tool
Propose case studies of businesses

The annex of this tool contains the parts of this policy that are most relevant to those using this tool. This includes the ask that those using the tool to work with businesses register on DEAL's platform as an organisation and share back insights about the workshop with the DEAL Community. The tool contains additional guidance on how facilitators can share back.

We also invite businesses to propose case studies about their redesign around the goals of Doughnut Economics. To submit a case study, please connect with us through the DEAL contact form, choosing the category 'Tools and Stories' and theme ‘Business and Enterprise’.

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