Building Community Through Local Living Economies
Watch live streaming video from etsy at livestream.com
Activist and entrepreneur, Judy will discuss how small independent local businesses are creating a new economy based on positive win-win relationships among people and with nature. In local living economies, communities are self-reliant in basic needs, while exchanging globally in what is culturally unique and not available locally. By decentralizing ownership from the concentrated power of large corporations, local living economies are increasing community wealth, restoring nature, strengthening democracy, supporting cultural identity, bringing greater happiness and helping prepare communities for the consequences of peak oil and climate change.
About Judy Wicks
Under Judy’s leadership, White Dog became a leader in the local food movement, purchasing sustainably grown produce from local family farmers, and only humanely and naturally raised meat, poultry and eggs, sustainably harvested fish, and fair trade coffee, tea, chocolate, vanilla, and cinnamon. Other sustainable business practices she implemented at White Dog include recycling and composting, solar heated hot water, eco-friendly soaps and office supplies, and purchasing 100% of electricity from renewable sources, the first business in Pennsylvania to do so.
An international leader and speaker in the local living economies movement, Judy is co-founder, in 2001, of the nationwide Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), now comprised of over 80 local business networks in towns and cities across the US and Canada. She also founded the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, the local BALLE affiliate, now with over 500 members.
Looking for a vehicle to spread the farm purchasing practices of the White Dog Cafe to other restaurants, Judy founded Fair Food, which is now an independent non-profit with numerous programs to connect local family farms with the urban marketplace.
I just found out about Judy Wicks! Real Estate “experts” like to say that “all real estate is local” and I agree. Yet, the “local”, Mom & Pop, Independent, Real Estate Brokerages of the past, have been taken over by large, national and international, corporate, franchised real estate companies, who really don’t care what happens to real estate, in ANY local community. We NEED to bring the “LOCAL BROKER” back!