Entrepreneur goes green and spiritual
Visit New Brighton beach at sunrise almost any morning of the week and you will find a barefoot man with a dog. That man is globally successful businessman Cookie Time founder Michael Mayell, a different style of entrepreneur. Reporter Will Harvie asks what makes him tick.
When approached for an interview about an eco-village project he initiated, Michael Mayell didn’t want to use a phone or screen. Rather, he wanted to meet under a tree.
And so, we met in the dappled light of some oak trees in Christchurch’s South Hagley Park, acorns dropping around us and his ancient dog Pete snuggled in his lap.
Mayell is best known as the founder of Cookie Time some 40 years ago, but these days he leans into an alternative lifestyle.
He rises every morning to watch the sun rise and meditate. He’s stopped wearing shoes unless they’re truly called for and his feet are magnificently calloused. He often sleeps in a small campervan or in a one-room caravan made partly from hempcrete, a natural concrete composite of hemp and lime.
Ice bathing, tree bathing, veganism, fasting, regenerative farming – these are the things that interest Mayell now.
Curiously, Mayell has found a way to combine these enthusiasms with his serial entrepreneurship. He appears as a shareholder and/or director of 31 companies on the NZ Companies Register.
Many are defunct, but new ones come along at a steady clip.
Nutrient Rescue Ltd, for example, produces fruit and vegetable powders that are mixed with water and drunk like a shot of tequila. It’s a social enterprise – dedicated to super nutrition and “planet-healing supply chains”.
“Help” is a food product that combines hemp and kelp. It will soon be sold by an “activist company” dedicated to regenerative food and getting hemp out of the Misuse of Drugs Act.
And he’s now combining his lifestyle and business nous into perhaps his biggest project ever – an eco-village called NeighbourGood.
So far it consists only of a website, neighbourgood.earth, and Mayell’s evolved thinking over seven years.
But he’s gathered experts, dreamers, investors, tradespeople, lawyers, architects and others to help with the project he only “initiated” – a word he likes.
The plan is to buy a farm somewhere near Takaka – ideally, but elsewhere if necessary – clear out the dairy cows and co-create an organic and regenerative farm that will eventually feed the 150 or so people who will live there in a village atmosphere.
It’s about sustainable wellbeing.
Gardeners and farmers will grow the plants, cooks will produce communal, plant-based lunches five days a week. Tradies will build accommodation units and service the infrastructure, the elderly may provide capital and help educate the children.
Meat will be allowed in the village, but only if ethically raised and slaughtered,
Businesses will operate from the village, including one that’s nearing launch. The village will operate with a quadruple bottom line: people, planet, purpose and profit.
Surplus might be a better word, but that loses the alliteration.
All of this is spelled out on the neighbourgood.earth website, including the all-important Living Manifesto. Both are due for an upgrade soon.
These documents establish that the village will be governed as a sociocracy, “a functional, semi-autonomous hierarchy based on equivalence, transparency, and effectiveness”.
For example, decisions will be made by consent rather than consensus.
Consensus is 100% agreement, meaning every member will have a veto. Consent is something less. There will also be a dispute resolution system that will start with nonviolent communication, travel through restorative justice, and end at being expelled from the community, if necessary.
The Living Manifesto is 4200 words and can’t be fully explored here, but Mayell didn’t craft the whole thing himself. It’s also the work of people such as Zahra Lightway, a sociocracy expert, and Alexsandra Samardziska, a sustainable wellbeing professional and architect.
Does this project have any chance? Mayell thinks so: The land will be secured in the next year or two and then members can start moving in.
Mayell brought the Whakamana cannabis museum to Christchurch in 2019, and installed it in the Shand’s Emporium building on Manchester St. That didn’t go well and it was shifted to Wellington but never opened due to the Covid pandemic.
He was also behind a campaign called Drinkable Rivers, which aimed to restore the country’s “greatest assets to their natural balance and beauty”. That didn’t last either. But Mayell has recycled the background ideas. Hemp will be an important crop at NeighbourGood, providing food and materials for products like hempcrete, which is used in construction.
And, of course, the eco-village’s water will be pure and drinkable. There’s also a plan to sell kits that will tell people how pure their home tap water is. That could be one of the businesses that provides profit to the village.
But first, they need some land.