Resources

The following references have been helpful sources of information and inspiration:

Organizations

350.org

350.org is building a global climate movement. Our online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions are coordinated by a global network active in over 188 countries.

We believe that a global grassroots movement can hold our leaders accountable to the realities of science and the principles of justice. That movement is rising from the bottom up all over the world, and is uniting to create the solutions that will ensure a better future for all.

 

BALLE

BALLE, which stands for the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, provides a national forum for visionary local economy leaders and funders to connect, build their capacity, and innovate. Among the transformative communities of practice that BALLE hosts are a Local Economy Investment Circle, the Community Foundation Circle, and the nation’s only Fellowship program dedicated to cultivating the emergence of a new economy.

By connecting leaders, spreading solutions, and attracting investment toward local economies, BALLE advances the Localist Movement to create real prosperity for all. Within a generation, we envision a global system of human-scale, interconnected local economies that function in harmony with local ecosystems to meet the basic needs of all people, support just and democratic societies, and foster joyful community life.

A piece I wrote after attending the BALLE conference

 

THE CENTER FOR HUMANS AND NATURE

We are a group of engaged and curious thinkers who understand that ideas matter.
The Center for Humans and Nature partners with some of the brightest minds to explore humans and nature relationships. We bring together philosophers, biologists, ecologists, lawyers, artists, political scientists, anthropologists, poets and economists, among others, to think creatively about how people can make better decisions — in relationship with each other and the rest of nature.

The Center for Humans and Nature connects people with ideas through big Questions, ongoing Projects, our journal Minding Nature, our Blog, and special events. With the Center’s network of Senior Scholars, Contributors, and Fellows, we’re working to foster a culture that puts ethical thinking at the core of decision-making.

Across the world, people are striving for fairer and resilient economies, truly democratic cultures, and healthy, thriving communities.  The Center offers ideas on how transforming humanity’s relationship with nature can inform our responses to these interconnected challenges.

 

CENTER FOR THE NEW AMERICAN DREAM

The mission of the Center for a New American Dream is to improve well-being by inspiring and empowering all of us to shift the ways we consume.

 

COMMUNITY SOURCED CAPITAL

Community Sourced Capital is building a collaborative network to help small businesses and local economies thrive

By connecting community members, small business owners and mission-aligned funders to the goal of creating healthy communities, we’re introducing a new purpose for financial systems, removing barriers to success for entrepreneurs, and building meaningful relationships around money.

Providing affordable capital to community businesses is vital to our economy

Small businesses are the key generators of jobs in our economy and character in our communities. Everyone seems to know that. What most people don’t know is how important funding is to the success of a business.

Even in this day and age, most small businesses simply cannot access the funding they need to succeed. New lenders have emerged to serve this need, but many of them charge equivalent interest rates upwards of 20 or 50 percent. These rates can compromise the stability of the businesses that ultimately provide stability to our communities.

Community Sourced Capital exists so that businesses can access affordable capital from their community. If a business isn’t ready to access a community loan, the team at CSC connects them to a network of partners who can.

COMMUNITY WEALTH.ORG

Community-Wealth.org brings together, for the first time, information about the broad range of community wealth strategies, policies, models, and innovations. The site is built upon the proposition that above all, practitioners, policy makers, academics and the media need solid, cross-cutting information and tools that can help them to understand and support the expansion of these institutions. Across-the-board information, experience, and expertise can also contribute to creating a favorable policy environment in which community wealth approaches are more fully legitimized, recognized, and appreciated as meaningful to the revitalization of our communities.

 

DEMOCRACY COLLABORATIVE

The Democracy Collaborative is a national leader in equitable, inclusive and sustainable development through our Community Wealth Building Initiative. This initiative sustains a wide range of Advisory, Research and Field Building activities designed to transform the practice of community/economic development in the United States. Another important program is the Next System Project, ongoing intellectual work designed to connect Community Wealth Building to the larger context of systemic economic transformation.

Our staff and associates are involved in a wide range of projects involving research, training, policy development, and community-focused work designed to promote an asset-based paradigm of economic development and increase support for transformative strategies among community stakeholders, anchor institutions, and key policymakers. As the premier innovator and leading national voice in the field of Community Wealth Building, we are known for our research and advisory services, as well as informing public policy, promoting new models and strategies, and establishing metrics to advance the field.

Our goal is to change the prevailing paradigm of economic development – and of the economy as a whole – toward a new emphasis and system based on:

  • Broadening ownership and stewardship over capital
  • Democracy at the workplace
  • Stabilizing community and emphasizing locality
  • Equitable and inclusive growth
  • Environmental, social, and institutional sustainability

THE LAND INSTITUTE

The Land Institute is a cutting edge, science-based organization that promotes an alternative to current destructive agricultural practices. Our work is dedicated to advancing perennial grain crops and polyculture farming solutions.

Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1976, The Land Institute is committed to researching food production methods that sustain the land, a precious resource in an increasingly precarious state around the globe. The current agricultural paradigm takes a short-term/high-yield approach that is dependent on heavy chemical applications and petroleum consumption, and is prone to soil erosion and degradation. We aim to change that.

At The Land Institute, we believe we must grow food in partnership with nature, including the wisdom inherent in planting perennial grains in mixtures that can help build and protect soil.

We must stop treating soil like dirt. We are dependent on our soil. It is everyone’s future.

 

RESILIENCE.ORG

Resilience.org is both an information clearinghouse and a network of action-oriented groups. Our focus is on building community resilience in a world of multiple emerging challenges: the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to these. We like to think of the site as a community library with space to read and think, but also as a vibrant café in which to meet people, discuss ideas and projects, and pick up and share tips on how to build the resilience of your community, your household, or yourself.

 

ROOTSTOCK

Rootstock is a cooperatively-produced blog authored by the farmer-owners, staff and friends of CROPP Cooperative. We have a wealth of hard-earned wisdom and a wonderfully unique culture that we can’t wait to share with you. We are mothers and fathers. We are gardeners and farmers. We are health and marketing professionals. We are cooks and (avid) eaters. We are the people of CROPP, and Rootstock is our gathering place.

You’ll see a little bit of everything here—gardening and cooking tips, farm stories and office mischief; as well as news about the organic industry and official statements from CROPP about issues affecting organic food and farming. Through this blog, we want to share our culture and inspire meaningful conversation about food, farming and the world we live within and are charged to protect.

RSF SOCIAL FINANCE

RSF Social Finance (RSF) is a pioneering non-profit financial services organization dedicated to transforming the way the world works with money. In partnership with a community of investors and donors, RSF provides capital to non-profit and for-profit social enterprises addressing key issues in the areas of Food & Agriculture, Education & the Arts, and Ecological Stewardship.

STRONG TOWNS

The mission of Strong Towns is to support a model of development that allows America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient.

For the United States to be a prosperous country, it must have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods. Enduring prosperity for our communities cannot be artificially created from the outside but must be built from within, incrementally over time. An America in transition must focus on developing strong, local communities.

As advocates for a strong America, we know the following to be true.

  • Strong cities, towns and neighborhoods cannot happen without strong citizens (people who care).
  • Local government is a platform for strong citizens to collaboratively build a prosperous place.
  • Financial solvency is a prerequisite for long term prosperity.
  • Land is the base resource from which community prosperity is built and sustained. It must not be squandered.
  • A transportation system is a means of creating prosperity in a community, not an end unto itself.
  • Job creation and economic growth are the results of a healthy local economy, not substitutes for one.

We seek an America where our local communities are designed to grow stronger in the face of adversity, to be the solid foundation on which our shared prosperity is preserved.

There are no universal answers to the complex problems America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods face. At Strong Towns, we seek to discover rational ways to respond to these challenges. A Strong Towns approach:

  • Relies on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects,
  • Emphasizes resiliency of result over efficiency of execution,
  • Is designed to adapt to feedback,
  • Is inspired by bottom/up action (chaotic but smart) and not top/down systems (orderly but dumb),
  • Seeks to conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale, and
  • Is obsessive about accounting for its revenues, expenses, assets and long term liabilities (do the math).

Take the Small Towns Strength Test here

 

 

News Sources

COMMON DREAMS

Our mission.
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.

Who we are.
“Common Dreams is a non-profit independent newscenter created in 1997 as a new media model. By relying on our readers and tens of thousands of small donations to keep us moving forward — with no advertising, corporate underwriting or government funding — Common Dreams maintains an editorial independence our readers can count on.

We are optimists. We believe real change is possible. But only if enough well-informed, well intentioned — and just plain fed up and fired-up — people demand it. We believe that together we can attain our common dreams.

What we value.
We share our readers’ progressive values of social justice, human rights, equality and peace. Common Dreams is committed to not only being your trusted news source, but to encouraging critical thinking and civic action on a diverse range of social, economic, and civil rights issues affecting individuals and their communities.

What we do.
Common Dreams works diligently to uncover and publish honest, independent news and information that you can rely on. Every day.

We publish a diverse mix of breaking news, insightful views, videos and press releases covering issues that resonate with progressives in every corner of the globe. We compile it all in one easy-to-access online location, and present it in a clean, uncomplicated format, uninterrupted by pop-ups, advertising or gimmicks.

Common Dreams makes sure that the critical issues and ideas for the future are not drowned out in the ceaseless noise and dis-information that calls itself “the news” in most of the corporate media.

Our community.
We are writers. Activists. Everyday citizens.

We are hundreds of thousands strong.

We understand that to assure a meaningful participation by all in democracy we must maintain a free press – providing reliable information, critical thought and creative ideas.

 

 

LOCAVESTING

Through incisive journalism and storytelling, we aim to shine a spotlight on the innovative business and economic models being created around the country, and the people behind them, so that others may benefit by their example. We’ve also created educational guides for investors and entrepreneurs interested in a deeper dive into community capital models. Because a new economy requires new funding models.

It is our hope that locavesting will become a trusted resource for individuals and organizations looking to rethink the way they invest, for entrepreneurs and small business owners passed over by conventional finance, for economic developers looking to revitalize their towns and stay relevant—and for anyone who cares about creating a more inclusive and prosperous economy.

 

THE FIELD GUIDE

Discover the universal patterns and qualities of regenerativeness in these inspiring stories of the people, businesses, and projects that are incubating the regenerative economy in our cities, our rural communities, and in our financial system.
Artists and creative thinkers also share their regenerative perspectives with us here.

In Right Relationship
Wealth Viewed Holistically
Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive
Empowered Participation
Honors Community and Place
Edge Effect Abundance
Robust Circulatory Flow
Seeks Balance

THE SIMPLICITY COLLECTIVE

Simplicity Collective is a grassroots ‘network of imaginations’ dedicated to creatively exploring, promoting, and celebrating a materially simple but inwardly rich life. Our planet needs us to explore alternative ways to live, and one promising way to lessen our impact on nature is to reject the high-impact lifestyles of consumer culture and voluntarily embrace ‘a simpler life’ of reduced consumption. But the simple life is arguably something which we should want to embrace even in the absence of the environmental crisis. The rat race of consumer culture is leading Western civilization (and increasingly global society) to a dead-end, and so the defining challenge of our age is to re-imagine “the good life.” Human flourishing, it can be argued, does not consist in the limitless consumption and accumulation of money and materials possessions. Instead, it consists in the cultivation of social relationships and community engagement, self-development, creative activity, aesthetic and spiritual contemplation, connection with nature, and various other non-materialistic sources of satisfaction and meaning. Furthermore, in an age where oceans of poverty exist amidst small islands of plenty, there are powerful humanitarian arguments for rejecting consumer culture. As Gandhi once said, ‘Live simply so that others may simply live.’

 

STRONG TOWNS

For the United States to be a prosperous country, it must have strong cities, towns and neighborhoods. Enduring prosperity for our communities cannot be artificially created from the outside but must be built from within, incrementally over time. An America in transition must focus on developing strong, local communities.

As advocates for a strong America, we know the following to be true.

  • Strong cities, towns and neighborhoods cannot happen without strong citizens (people who care).
  • Local government is a platform for strong citizens to collaboratively build a prosperous place.
  • Financial solvency is a prerequisite for long term prosperity.
  • Land is the base resource from which community prosperity is built and sustained. It must not be squandered.
  • A transportation system is a means of creating prosperity in a community, not an end unto itself.
  • Job creation and economic growth are the results of a healthy local economy, not substitutes for one.

We seek an America where our local communities are designed to grow stronger in the face of adversity, to be the solid foundation on which our shared prosperity is preserved.

There are no universal answers to the complex problems America’s cities, towns and neighborhoods face. At Strong Towns, we seek to discover rational ways to respond to these challenges. A Strong Towns approach:

  • Relies on small, incremental investments (little bets) instead of large, transformative projects,
  • Emphasizes resiliency of result over efficiency of execution,
  • Is designed to adapt to feedback,
  • Is inspired by bottom/up action (chaotic but smart) and not top/down systems (orderly but dumb),
  • Seeks to conduct as much of life as possible at a personal scale, and
  • Is obsessive about accounting for its revenues, expenses, assets and long term liabilities (do the math).

 

YES! MAGAZINE

YES! Magazine reframes the biggest problems of our time in terms of their solutions. Online and in print, we outline a path forward with in-depth analysis, tools for citizen engagement, and stories about real people working for a better world.

 

Books & Articles

 

LOCAL DOLLARS, LOCAL SENSE
—How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity
—by Michael Shuman

Local Dollars, Local Sense is a guide to creating Community Resilience.

Americans’ long-term savings in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, pension funds, and life insurance funds total about $30 trillion. But not even 1 percent of these savings touch local small business-even though roughly half the jobs and the output in the private economy come from them. So, how can people increasingly concerned with the poor returns from Wall Street and the devastating impact of global companies on their communities invest in Main Street?

In Local Dollars, Local Sense, local economy pioneer Michael Shuman shows investors, including the nearly 99% who are unaccredited, how to put their money into building local businesses and resilient regional economies-and profit in the process. A revolutionary toolbox for social change, written with compelling personal stories, the book delivers the most thorough overview available of local investment options, explains the obstacles, and profiles investors who have paved the way. Shuman demystifies the growing realm of local investment choices-from institutional lending to investment clubs and networks, local investment funds, community ownership, direct public offerings, local stock exchanges, crowdfunding, and more. He also guides readers through the lucrative opportunities to invest locally in their homes, energy efficiency, and themselves.

A rich resource for both investors and the entrepreneurs they want to support, Local Dollars, Local Sense eloquently shows how to truly protect your financial future–and your community’s.

Local Dollars, Local Sense

AS SYSTEMS COLLAPSE, CITIZENS RISE — Otto Scharmer

“The logic of collective action is suddenly shifting from the head to the heart. Or, put differently: from applying yesterdays rules onto the current situation, to co-sensing from the current situation what response is needed from us, right now.

The call of the future is already here. Are we able to listen and rise?”

Read full text here

ACTIVISM IS AN ACT OF FAITH —Tim DeChristopher

Part of the role of civil disobedience is that it awakens and enlarges that part of our souls that calls us to rise against injustice. Organizational analyst Margaret Wheatley, reflecting on the interconnected power of small actions in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, writes, “[E]ach small act of defiance or new way of being occurred within a whole fabric. Each small act was connected invisibly to all others.” Robert F. Kennedy expressed a similar sentiment about the “tiny ripples of hope” from a million actions sweeping down “the mightiest walls of oppression.” These statements invoke a deep spiritual connection that amplifies the power of our actions.

Read full text here

THE LEADERLESS REVOLUTION –Carne Ross

There are few books that attempt to interpret the world and how it is run. [In] The Leaderless Revolution, Carne Ross takes different angles on contemporary issues – economics, politics, the state of democracy, the environment and terrorism – wrapping them into a unified explanation of how money and power function to control the lives of the earth’s inhabitants, such that they feel powerless to affect their collective future. It seems that mankind has settled upon liberal democracy as the ideal form of government. Its triumph with the collapse of communism signalled the end of ideological struggle and thus of history.

The Leaderless Revolution shows however that even in democracies, many if not most of the population feel that they are excluded from any agency over the issues that most trouble them, while governments appear less and less able to influence the global problems that threaten our peace and comforts. Mining the rich but little-examined history of anarchism, and updating the philosophy for today’s needs, The Leaderless Revolution offers a refreshing and original prescription for the problems of today. Not only an antidote to our global crises; Carne Ross offers, moreover, a route to fulfillment and self-realisation.

The Leaderless Revolution

LOCAVESTING –Amy Cortese

Locavestingcortese_book is a call to rethink the way we invest, so that we support the small businesses that create jobs and healthy, resilient communities. Just as “Buy Local” campaigns have found that a small shift in purchasing from chains to locally owned enterprises can reap outsized benefits for a community, so, too, can a small shift in our investment dollars. The book explores the extraordinary experiment in citizen finance taking place across the country, from Brooklyn, NY to Honolulu, HI and dozens of towns in between, as communities take back control of their financial destinies while revitalizing the communities they call home.  These citizens are at the vanguard of a grassroots revolution that journalist Amy Cortese calls “locavesting.”

Locavesting introduces readers to these pioneers and the models they are creating—some new, some as old as capitalism itself—to put their money to work locally, from community ownership to crowdfunding to the rebirth of local stock exchanges. In the process, they are rebuilding their nest eggs, their communities, and, just perhaps, the country.

Along with books by Michael Shuman, Marjorie Kelly and other new economy thinkers, Locavesting makes a key contribution to the national discussion around how to create a more fair and sustainable economy. This web site builds on the foundation of the book to provide up-to-date coverage of the local economy and crowdfinance movements, and connects investors, entreprenuers and civic leaders with the knowledge and resources they need.

Locavesting

 

THE LONELY AMERICAN- Chris Hedges

“The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is NASCAR—which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers—is ominous. It is the symbol of a captive society.”

Read full text here

 

BOWLING ALONE – Robert Putnam

In a groundbreaking book based on vast data, Putnam shows how we have become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and our democratic structures– and how we may reconnect.

Putnam warns that our stock of social capital – the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities.

Putnam draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We’re even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues. Putnam shows how changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women’s roles and other factors have contributed to this decline.

America has civicly reinvented itself before — approximately 100 years ago at the turn of the last century. And America can civicly reinvent itself again – find out how and help make it happen at our companion site, BetterTogether.org, an initiative of the Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

BETTER TOGETHER — 150 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO BUILD SOCIAL CAPITAL

COMPROMISE, HELL!   — Wendell Berry

“We have got to learn better to respect ourselves and our dwelling places. We need to quit thinking of rural America as a colony. Too much of the economic history of our land has been that of the export of fuel, food, and raw materials that have been destructively and too cheaply produced. We must reaffirm the economic value of good stewardship and good work. For that we will need better accounting than we have had so far.

We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by “bringing in industry.” Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by “tax incentives” and other squanderings of the people’s money. We ought to suspend that practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don’t need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don’t need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.

And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land — for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country’s defense, become the agents of our country’s destroyers, compromising on its ruin.”

Read full text here

 

THE POLITICS OF LOVE — Max Harris & Philip McKibben

 

HOW DO WE GET  PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?  Richard Schiffman

“There are five main psychological barriers: distance, doom, dissonance, denial, and identity. This is what the book is about. And the reason climate science communication is so difficult is that it triggers these barriers one after the other.

If you overuse fear-inducing imagery, what you get is fear and guilt, and this makes people more passive.”

……..

“We need a new kind of stories, stories that tell us that nature is resilient and can rebound and get back to a healthier state, if we give it a chance to do so. We need stories that tell us that we can collaborate with nature, that we can, as Pope Francis has urged, be stewards and partners of the natural world rather than dominators of it. We need stories about a new kind of happiness not based on material consumption.

Since we have a pretty good understanding of the barriers, that is a good place to start. We need to flip the barriers over so they become successful strategies. Rather than something distant, communicators need to make climate change feel like something that is near, personal, and urgent. Rather than doom, we need to emphasize the opportunities that the crisis affords us.

Climate change is an opportunity for economic development — an entire energy system has to be redesigned from the wastefulness of the previous century to a much smarter mode of doing things. It’s a great opportunity to improve global collaboration and knowledge sharing and to create a more just society. So climate change is a fantastic opportunity to encourage our global humanity to emerge. We need to be talking about this.”

Read full text here:

THE POPE AND THE PLANET — Bill McKibben

“The pope’s contribution to the climate debate builds on the words of his predecessors—in the first few pages he quotes from John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI—but clearly for those prelates ecological questions were secondary. He also cites the pathbreaking work of Bartholomew, the Orthodox leader sometimes called the “green patriarch”; others, from the Dalai Lama to Anglican archbishop Desmond Tutu, have spoken eloquently on this issue as well. Still, Francis’s words fall as a rock in this pond, not a pebble; they help greatly to consolidate the current momentum toward some kind of agreement at the global climate conference in Paris in December. He has, in effect, said that all people of good conscience need to do as he has done and give the question the priority it requires. The power of celebrity is the power to set the agenda, and his timing has been impeccable. On those grounds alone, Laudato Si’ stands as one of the most influential documents of recent times.

It is, therefore, remarkable to actually read the whole document and realize that it is far more important even than that. In fact, it is entirely different from what the media reports might lead one to believe. Instead of a narrow and focused contribution to the climate debate, it turns out to be nothing less than a sweeping, radical, and highly persuasive critique of how we inhabit this planet—an ecological critique, yes, but also a moral, social, economic, and spiritual commentary. In scope and tone it reminded me instantly of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973), and of the essays of the great American writer Wendell Berry.1 As with those writers, it’s no use trying to categorize the text as liberal or conservative; there’s some of each, but it goes far deeper than our political labels allow. It’s both caustic and tender, and it should unsettle every nonpoor reader who opens its pages.”

Read full text here:

 

LAUDATO SI -Pope Francis’s encyclical on the health of the planet

Read or Download full text here:

 

7 PATHS TO DEVELOPMENT  That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification

In cities across the nation, a few enjoy rising affluence while many struggle to get by.

An August 2015 study by The Century Foundation reported that—after a dramatic decline in concentrated poverty between 1990 and 2000—poverty has since reconcentrated. Nationwide, the number of people living in high-poverty ghettos and slums has nearly doubled since 2000. This situation is created in part by the practices of traditional economic development, which prioritize corporate subsidy after corporate subsidy over the needs of the local economy. Current trends threaten to worsen, unless we can answer the design challenge before us.

Can we create an economic system—beginning at the local level—that builds the wealth and prosperity of everyone?

Economic development professionals and mayors are working in partnership with foundations, anchor institutions, unions, community organizations, progressive business networks, workers, and community residents. What’s emerging is a systems approach to creating an inclusive, sustainable economy where all can thrive. The work is place-based, fed by the power of anchor institutions, and built on locally rooted and broadly held ownership. It’s about building community wealth across the United States—in more places than most would imagine, a new kind of economy is beginning to appear. It’s an economy that, because of its fundamental design, tends naturally to create inclusion and prosperity for many, not simply for the few.

The answers are beginning to appear in cities nationwide—in the tools and approaches of community wealth building, as they are wielded by cutting edge city economic development professionals. This work is only beginning to be widely recognized as a cohesive field. Yet as this report shows, it is in fact a coherent, systemic approach to economic development—one that embodies a powerful set of common drivers, and offers a broad set of powerful strategies.

Read Full Text Here:

THE GREEN BOAT:  Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture  —by Mary Pipher

Every day we are hit by a tidal wave of information, including a great deal of traumatic information about the fate of Mother Earth. Yet our basic equipment—our bodies and brains—have not changed since the Neolithic Era. We simply are not built to respond well. The Green Boat posits a trauma to transcendence cycle that begins with awareness and leads first to resilient coping and then in many people to what I call a transcendent response.

As our web of life becomes tattered and torn, it is easy to become disconnected from our emotions, our bodies, each other, and the truth. The Green Boat suggests that we can only be sane and healthy by reconnecting with these things. Our inner and outer lives are interconnected. Healing ourselves will require us to reweave the web of life around us.

The Green Boat

THE LOCAL ECONOMY SOLUTION —by Michael Shuman

Reinventing economic development as if small business mattered

In cities and towns across the nation, economic development is at a crossroads. A growing body of evidence has proven that its current cornerstone—incentives to attract and retain large, globally mobile businesses—is a dead end. Even those programs that focus on local business, through buy-local initiatives, for example, depend on ongoing support from government or philanthropy. The entire practice of economic development has become ineffective and unaffordable and is in need of a makeover.

The Local Economy Solution suggests an alternative approach in which states and cities nurture a new generation of enterprises that help local businesses launch and grow. These cutting-edge companies, which Shuman calls “pollinator businesses,” are creating jobs and the conditions for future economic growth, and doing so in self-financing ways.

The Local Economy Solution

 

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