Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>]

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."