by Ethan Miller :: The old story says we have to depend on big corporations. The new story tells us we can earn a livelihood, gain freedom, and build community through cooperation ::
Call it "globalization," or the "free market," or "capitalism." Whatever its name, people across the United States and throughout the world are experiencing the devastating effects of an economy that places profit above all else.
None of this, of course, is news. Many of us have come to believe that the crucial economic decisions affecting our lives are made not by us, but by far-away "experts" and mysterious "market forces." A friend asked me recently, "Since when did the American people decide to send their manufacturing sector south to exploit people in El Salvador or the Dominican Republic'" We didn't, and nobody ever asked.
But what's the alternative? We're taught that there are only two possible economic choices: capitalism'a system in which rich people and corporations have the power, make the decisions, and control our lives; or communism'a system where state bureaucrats have the power, make the decisions, and control our lives. What a choice!
When it comes to real economic alternatives, our imaginations are stuck. Clearly, we need something different, but what would it look like? How do we start to imagine and create other ways of meeting our economic needs?
A Story of Dependency We can begin by changing the stories we tell about the overwhelming power and inevitability of our economic system. These stories have hidden from us our own power, potential, and value as creative human beings.
The dominant story defines the heroes of our market system as the rational, self-interested firms and individuals who seek to satisfy their endless need for growth and accumulation in a world of scarce resources.
In this story, we the people are just worker-bees and consumers, making and spending money, hoping for the opportunity to accumulate more, and perpetually dependent on the jobs and necessities that the corporate system allocates to the worthy. Citizenship is reduced to the active pursuit of financial wealth. Feeling powerless to make real change, we come to see the economy as like the weather'beyond our control and understood by only the elite "experts." We hope for sunny days and carry umbrellas.
This story renders all activities other than business transactions invisible'segregated into the sphere of family life, social life, and leisure. A community of active, creative, and skilled people without money or capital (or the desire to have it) is considered unproductive or backward.
This is why many economic developers talk endlessly about "bringing in new businesses" or "attracting investors" to improve the local or regional economy. Real value, for them, comes from the outside, not the inside; from those who invest capital, not those who invest time and hard work; from the power of money to make more of itself, not from the power of life and community to self-organize and to thrive. This dominant story is about how our lives and our communities are never good enough, never complete or worthwhile without the money and jobs of the capitalist market economy.
A Story of Hope Suppose we try a different story: instead of defining the economy as a market system, let's define it as the diverse array of activities by which humans generate livelihoods in relation to each other and to the Earth. Extending far beyond the workings of the capitalist market, economic activity includes all of the ways we sustain and support ourselves, our families, and our communities. Peeling away the dominant economic story of competition and accumulation, we see that other economies are alive below the surface, nourishing us like roots. These are not the economies of the stock-brokers and the economists. They are the economies of mutual care and cooperation'community economies, local economies.
Many are familiar to us, though rarely acknowledged. They include:
Household Economies--meeting our needs with our own skills and work: raising children, offering advice or comfort, teaching life skills, cooking, cleaning, building, balancing the checkbook, fixing the car, growing food and medicine, raising animals. Much of this work has been rendered invisible or devalued as "women's work."
Gift Economies--built on shared circles of generosity: volunteer fire companies, food banks, giving rides to hitch-hikers, donating to community organizations, sharing food.
Barter Economies--trading services with friends or neighbors, swapping one useful thing for another: returning a favor, exchanging plants or seeds, time-based local currencies.
Gathering Economies--living on the abundance of Earth's gift economy: hunting, fishing, and foraging. Also re-directing the wastestream'salvaging from demolition sites, gleaning from already-harvested farm fields, dumpster-diving.
Cooperative Economies--based on common ownership and/or control of resources: worker-owned and -run businesses, collective housing, intentional communities, health care cooperatives, community land trusts.
Community Market Economies--networks of exchange built from small businesses and cooperatives that are accountable to their communities through social ties, innovative ownership models, and mutual support. Such economies are not created to make large profits, but to provide healthy, modest livelihoods to their participants, and services to the larger community.
Recognizing these diverse forms of livelihood we can see not only that economic possibilities exist beyond the market and the state, but that these possibilities are viable and powerful. Indeed, the dominant economy would fall apart without such basic forms of cooperation and solidarity. It is not the capitalist market that germinates seeds, calls nourishing water from the sky, or transforms decay into delicious fruit. It is not the capitalist market that nourishes our souls on a daily basis with friendship and love or cares for us when we are too young or too old to care for ourselves. Nor is it this market that keeps us alive in times of crisis when the factories close, when our houses burn down, or when the paycheck is just not enough. It is the economies of community and care'what many activists in Latin America and Europe call the "solidarity economy"--that hold the very fabric of our society together. It is these relationships that make us human and that meet our most basic needs for love, care, and mutual support.
So what's the alternative to the market system? Its seeds already exist. Though capitalist markets are constantly working to undermine, exploit, and co-opt elements of the solidarity economy, its power and potential as a space of creation and hope persists.
We already inhabit different kinds of economic relationships. We have our own forms of wealth and value that are not defined by money. Economies already exist that place human and ecological relationships at the center, rather than competition and profit-making. We do not need to start from scratch.
When faced with the question of alternatives, then, we can answer not with another Grand Economic Scheme, but with a vision for creative, diverse, and democratic economic organizing. We can build on existing cooperative economic practices, cultivating imagination and possibility.
Linking together emerging alternatives in networks of mutual support and exchange, we can take them to the next level and generate new economic dynamics of solidarity and cooperation on local, regional, and global scales.
A strategy begins to emerge: identify existing alternatives; bring them together to build shared identities and connections; and with new-found collective strength, generate powerful possibilities for social and economic change.
Sounds simple, right? Perhaps, but it is the complex, deliberate, and beautiful work of community organizing that will transform vision into reality.
Efforts to identify spaces of democratic economic possibility are already under way. Groups such as the Seattle Local Economies Mapping Project are building inventories of alternative economic initiatives, from cooperatives and local currencies to volunteer fire companies and community food banks. Inspired by what is sometimes called "asset-based community development," other groups are cataloging forms of wealth left out of the economic equation, such as subsistence skills, traditional arts and crafts, local stories and lore, and natural landscapes. A coalition of organizations in the U.S. and Canada called the Data Commons Project is building a directory of North American cooperative economic projects.
New Eyes, New Connections With local economic inventories in hand, we can begin to generate conversations among solidarity initiatives and institutions. In Brazil, where the solidarity economy movement is well-established, 23 statewide forums, connected by the national Brazilian Solidarity Economy Forum, generate dialog and collaboration among solidarity-based economic projects.
Similar gatherings could be highly effective in North America. The United States Social Forum, to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, in July 2007, offers an exciting opportunity for solidarity economy practitioners and organizers to meet on a large scale.
Such gatherings can link previously isolated efforts, integrating their work into a new and emergent economic web of solidarity. These connections are about more than mutual recognition; they are about building relationships of exchange and support--connecting producers and consumers, marketers and distributors, investors and organizers. In the process, we redefine these roles and institutions.
Connections can also extend to the larger web of organizations and social movements struggling for justice, ecology, and democracy. Campaigns against big-box stores are enhanced by efforts to create community-based economic alternatives. Counter-recruitment work is more effective when youth are involved in cooperative economic projects that offer viable alternatives to the military, and the creation of community land trusts and housing cooperatives strengthens anti-gentrification struggles.
In all of these cases and more, the support is reciprocal: the dreams, aspirations, and energies of grassroots social movements ensure the integrity and health of community-based economic institutions.
The practices of seeing, convening, and connecting all build toward the practice of creation. From imagination and possibility can grow new initiatives, new institutions, new forms of exchange, new economies of solidarity. Together, we can reclaim our homes and communities as spaces of safety, care, healing, and mutal aid.
Seeking economic alternatives? The seeds have been planted. They're ready for the rain.
Ethan Miller is a writer, musician, subsistence farmer, and organizer. A member of the GEO Collective and of the musical collective Riotfolk, he lives and works at JED, a land-based mutual-aid cooperative in Greene, Maine. Read more articles on people who are creating an alternative to the corporate economy in our Stand up to Corporate Power issue.
:: On the third Thursday of September 2006, in a college auditorium in Oakland, California, 300 people came together to launch a new movement: a campaign for "green-collar jobs" as a path to economic and social recovery for low-income communities ::
Union electricians hung out with Youth Against Youth Incarceration. A poet parsed words with a permaculturist. Two seniors and a spoken word artist debated the coming election. Community college students communed with a councilmember, while an architect broke bread with an immigration attorney.
A "green-collar job" involves environment-friendly products or services. Construction work on a green building, organic farming, solar panel manufacturing, bicycle repair: all are "green jobs." The green-collar economy is big money, and it's booming. Including renewable energy and clean technology, "green" is the fifth largest market sector in the United States.
In the Bay Area, we have seen boom times before. The dot-com era rose and fell all around us, but for low-income people and people of color that wave didn't even register, boom or bust. The question we're asking here in Oakland--that 300 people turned out to answer--is, can the green wave lift all boats?
This question is not an abstraction, and the answer is non-negotiable. With murder rates soaring and employment rates plummeting, Oakland is in a literal do-or-die struggle to build a sustainable local living economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.
If this movement succeeds, the effort in Oakland can point the way forward--to a new era of solution-based politics for cities across the United States. If this movement fails, a city with so much promise could fall further into despair. The stakes are high, and the next six months offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity to write a new story for Oakland.
The Murder Capital of California Oakland is the working-class home to almost 500,000. One of the most racially and culturally diverse cities in America, Oakland boasts the nation's fourth largest port, and for decades was an industrial manufacturing hub.
The march of globalization and the changing world economy ended this prosperity. As small businesses shut down and good manufacturing jobs disappeared, there weren't many jobs left. The industries that stayed are largely pollution-based, feeding Oakland with one hand and poisoning it with the other.
In the poor parts of Oakland, neighborhoods of mostly black and Latino residents, 40 percent of young people suffer chronic respiratory ailments. There are no supermarkets. Ten thousand people on parole or probation lack opportunities for meaningful jobs.
Violence reached a boiling point on September 6 when Nicole Tucker, a 27-year old single mother with a beautiful four-year-old daughter, was shot to death in her car. Her family remembers her as a hardworking and loving parent who put herself through school and was saving to buy a house. The media cruelly remembered her as the one who broke the record: Nicole was the 95th homicide of 2006, passing Oakland's total for all of 2005 in just the first week of September.
Much of Oakland has been left behind, and it's falling deeper and deeper into despair.
...Or the Global Green City Against this backdrop, there is hope for a different Oakland.
In 2005, residents reached out to former Congressman Ron Dellums, a visionary black progressive who had retired from politics. They pleaded with him to run for mayor.
Dellums was done with politics, and he stood before a crowd of hundreds ready to say "thank you, but no." Looking out at the crowd, Dellums changed his mind. He knew people needed hope. He ran.
In his campaign, Dellums embraced big ideas and committed to making Oakland what he called a "model city": a place where visionary ideas like universal health care and education for all take hold, working on a local level and standing as a model of what is possible for the rest of the country.
Embracing ideas put forward by community leaders, including our organization, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Dellums promised to make Oakland "a Silicon Valley" of green capital, pledging to make the growth of the green economy central to Oakland's comeback. The choice of a "green" economy isn't random--Oakland has some real advantages:
1)Oakland is one of the sunniest, windiest cities in California, poised to be a leader in solar and wind power. 2)The "green wave" of investment is hottest right here in the Bay Area. 3)Settlement of an energy lawsuit left Oakland millions to spend on sustainability, and a bond issue left our community college system ready to invest heavily in a bold greening program.
Dellums was running against a pro-development, pro-gentrification bloc bent on making Oakland a bedroom community for San Francisco. More condos for the rich and more of the same for the hardest hit neighborhoods in Oakland.
But inspired by the "model city" vision, and Dellums himself, the people said "no" to more of the same.
On June 5, 2006, Dellums was elected mayor. He got just 126 votes more than he needed to avoid a runoff. Progressives and people of color, locked out for so long, now had a chance to lead.
A "Green Jobs, Go Local" Plan At the same time Dellums was campaigning for office, the Ella Baker Center co-convened the Oakland Apollo Alliance. Connected to the National Apollo Alliance, an effort to create 3 million clean energy jobs in the next decade, the Oakland Apollo Alliance is one of the nation's first roundtables committed to job creation for low-income people and people of color in the green, sustainable economy.
Inspiring efforts were already taking place all over Oakland:
1)A group called People's Grocery delivers fresh, organic food on a truck to low-income families. 2)California Youth Energy Services trains and pays young adults to conduct energy audits. 3)Developers connected to the Apollo Alliance are building Red Star Homes--green buildings constructed by formerly-incarcerated people on the site of a once-toxic brownfield.
Our challenge: After so many years of fighting reactive battles, we had a chance to be for something. The Oakland Apollo Alliance moved quickly, offering three big ideas to the Dellums administration:
1)Create the nation's first "Green Jobs Corps," a training pipeline and partnership between labor unions, the community college system, and the City to train and employ residents--particularly hard-to-employ constituencies'in the new green economy. 2)Declare "Green Enterprise Zones" in Oakland areas where green businesses and green-collar employers are given incentives and benefits to locate and hire. This is part of a comprehensive "Green Economic Development Plan," a funded and staffed study to identify ways to make a better business climate for sustainable enterprise--provided it hires local residents as a way to keep benefits and money in town. 3)Green the Port, building on an inspiring success story in Los Angeles, where a healthy port program is dramatically reducing emissions. We want to turn one of Oakland's greatest public health threats into an international model for sustainability.
By their nature, green jobs are local jobs--and these ideas will have extra impact in Oakland because of the "multiplier effect" a town gets when money is spent on a local business instead of a chain or out-of-town company. Converting the Port to biodiesel creates demand for a fueling station and a manufacturing plant nearby. Businesses in the Green Enterprise Zones will need to hire Jobs Corps graduates.
Along with a host of other proposals, our larger vision is to turn Oakland into a "global green city," where the pathway out of poverty is the new green wave. The reality is that other market sectors and other types of business aren't coming to Oakland. If green isn't the answer, what is?
Six Months To Go Now, something remarkable is happening in Oakland. Unlikely allies like labor, environmental, and social justice activists are working together. A coalition of nonprofit organizations is aligning strategic plans for the next six months. Funders are pouring money into Oakland, inspired by the chance for a true progressive success story. Ordinary people, too, are getting involved in campaigns for things they'd never heard of six months ago, calling their councilmembers to demand "conservation retrofits" and "biodiesel at the Port."
On that third Thursday in September, we launched the "Apollo Challenge," our petition drive to encourage the City to adopt the green jobs platform. The first people to sign-- An electrician, a poet, a city councilmember, an activist, and a job counselor. In coming months we will take to the streets--a multi-racial, multi-issue coalition demanding a green future for all of Oakland.
We are the Heroes... In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of pioneering activists and dedicated citizens decided to focus their efforts on a couple of small Alabama towns in an effort to make change. They didn't worry whether their funders would ask if they were national or regional. They didn't wonder if what they were doing was too "local" to make a difference. The towns? Selma and Montgomery.
In 1999, citizens in a small town in Bolivia had growing concerns about a new plan to privatize their city's water supply. They went to community meetings. They formed working groups. They volunteered. When nobody listened, they took to the streets, surviving martial law and extreme violence at the hands of the military, and reclaimed their water. Their victory has catalyzed an international movement for change. Their town? Cochabamba.
Around our office, we've been wearing t-shirts that say, "We are the heroes we've been waiting for." We believe that our little local campaign to win green jobs for Oakland will echo. For us, "go local" isn't about going small scale or getting back to our roots. It's about winning a victory that will inspire debate and action in every struggling community in America.
Van Jones, is a YES! Contributing Editor, and executive director of Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Ben Wyskida is communications director at Ella Baker Center. Read more inspiring articles from Van Jones and others at www.yesmagazine.org
:: How a local food system builds health and community wealth ::
On farmers' market Sundays in Flagstaff, Arizona, local growers may offer you heirloom chiles and tomatoes you can't get anywhere else, apples from nearby orchards in Oak Creek Canyon, and verdolagas (purslane) from dry-farmed fields near Sunset Crater. When rains quench the thirst of drought-stricken forests, local foragers bring pinyon nuts, mushrooms, and wild horseradish. Livestock producers bring their Dominique hens, Black Spanish turkeys, pot-bellied pigs, or grass-fed beef. The air is as filled with the discussion of local political issues as it is with the aroma of family-recipe tamales, salsa, pesto, and hummus. A decade ago, none of this was readily available.
This market lies smack-dab in one of the most culturally diverse regions of North America, with more speakers of Native American languages than all the other regions of the United States combined, along with a strong Hispanic, Anglo, and Basque heritage. It also includes some of the poorest and most food-insecure counties in the West.
The Flagstaff market is now one of 10 in the region--the newest is the Navajo Nation's market in Tuba City. Those markets, and a series of multicultural discussions facilitated by the Flagstaff-based Center for Sustainable Environments, led to creation of the Canyon Country Fresh Network. That, in turn, catalyzed a number of youth gardens on the Hopi and Navajo reservations, a network of outlets for local food, and huge growth in the amount of food money that stays in the local economy.
The dramatic shift in sourcing foods in Grand Canyon country is not unique. Similar shifts are occurring in many other rural and urban food systems as well. Over the last decade, the number of farmers' markets in the United States has grown from 1,755 to over 3,700, while community-supported agriculture projects, 'Buy Fresh, Buy Local' campaigns, and community kitchens have also proliferated. Thanks to non-profits like Community Food Security Coalition and Food Routes, more Americans than ever before are thinking about where their food comes from and how far it travels.
Yet, despite the rapid growth of local food projects throughout North America, their contributions to wealth and health at the community level still fail to register with many conventional businesspeople and economic development officials. Perhaps this is because the annual growth in food sales for a corporation such as Wal-Mart is easy to measure. It's harder to track the diffuse growth of the local foods movement--whose participating markets may collectively have a higher growth rate in the United States than Wal-Mart--where the majority of benefits do not flow back to a single, distant corporate headquarters.
Nevertheless, the generation of wealth and well-being by local and regional food initiatives is quantifiable, and directly benefits members of rural communities like those in Northern Arizona. Ironically, the other side of the coin is seldom considered by urban and rural planners: just how much is lost when farmers in a region export most of their foods into the global commodity market, while their own communities buy back many of the same foodstuffs through an international network of intermediaries. Not only is the food more costly to purchase, but it has diminished freshness, reduced nutritional quality, and a higher probability of carrying food-borne diseases.
Let's consider the cost of farmers and ranchers not selling their meats, grains and produce locally, and not using local inputs to produce them. The master detectives solving this economic mystery have been Ken Meter of the Crossroads Center and Jon Rosales at the Institute of Social, Economic and Ecological Sustainability in Minnesota. They pioneered this topic in a classic series of studies of rural areas across the U.S. called 'Finding Food in Farm Country.'
Meter recently did an analysis, commissioned by our Center for Sustainable Environments, of the multi-cultural food system of northern Arizona. In particular, Ken studied how much food--especially meat--is produced in the Arizona counties of Coconino, Navajo, and Yavapai relative to what is eaten there.
Coconino County surrounds the Grand Canyon, and includes much of Western Navajo and Hopi lands. In 2002, its 213 ranches and farms sold $10.3 million in livestock and byproducts. In that year, county residents spent $37 million on meat, poultry, fish and eggs. Local consumers could absorb all the meat produced in the county if it were directly available to them. Yet, in 2002, they bought $53,000 of food directly from their farming neighbors.
The way the food economy is now structured, the direct producer-consumer connection does not exist--or is just developing. Coconino County ranchers and farmers currently lose $10 million each year selling the bulk of the food they produce into the national or globalized commodity marketplace. Eliminating the middlemen and selling locally would go a long way toward stopping those losses.
As county ranchers and farmers struggle with losses, county consumers spend $215 million a year buying food from the outside. As Ken has summarized, this is a total loss to the region of $231 million of potential wealth each year. This loss amounts to 14 times the value of all food commodities raised in the county--a giant sucking sound that drains both wealth and well-being from our communities.
On the brighter side, let's look at what's happened in Flagstaff and surrounding areas of northern Arizona since 2001, when a community farmers' market and several related local food micro-enterprises opened their gates to put a stopper in the drain.
From 2001 to 2005, annual purchases of locally and regionally produced foods went from less than $20,000 to $250,000 in Flagstaff and from $85,000 to nearly $500,000 in the surrounding Northern Arizona region. This is a six- to eight-fold increase in direct economic benefits to the community resulting from local food purchases in the first five years of these initiatives.
But this money also generates multiplier effects within Northern Arizona, or what Richard McCarthy of the Crescent City Farmers' Market calls 'sticky money.' Money spent locally stays in the community rather than draining off to corporate headquarters in Phoenix or Los Angeles. In addition, McCarthy's studies in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina showed that downtown retailers near his market witnessed a 30-70 percent increase in sales on market days, gaining an additional $450,000 a year as a result of increased foot traffic.
Our informal surveys of Flagstaff's downtown retailers, all of whom are open during Sunday market hours, indicate that they benefit substantially from market-directed foot traffic. The retailers' direct benefits in Flagstaff are similar to those in New Orleans--downtown Flagstaff businesses gain approximately $54,000 annually just from the increased traffic during summer and fall when the Flagstaff Community Farmers' Market is open.
Of course, not all of the economic and nutritional benefits of local food initiatives come directly from farmers' markets. In Flagstaff, the farmers' market served as a cornerstone that supported other bricks needed to build a healthy local food system.
Soon after the farmers' market opened, chefs from restaurants such as The Turquoise Room at La Posada in Winslow, Arizona, became 'early adopters' of local foods.
They were followed by a second wave of chefs, primarily caterers, who began to regularly purchase food from local farms, orchards and ranches. The Flagstaff Community Supported Agriculture Project also contracted with one of the farmers from the market, and has since added other vendors to supply weekly packages of regionally produced foods to 150-170 households.
From there, the local food initiatives grew even more diverse. The country's first community-supported wild-foraging project was started to supply 20 households, and still supplies caterers and restaurants with native and naturalized wild foods. Several ranchers began to market their locally produced meats in northern Arizona, and a new restaurant featuring grass-fed meats is set to open this winter.
More than a dozen new youth gardens in Flagstaff and on the Hopi and Navajo reservations have begun to produce food for local consumption. Their fall 2005 harvest celebrations fed between 1,800 and 2,400 people with fresh produce, and their fall 2006 Native Harvest conference at Moenave near Tuba City engaged more than 150 Navajo ranchers, gardeners, and farmers.
Over several years, the NAU Healing Gardens program, Nava-Tech, Indigenous Community Enterprises, New Dawn, and Native Youth Movement have galvanized various facets of local food work in Diné (Navajo) communities, while the Natwani Coalition has done the same in Hopi communities. Most recently, a Diné Farmers' Association has decided to incorporate at Leupp, Arizona, building on the earlier successes of a project called Navajo Family Farms. That same community formed the first Native American-led 'convivium' associated with Slow Food USA, and has featured blue corn and churro lamb dinners at its events.
The Canyon Country Fresh Network began as a means of promoting more purchase of locally produced foods in the region. It includes 27 restaurants, cafes, caterers, resorts, vineyard tasting rooms, groceries and gift shops. Each must pledge to purchase foods from three or more of the many local producers on a regular basis. Network members are located in Flagstaff, Sedona, Winslow, Prescott, Dewey, Mormon Lake, Cottonwood, and Chino Valley, Arizona; Boulder, Utah; and in Zion and Petrified Forest national parks.
A community kitchen program has been in the works for two years, and several school districts are working on food policies that favor local food purchases. All of these organizations, plus several ranchers' groups such as Diablo Trust, have joined together for discussions sponsored by a new Northern Arizona Food and Agriculture Council, which Drake University's Agricultural Law Center has assisted. Their shared goal is to build more collaboration and infrastructure to access more local foods and keep our communities healthy.
All of these efforts add not only to the local economy, but to the sense of being in a cohesive, multi-cultural community in Grand Canyon country. There's value beyond mere calories in fresh, local food. Building a local food supply system makes for healthier food, fosters more economically viable farms and ranches, and provides a forum for community members to collectively imagine a more sustainable future for the region. The informal conversations that take place at marketplaces and feasts are as important as the network's more formal accomplishments.
With the dry humor characteristic of their arid region, some activists in Canyon Country now jokingly call themselves 'terroir-ists,' expressing their love of the flavors and fragrances of the food native to their homeland. It is the kind of 'terroir' that even advocates of homeland security might celebrate, for it has increased the food security of a homeland that had earlier found itself at risk in terms of food security, nutrition-related diseases, and poverty. Although these risks have not instantly disappeared, residents can now see 'a green light' at the end of the tunnel.
Gary Nabhan is director of the NAU Center for Sustainable Environments. For more information, visit www.garynabhan.com. Read more articles from our Go Local issue.
:: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian coffee farmers make mirembe kawomera--delicious peace ::
Mirembe Kawomera coffee delivers a double jolt.
First, there's the caffeine, but right behind that tang comes the jolt of learning that the arabica beans were sold by an alliance of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Ugandan farmers.
This unique cooperative in the Mbale region of Uganda is Mirembe Kawomera--Delicious Peace. Their coffee comes to market fairly traded, distributed by Thanksgiving Coffee, a Fort Bragg, California, company specializing in organic and fair trade produce.
By banding together and by establishing a fair trade relationship, the farmers now realize enough profits from sales to meet their families' basic needs--a sharp contrast to the hardship of trying to sell as individuals to large corporate buyers in a glutted world market. Better circumstances have, in turn, sweetened relations between the unique Mbale Jewish community and their more numerous Muslim and Christian neighbors.
The notion of forming a coffee cooperative was first conceived by Jewish community leader J.J. Keki as an economic survival tactic. In 1999, a worldwide coffee crisis developed as overproduction in new Brazilian and Vietnamese markets sent prices plummeting. The Mbale farmers were among the many growers who were hurt. Coffee farmers were forced to curtail children's education so that the youngsters could go to work, or to sell off land their families had cultivated for generations.
In 2004, Keki went door-to-door, encouraging farmers of all faiths to band together. The alliance would be a first; interfaith relations had been strained since the establishment of the Ugandan Jewish community in 1919, when charismatic general Semei Kakungulu and followers converted to Judaism, rather than embrace the Christianity proffered by the British.
"The most serious problem for us is religious prejudice," Keki said. "In Uganda, a Jew is referred to as a 'Christ killer.' Sometimes we have failed job interviews just because we are Jews." And Muslim Ugandans, says Keki, believe that the Jews have been abandoned by God.
Keki can also recall how his father, during Idi Amin's rule in the 1970s, narrowly missed punishment when he was caught studying the forbidden Torah. Fortunately, Keki says, the authorities were willing to accept a bribe of five goats in exchange for his father's life.
But the history of prejudice would have to become less important than present concerns if the Mbale farmers were to survive in 2004. Keki, who had been supported by Muslims and Christians, as well as Jews, in a successful 2002 bid for a Namanyonyi Sub-County council seat, was widely considered a credible leader. Now, 400 farmers of all three faiths joined to form the coffee cooperative.
"We brainstormed," Keki said, "and through participatory discussions we came up with the Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative."
The diverse religious groups came together, Keki says, by focusing on what united them. "We looked to common things that were reflected in the holy books," Keki said. "For example, we all acknowledge that we greet with the word of 'peace': shalom, salaam, mirembe."
The next step was finding a market. Mirembe Kawomera got a break when American vocalist Laura Wetzler intervened. Wetzler learned about the Ugandan jews in the mid-1990s when she heard their Hebrew-African music on public radio.
Wetzler said. "I wrote away and got the tape. I learned all the songs, and I started telling the Abayu Daya's stories in my concert work." As coordinator of Kulanu, a Jewish nonprofit organizing community-development projects, Wexler had a mandate to help Mirembe Kawomera find a coffee market. She made 40 phone calls before Thanksgiving Coffee's CEO, Paul Katzeff, agreed to buy the beans.
Next, Wetzler found a cooperative near Mbale that had already obtained the expensive Fair Trade certification the coffee would need to be sold through Thanksgiving. The Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative would buy farmers' produce, which would then be processed through the nearby co-op and shipped to California.
Katzeff guarantees the farmers 20 to 40 cents per pound higher return than conventionally traded coffee. That makes their produce dependably lucrative for the farmers. There are other fair trade benefits, as well. Mirembe Kawomera can count on Katzeff's commitment to an ongoing trade relationship, rather than having to cope with the insecurity of looking for a market each season. And Thanksgiving, like other fair trade buyers, contributes regularly to community development projects in Mbale. Thanksgiving's contribution of one dollar for every package sold recently helped open and support a school there. The fair trade co-op has been so successful, Keki wants to see it duplicated.
"We hope to make the cooperative a model of championing development in communities," he said. "We also hope that other cooperatives will emulate the principles of Mirembe and bring about peaceful coexistence. We get along very much better. You can't believe the peace and harmony that this community has enjoyed since the cooperative society was formed."
Dee Axelrod is former senior editor at YES! Read more articles on sustainable economies in our Go Local issue.
:: The suicide economy is all too ready to cast off used material, disadvantaged people, and troubled neighborhoods. These living economy entrepreneurs are turning throwaways into gold :: When Shane Endicott was 27, he wrestled with a crisis that haunts many adults. He'd spent his early years amassing skills and was now ready to embark on a profession that would define his adult work life. He wanted to make a living that would support his new family, but he didn't want to spend his life making rich people richer. He believed in doing work that would provide benefits for his neighborhood as well as himself. He wanted to work someplace where everyone had an equal say and similar values. And he especially wanted to avoid producing anything that would create more dangerous wastes or use up more natural resources.
Endicott's work ethic sounds not just idealistic, but positively quixotic; it flies in the face of every rule society teaches us about business life in the modern world. But today, Endicott and his work crew are grossing nearly $2 million a year supporting their families and watching their dreams turn into reality. In a business Endicott and his partners have built from the ground up, the Rebuilding Center in Portland, Oregon, is living up to all the demands he had about work. They are also doing it within a well-established but under-used business model--the nonprofit.
Endicott had always been interested in the construction and demolition business. But he and his partners did not want to emulate demolition as it is usually done. He says he didn't want to "crunch and dump, grind up all that useful wood, metal, and brick and dump it in a landfill, then go out and chop down more trees and mine more iron to build something else." Instead, the Rebuilding Center demolishes, by hand, wooden or brick houses, guts entire apartment buildings, or removes built-ins like old kitchen cabinets for reuse. The Center renews the used building materials and sells them to the public at half the cost of retail or less.
Rebuilding ideas: economy and community Endicott and his partners understood that one of the first steps toward being a socially responsible business is to have ties to the locality. They were located in an economically depressed area of northeast Portland. While the neighborhood needed job opportunities, it also needed a sense of itself as a viable community.
Starting with a $15,000 private loan, Endicott, his partners, and several volunteers worked for a few months out of a garage. Now, after four years, they're still in the neighborhood. They've expanded to a half-block-long building, stuffing it with recycled building materials. Humming with the activities of 36 full-time employees, it attracts customers from all over the city who come to get good deals on everything from toilets and light fixtures to roofing and door frames.
About 80 percent of the Rebuilding Center staff comes from the surrounding neighborhood. Because no expensive, oil-demanding machines are used, the Center employs three to six times more people than mechanized demolition companies; and they still do the job for less money while paying their employees considerably higher wages. Wages start at $10 an hour for the most unskilled labor (like shifting bricks or pulling nails) with regular reviews and wage increases, plus full medical and dental coverage. "We didn't want to be the kind of nonprofit that appeals to people's ideals and then doesn't pay a living wage," says Endicott. "We also didn't want the kind of inequalities you find in many businesses. One of our goals was to raise the bar for unskilled labor and lower the bar in management to level out the inequalities found in most pay scales."
Workers are treated like full business partners; everyone, including the director, gets the same single vote on work-related issues, and potential workers are hired by the people they'll be working with. With principles like these, the employees and their families aren't the only ones who have felt the effect. After just two years of existence, the Center was being hailed by the local neighborhood paper as "an anchor that's revitalizing the local economy."
Environmentally friendly Besides revitalizing the economy, the Rebuilding Center's key tenet for social responsibility is to help protect the Earth. They've adopted a closed-loop cycle for building materials that reuses everything down to, as Endicott says, "a two-foot length of nail-studded two-by-four." Because of this, they've diverted millions of pounds of still-useful materials from overflowing landfills every year, and they prevent more raw materials from being extracted.
"And even more importantly, we value the energy in that porcelain sink, even the gyprock," says Endicott. "We help that energy, that was once alive, to go on giving." Although the Center is now so successful it could ship high-end items like oak doors or repaired stained glass to distant markets, the staff has refused to do so, believing that burning fossil fuels for shipping out of state would negate the point of their enterprise.
Uniting the neighborhood After everyone's paid a decent wage and all the bills are paid, there's usually money left over. If not needed to improve or expand the business, the money is paid out to the public. "With our surplus, we try inspiring various community projects, which is what Our United Villages, does," says Endicott. The inspiration for Our United Villages (OUV) started with Endicott (before he'd even established the Center) when he and a few neighbors met to discuss a local 12-year-old who was stealing in the neighborhood. They discovered that the youth badly needed braces, which his family couldn't afford. The whole neighborhood decided to chip in and buy them for him. Now, the youth not only abstains from acts like stealing, but prevents other youths from doing the same. "It's not that we aren't having things stolen from the neighborhood anymore, but that we have a different relationship with him and the community," says Endicott.
With that, the neighborhood started discussing other ideas. Neighbors could learn how to make jam from the older folks. Kids might perform odd jobs such as mowing a neighbor's lawns in exchange for locally-donated funds from a tax-deductible scholarship trust.
While ideas were flowing, locals found that they weren't easy to implement. "I realized that there was an amazing amount of ideas and passion but no cultural outlet for them," says Endicott. To create this outlet, he helped establish an organization that would foster community dialogue and activity: Our United Villages. Endicott had always envisioned the Rebuilding Center as the means for creating OUV but only recently have profits grown enough to get it going. Endicott is optimistic that with OUV now established, many ideas can finally be realized.
"We used to think we could attain quality of life individually, by making more money," Endicott says. "But with our water and air increasingly polluted and so many people isolated and unhappy, the only way we'll get that quality of life is to evolve new ways to do business and to live together in communities that are value-based, not money-based."
Holly Dressel is co-author of Good News for a Change and From Naked Ape to Superspecies. She has been a writer and researcher for television, film, and radio for 20 years. Read more articles on local economies at www.yesmagazine.org
