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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, nmgreens@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] PROFITS OF PLACE
  • Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 14:02:02 -0600


PROFITS OF PLACE
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/04-1om/Harkinson.html
A different vision of success emerges along Main Street

A SHORT WALK from the University of Pennsylvania, on a block of Victorian
brownstones once condemned to the wrecking ball, resides one of the East
Coast's great salons for the liberal intelligentsia. A visitor on a given
evening might find Eric Schlosser deconstructing fast food, former ambassador
to Czechoslovakia William Luers analyzing the United Nations, or a gaggle of
TV cameras crammed in to cover a protest of the Republican National
Convention. Yet the crowds are as likely to be pulled in by the Sweet Potato
Plantain Soup, Crispy Twice-Cooked Quail, and Organic Pear Salad with Jumbo
Lump Crab Meat as they are by a lecture on the hydrogen future.

Judy Wicks founded the White Dog Café on the first floor of her Philadelphia
home in 1983. Her food took its cue from the innovative New American cuisine
of Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in Berkeley: updated regional dishes, rebuilt
on a foundation of seasonal local produce. At the White Dog the food was a
hit, and diners soon spilled onto the sidewalk, waiting for a chance to taste
farm-fresh strawberry pie and the succulent local tomatoes on Betty's Beef
Kabobs.

As the restaurant grew, so did Wicks's notion that the strength of her
business relied upon the quality and sustainability of its locally grown
ingredients. Six years ago, after reading about the horrors of industrial hog
farms, she stormed into her kitchen, scratched pork off the menu, and went
searching for a farmer with a soft spot in his heart for pigs.

Her hunt took Wicks beyond the meat wholesalers, who knew not whence their
cuts came, to Glen Brendle, a farmer who delivered produce to the White Dog
in his compact pickup truck. Brendle knew Amish farmers in nearby Lancaster
County who still were raising hogs the old way. But he barely had room in his
pickup for vegetables, let alone pork chops, so Wicks gave him a low-interest
loan to purchase a refrigerated cargo truck. The loan enabled him to deliver
meat to more than fifteen restaurants and caterers, creating an entirely new
market in Philadelphia for locally grown, humanely raised, free-range pigs.

"Judy is an enabler," Brendle says. "Without her encouragement and financial
help I probably wouldn't be doing this."

That could have been the end of the story, but Wicks saw something powerful
in what she and Brendle had done. She began to envision how strengthening
relationships between independent, community-rooted enterprises could inspire
broad and profound cultural change. In 2001, she and cofounder Laury Hammel
unveiled the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), the first
national network of small, sustainable companies dedicated to buying and
selling products locally. The organization supports merchants who are deeply
committed to their communities and who define success more holistically than
the managers of investor-owned corporations.
When is the last time
you got advice from Safeway?
Or borrowed a dollar
from Walgreens?
Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self Reliance

"In a living economy, investors seek a 'living return' -- one partially paid
by the benefits of living in healthy, vibrant communities and participating
[in civic affairs]," Wicks says. "By addressing the deeper needs of their
employees and community, business owners can grow their companies in new
ways, providing more fulfilling jobs, healthier communities, and greater
economic security for their bioregions."

A living economy sustains community life, economic viability, and the natural
environment. "We have to change our concept about how we measure value in
things, and get people to be willing to pay more for something that's well
made, made locally, and that they would have for a long time," Wicks says.

BALLE members join local "affiliates" (a term intended to emphasize how BALLE
-- which is pronounced "bah-lee" -- is a bottom-up kind of organization) and
pledge to purchase as many locally made items as possible -- everything from
energy to personal clothing. Banding together, they attempt to construct an
alternative to corporate globalization by building local and, if their plans
work out, international networks of self-sufficient economic communities.
"This is a new way to operate," Wicks says. "It's about stepping outside your
business and working collectively and cooperatively with others to rebuild
entire local economies."

THE FIRST PERSON to unite small businesses into a national force for economic
self-determination was born in Porbunder, India, in 1869. Mohandas Gandhi is
best known as the pioneer of nonviolent resistance, but many of the
techniques he used to fight British imperialism harnessed market forces. He
inspired Indians to burn imported British fabrics and return to the
traditional textiles woven in villages, and he helped retrain local spinners,
weavers, and carders. Gandhi's independence movement illustrated how a group
such as the BALLE could combat modern colonizers that today take the form of
Burger King and Wal-Mart. Wicks invokes Gandhi's example when she promotes
BALLE. "Where Gandhi fought British tyranny," Wicks says, "we're now fighting
corporate tyranny -- and we're using the same strategies."

By effectively ignoring global corporations, the BALLE strategy represents a
break from more traditional efforts to reform them, choosing to focus instead
on the benefits of local businesses and their interconnections. Strengthening
local economies shortens the separation between cause and effect, allowing
business owners and customers to comprehend the environmental and social
impacts of their behavior more immediately. It also causes economic interests
to mesh more effectively with community interests by illustrating how they
overlap.

BALLE employs a diverse set of strategies to bolster business on Main Street.
For instance, it lobbies for policies to tailor technology for regional use
and to recirculate financial capital locally. But the foundation of any local
living economy is a community's appreciation for its own uniqueness. BALLE
thus focuses heavily on boosting community pride and tying this notion to the
idea of local purchasing.

By late 2002, BALLE counted about four thousand members among twenty
affiliates in twelve states. By then, some of the groups had begun actively
trying to stimulate business-to-business connections. The New York affiliate,
Whole Profit Exchange, started holding a monthly working cocktail hour dubbed
the "Transaction Bar." "For a lot of us, the traditional kind of networking
thing is not that interesting," says Ajax Greene, organizer of the Bar and
cofounder of Visionary Health Concepts, a Manhattan healthcare company. "We
wanted to meet with people who share our values." The affiliate in
Minneapolis, Responsible Minnesota Businesses, began organizing similar
monthly salons. And Sustainable Connections -- the BALLE group in Bellingham
-- issued its first membership directory, a catalog of 110 merchants, in 2002.

The 1990s were an especially brutal decade for local retailers. In ten years,
eleven thousand independent pharmacies closed as chain drugstores captured
the majority of the market. More than forty percent of independent book
stores failed; Barnes & Noble and Borders now command nearly half of all
sales. And five supermarket firms jumped from controlling less than a quarter
of all grocery receipts to ringing up nearly half of them. Today, Blockbuster
rents out one in three videos; one hundred chains pocket forty percent of
restaurant spending; and Wal-Mart marshals over a third of the entire U.S.
market for product lines ranging from dog food to diapers.

Big businesses leach money and vitality from the communities they purport to
serve. A study conducted by the Austin Business Association found that a
dollar spent at a local store circulates in that community three times more
than a dollar spent at a chain. Big-box stores situated on the urban
periphery also lure people away from downtown parks and sidewalks and into
their cars, reducing their social interactions to elbow bumping in checkout
lines. And corporate chains rarely lend customers a hand. "When is the last
time you got advice from Safeway?" asks Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for
Local Self Reliance, an antichain research group. "Or borrowed a dollar from
Walgreens?"

BALLE, which Wicks launched with the help of other members of the Social
Venture Network, has grown quickly because the advantage it brings to members
is the connections they make with each other. These relationships are good
for business -- witness the improved dollar-recycling effect -- but they are
also good for the other values BALLE espouses. "It's a model for activism, in
some ways," says Bellingham's Long. "It's about thinking about what's in it
for everybody. It's about not pointing fingers, but going about business the
way it should be done and caring about each other."
We want to invest
in goods and services,
rather than bads and disservices.
Andrew Anderson, Greater Philadelphia Local Living Economy Fund

BALLE is structured around "building blocks," each essentially a citizens'
task force dedicated to one of twenty basic industries -- for example,
sustainable energy, independent media, locally designed and manufactured
clothing, neighborhood tourism, reuse and recycling, green building,
independent retailers, local arts and culture, and holistic healthcare.
Volunteers form building blocks to strengthen bonds between restaurants and
local farmers; to build intelligent local transportation solutions; and to
green up the local construction industry. "A key to success is tapping into
the energy and passion of people in your community," Wicks says. "That's
where the building blocks have made a big impact."

Last winter, BALLE partnered with The Society of Friends (Quakers) to create
the Greater Philadelphia Local Living Economy Fund, an
eight-hundred-thousand-dollar endowment dedicated to promoting new businesses
based on BALLE principles. The type of loan that Wicks gave to Brendle is now
available to scores of other merchants. The fund has invested in locally
owned Pennypack Farm -- which donates a portion of its produce to the hungry
-- and is studying a ridesharing business called Philadelphia Car Share. "We
want to invest in goods and services, rather than bads and disservices," says
fund director Andrew Anderson. "We are looking at businesses that are moving
toward a restoration economy."

BALLE's NEXT PROJECT will tie local affiliates together through a national
online purchasing database. A remodeler in Boston shopping for eco-certified
timber could buy it at Home Depot, for instance, but if she types "wood" into
the BALLE webpage, up pops an independent forester who will ship straight
from Vermont. The database, open to all, is designed to unite local networks
-- and individual shoppers -- into a national marketplace of independent
businesses. As far as Wicks is concerned, there is no reason to stop there.
One of BALLE's principles is to "reach out globally to other communities to
trade in those products they cannot reasonably produce at home." Reaching out
online, restaurateurs could buy sustainably grown coffee directly from
Chiapas farmers; furniture makers could order eco-certified veneers from West
African villagers; and decorators could purchase rugs from Moroccan weavers.
What began as ties between the White Dog Café and Pennsylvania farmers could
eventually grow into a new model for the global economy. "You can't buy
everything locally," Wicks says, "so what we are envisioning is a global
economy that is comprised of this intricate network of small-to-small
relationships around the world. "

As BALLE's power to market and network local businesses has expanded,
entrepreneurs have begun resurrecting local trades once nearly extinct. The
moribund clothing industry in Philadelphia seemed a particularly hopeless
candidate for revival until Wicks took it up as a project this spring. She
doubted BALLE could enable local garment makers to compete on price with
major chains that manufacture their clothes in the Third World, but she
wanted to open minds to the idea of spending more for locally made options --
much as the White Dog had popularized local (albeit sometimes more expensive)
food.

Marcia O'Donnell, the head of BALLE's Philadelphia clothing building block,
never thought she could earn a living from garments until Wicks connected her
with a government grant that helped O'Donnell pay the salary of an additional
seamstress. Wicks also pointed her to trade shows where she could meet
buyers. "Judy has been a critical resource for me at this time in my career,"
says O'Donnell, who now produces outfits for children through her new
company, Added Touch Sewing Specialties. She will sell her creations
alongside those of other local designers in a new clothing store Wicks plans
to open adjacent to the White Dog Café next fall.

O'Donnell and Wicks proved BALLE could create a buzz around Philadelphia's
rebounding clothing industry when they mounted a local fashion show at the
May conference of the Sustainable Business Network. Three hundred people ate
locally grown salads in the assembly hall of a design school as models
strutted up and down a red carpet runway produced by a Philadelphia company
from recycled materials. O'Donnell took the microphone to introduce a dress
inspired by a snowdrop flower, designed by Philadelphian Kiril Tchangov.
Later, a muscular model appeared in a sleeveless shirt designed from vintage
tie fabric by local boutique owner Anthony Sparacino. And O'Donnell's
granddaughter captivated the audience when she stepped into the ballroom
wearing O'Donnell's pink Cinderella dress. She strode down the runway in a
flutter of organza, stopped, twirled, and smiled.

Later that month, reflecting on what BALLE has accomplished, Wicks summarized
the consciousness a local living economy creates. "When I eat the food from
my restaurant," she said, "I think about the local farmers in Pennsylvania I
buy my produce from. I think about the goat herder and the sheep. When I
drink the coffee from my café, I think about the Indians in Chiapas, Mexico,
who grew the beans. Business is about relationships. Money is simply a tool."




  • [Livingontheland] PROFITS OF PLACE, Tradingpost, 10/21/2004

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