Why My Older, Smaller Library Was Better
Only by reaching out to the community at large can we fully understand how a neighborhood connects with the key resources in its midst.
local economies
We Believe in High Streets
Enter #WeAreLocals, a platform to deliver a sense of place for local businesses to showcase their products and services to the local community and beyond. A virtual high street that, in essence, will help ensure that—when you are able to go more freely to your local high street or town centre in the future—there’s still somewhere to go.
El Cuá, Nicaragua: Community-Owned Hydropower Transforms Rural Economy
Before the construction of this plant, many generations of families had never had access to electricity. The plant has been the driving force behind the thriving economy of El Cua today.
Local currencies: The wasted opportunities
Within alternative movements there is much interest in introducing local currencies and they have been central elements in many Transition Towns and other initiatives. Unfortunately I think most of these have been quite misguided, failing to grasp the power a local currency can have, and not likely to make a significant contribution to goals such as town sustainability and resilience.
The Rules’ Alnoor Ladha on Local Economics, Decentralization of Power, and More
Alnoor will help us understand the interplay between political organization, system thinking, storytelling, technology, and the decentralization of power. In a conversation spanning a wide range of topics including anarchism, collective organizing, local economies, psychedelics, and even spirituality, Ladha and Douglas Rushkoff underscore the multifaceted and necessary work of building a resilient and just society.
Don’t Just Buy American, Buy Local
This is where buy local is different from Buy America. Buying locally-produced products that are sold in locally-owned stores is a key strategy for building local wealth. Every dollar spent locally is a dollar of wealth retained in the community. The alternative is for that wealth to leak into other communities while making the local community poorer. This is the community expression of the saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
Reducing Consumption and Local Exchange Better than “Sustainable Consumption”
While it is clear that global trade play a major role as a driver of destruction of biodiversity there is no way “consumers” in the US or other developed economies can be expected to take responsibility for the effect on biodiversity of their consumption.
Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future
During the early decades of the century, the market will lose its magic.
Building a Local Peace Economy: We Have the Power
Because they view all business in a negative light, many activists don’t seem to think it matters where they spend their money.
Telling the Story of the Bristol Pound
Prosperity Parade, funded by the Barrow Cadbury Trust, includes eight tales about the new entrepreneurial spirit, where people are finding ways of kickstarting their local economic engines, often in very poor areas, and by doing so increasing their independence from central and local government.
How to Grow a Local Job-Rich Economy
At a time when huge debates are raging over all the subsidies required by the 1 per cent of the business elite, Michael Shuman is working to shift public attention to the other, ultimately more positive, side of the picture…
How Amazon Debases our Language, and How we can Take it Back
As regular readers here will be aware, when left to determine their own futures, local town economies, neighbourhood economies in urban areas, can be ‘fulfilment centres’ in the good meaning of the word, meeting their needs in the round, while doing so with virtually no public funding, and paying their taxes.