Episode 68, 46 min listen
How can we co-create a more just, compassionate, vibrant, and inclusive economy? In this interview, Judy Wicks shares how the Circle of Aunts and Uncles in Philadelphia does just that as they invest in and support local entrepreneurs. In our discussion, Judy goes even further to help us understand how supporting local businesses can build a more sustainable future for our community.
AUDIO PLAYER
You can access this episode wherever you listen to podcasts via our pod.link.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
Learn more about the Circle of Aunts and Uncles.
Read Judy's memoir about her incredible life, Good Morning Beautiful Business: The Unexpected Journey of an Activist Entrepreneur and Local-Economy Pioneer.
Read about the transition of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies to its current form, Common Future.
Learn more about Community Development Financial Institutions and find a certified CDFI near you.
JUDY'S BIO
Judy Wicks is an author, activist and pioneer in the local economy movement, best known for founding the farm-to-table forerunner White Dog Café in 1983, which she operated for 27 years. She also founded the Black Cat, 1989, a retail store selling local and fair-trade merchandise for 20 years, and co-founded The Free People’s Store, 1970, now well known as Urban Outfitters. Judy also founded the non-profits Fair Food Philly, 2000; the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, 2001; Circle of Aunts & Uncles, 2015; and All Together Now PA (now called PA Fibershed) 2019. She co-founded the nationwide Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (now Common Future) in 2001. Judy is author of award-winning memoir, Good Morning, Beautiful Business: The Unexpected Journey of an Activist Entrepreneur and Local Economy Pioneer. Now retired, Judy is creating a sustainable, solar-run homestead in Philadelphia, growing organic vegetables and fruit with daughter Grace, and a white dog named Curtis.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
-Introduction
Ame Sanders 0:11
This is the State of Inclusion Podcast, where we explore topics at the intersection of equity, inclusion, and community. In each episode, we meet people who are changing their communities for the better, and we discover actions that each of us can take to improve our own communities. I'm Ame Sanders. Welcome.
You know, as a podcast host, sometimes the interview you set out to do is not at all the interview you discover along the way. That happened to me with today's episode. I set out to do an interview to learn more about a small volunteer team of community members linking grassroots philanthropy with local entrepreneurs, all in the service of building a more equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem and supporting underserved entrepreneurs. As you'll see, we got that plus a lot more.
Before we start, a small aside. You know, our guests freely share their stories with us, so we make the podcast, our newsletter, and related content free as well. However, if you'd like to support us to grow in our work and help to offset some of our production costs, you can find a link to our Support Us page in the show notes. We're happy that you found us. We're grateful that you listen. And we would be thankful for your support.
Today, we are happy to welcome Judy Wicks. Judy is the founder of Philadelphia's Circle of Aunts and Uncles. But Judy is also an entrepreneur, a fairly famous restaurateur, the person who established the White Dog Café, and a legend in the farm-to-table movement. She's a change agent and a recognized leader in the local living economy movement. Welcome, Judy. Thanks so much for joining us.
Judy Wicks 2:07
Thank you, Ame. Good to be here.
-About The Circle of Aunts and Uncles
Ame Sanders 2:08
You know, I wanted to start our discussion by referencing a quote from an article you wrote about founding the Circle of Aunts and Uncles. And you said,
"I had the idea to match the potential of the retired baby boomers with the potential of unrealized talents and under-resourced entrepreneurs in our community. The vision is that we co-create a more just and compassionate, vibrant and inclusive economy."
So, if we use that as a jumping off point, can you talk a little bit about the Circle of Aunts and Uncles? Who you are, what you do, how you came to be, and then maybe about your fabulous name that you have?
Judy Wicks 2:52
Okay. Well, it's funny because I thought of the name before I conceived of the whole concept. It came about when I first moved to Philadelphia. I was a very naive suburbanite young woman, but we were going back 50 years. I remember one time--and I had not had much experience with inner city life--I'd never lived in a city before. I was walking on the street, and there was a group of high school girls coming towards me. They were African American high school girls. One of the young women complimented me on my outfit. I thought to myself, that young woman could be a fashion designer when she grows up. I wonder what kind of opportunities she has in the inner city and going to inner city high school and so on.
So, I didn't know what it was going to be, but I became fascinated with this idea of how much talent there is that doesn't have the opportunity to blossom and contribute to our economy. So, I kind of tucked that away in my mind.
The name for the organization, the Circle of Aunts and Uncles, came about when I was thinking about what are the needs of young entrepreneurs and how do people get started in their small businesses? I realized that I had gotten loans from my family and that most small businesses are not bank-ready. Like no bank will loan to these little, upstart small businesses. So, they really depend on family and friends. I learned the term family and friends stage capital--that that is a stage of capital needs that all entrepreneurs go through. But low-income entrepreneurs don't have that circle of aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers that can loan them money. So, I thought, well let's form a circle of aunts and uncles that are kind of the adoptive aunts and uncles. We started this and have maintained this with a sense of family. It's really more a sense of community than actual family, but the idea being that we support each other, not only with financial resources, but we also provide social capital to the entrepreneurs.
Our first entrepreneur, Pete. He was the owner of Philly Bread. He said, "Well, I guess I'm your first nephew." So, he was the one that kind of coined that, calling the entrepreneurs the nieces and nephews, or the aunts and uncles.
We'll be 10 years old next June, and we just had our ninth anniversary. To celebrate our anniversary each year we have what we call the family reunion. All the aunts and uncles and the nieces and nephews come together for a big party. We have dinner, and then each of the entrepreneurs gets up and gives a little three to five-minute update on how they're doing, what they used the money for, how their business is doing, and whatever. Even the entrepreneurs that have long since paid off their loan come back for the reunion to let everybody know how their business is doing. So, we do form a lot of personal relationships through this purposely.
A lot of times when businesses get loans, there's no real personal relationship. They make the loan and they make their loan payments. But in our case, we form a small circle around each of these entrepreneurs, so the aunts and uncles volunteer to be a small circle leader for that entrepreneur. Then we identify what their needs are outside of money. Do they need help with management? Do they need help with bookkeeping? Do they need help with marketing? Whatever it is. Then we try to address as many of their needs from within our circle of what the resources are. We have an architect. We have a lawyer. We have many people who have been in business, but most of the aunts and uncles have not been entrepreneurs themselves. But they might, for instance, for a clothing company, they might host a trunk show at their house. Invite all their friends over to see the wares.
There's many different ways that we can support the entrepreneurs, and even just emotional support in a sense. You know, someone's going through a hard time with their business, they can call their aunt or their uncle. Or if they have a new idea for a product and they want some feedback, they'll have a meeting and tell the aunts and uncles about their idea, hear their reactions and suggestions, and so on. It's really, it's very interesting. Most of our businesses are in the food or clothing business because we're trying to focus on basic needs. Like, how can we build a stronger local economy by strengthening our local food system, or strengthening our local textile system, or whatever it may be? That's our focus, as opposed to nail salons and that kind of thing, they're not necessarily basic needs.
-How The Circle Works
Ame Sanders 7:42
So, maybe you can talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how you guys do what you do. So do people donate? Do they make an investment? Do you guys actually loan the money? I think I saw somewhere that you work with a CDFI. So, there's just some nuts and bolts that would help me understand and help our audience understand better how you do what you do.
Speaker 1 8:06
Sure. First of all, yes, we do work with the CDFI, and it's really essential for us to have the expertise. I had no idea what I was doing. I came up with this idea of the Circle of Aunts and Uncles. So, I was talking to one of my friends and telling her about my idea for the Circle of Aunts and Uncles, and she happened to be the director of a CDFI, a community development financial institution. She said, "Why don't I house the loan for you?" You know, I didn't know anything about making a loan. I was just planning to collect checks from my friends and put them in the bank and make the loans myself. If I'd done that, I probably would have driven myself crazy. So, I took her up on that, and they house our funds.
So, the way it works is that each of the aunts and uncles makes an investment of $2,000. Now, in the beginning, we were considering this to be an investment, and we were charging a 3% interest, and that 3% interest would go to the aunt or uncle. But as we got into this work, we realized that it really wasn't worth it. All the bookkeeping. You had to keep track of all these different investments, and it was such a small return that it was hardly worth all the trouble. So, we decided just to make it a contribution.
The CDFI is a 501(c)(3), so when we make the $2,000 contribution, it's tax deductible. That was just a cleaner way of doing it than trying to get the money back. But the aunts to uncles make contributions to the 501(c)(3). So, that's how we got the original pot of money. Then it's a revolving loan fund because the entrepreneurs pay the money back with a small interest of 3%. The CDFI has been allowing us to keep the 3% as well, so we've been building up the pot. Then, the aunts and uncles also contribute social capital, as I mentioned before, in whatever ways they can support the entrepreneurs.
Then, we also have something called social capital aunts and uncles. So, these are members who are not contributing financially. Maybe they can't afford $2,000. Oh, then also, we pay $1,000 a year dues. So, it's $2,000 to get started per person, and then $1,000 dues. So, some aunts and uncles have a lot to share in terms of their social capital. Perhaps they used to be an entrepreneur themselves, or whatever, and so those social capital aunts and uncles only contribute their skills. They don't put money into the pot. That's essential, too, because we're an all-volunteer organization. At least we were, until very recently. I'll tell you about that little lucky thing that happened to us.
One of the hard parts about this model is that it is all volunteer. Now, the CDFI is not a volunteer. They pay their people, and they're so generous. One of the hard things for us was not having staff other than the staff that was donated to us by the CDFI, and the social capital that we're providing for the entrepreneurs is so important to them. They say that that's more important than the money. But yet, because we're all volunteers, there was no steady work being done in that regard. It was a hit-or-miss kind of a thing.
So, one of our uncles, a new uncle, has a family foundation. His father was a friend of mine, so when his father passed away, he called me and said that he knew that his father admired my work, and he was wondering if he could come and meet me. So, I met with this young man. He was asking me what I was into, and I told him about the Circle of Aunts and Uncles. The next thing I knew, he had donated $50,000 to the aunts and uncles. I never asked him for money, but he joined as an uncle and contributed $50,000. So, then, we were able to hire a part-time social capital coordinator. A consultant, I guess you'd call her.
The beauty is that we hired someone who was already in our circle, an entrepreneur who had lost her business because she had gotten ill and because of the pandemic and all these things. She's a wonderful butcher. But, she had a wonderful business and knew a lot of people in the circle, so we hired her to be our social capital consultant. So, that has been a game changer, because she knows every entrepreneur, what their situation is, what their financial situation is, what their needs are. So, then she can call upon the aunts and uncles, "Hey, this entrepreneur needs an architect's advice on something and pull that person in." Or, "We need a lawyer and pull that person." So, she's there working on all these connections to resources. So, that has just been fabulous.
Then, another entrepreneur who sold his business, an ice cream business, he's now also becoming a social capital consultant. He's not a full time, and she's not full-time either. That's kind of the dream--not that the businesses would be sold or go under, but that entrepreneurs that we help later become aunts and uncles. Even though we went almost 10 years, because this was just recently that we got some money. We went almost 10 years of a volunteer organization, and we've been successful.
I don't know how many entrepreneurs now we have. Maybe 35. We've loaned I think over $600,000 in small loans. I mean, our loans are anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000. Then for second loans, and we do a lot of second loans and even third loans to our entrepreneurs, if they're in good standing with paying back their loan. Say they took a $10,000 loan and they've paid off $5,000; then they can get a second loan with a total exposure of $20,000 because we've gotten to know this entrepreneur, and we will take a little bit more risk on them. So, that's how it works in terms of the mechanics of it all.
Ame Sanders 13:55
How many aunts and uncles do you have?
-Key Ingredients
Judy Wicks 13:57
Okay, around 40-45. Somewhere in there. But, it's revolving. We've always maintained around 40 to 45 members. That's been pretty steady the whole way through. So, as people rotate out, other people rotate in. Two other groups have started aunts and uncles, from our example, both in Pennsylvania. The hardest thing is finding the relationship with the CDFI, which is really crucial. Now I understand how much work it is to make a loan and have all the right documents to keep track of the loan and to keep track of the payments coming back. You have to have a whole process. It's not something the volunteers can do. So, that's a really essential part.
The other essential part is having relationships. A person or two people, whatever, that found the circle to have a lot of relationships in the community. That they're a community leader. They're trusted. They're known in their community. Because you're asking people to put $2,000 into something. They're not going to just do that to anybody. So, you need to have people that are trusted in the community to get this thing started and get money coming in. So, compared to the impact I guess that banks have with the big loans and all this kind of stuff, maybe it's a drop in the bucket. But I think it's really important to work because of the relationships because we are really building community. We're fostering those relationships. So you know, between the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, or the ice cream makers and those who use those products. I encourage other communities to give it a try.
Ame Sanders 15:29
So, a couple of things come to mind when I listen to you talk about that. One is a quote that I recently saw which said,
"Community building is a team sport."
And also, I love this image of your family reunion, of the folks that you guys have supported and the entrepreneurs that you've supported across the years coming back together to share their stories and to be part of this extended network of people. So, maybe if you would just take a minute or two and tell us about one or two of the entrepreneurs that you guys have worked with and a little bit about their stories.
-About the Entrepreneurs
Judy Wicks 16:04
Okay! I mentioned Pete. He was our first client, I guess, our first nephew. He has a bakery. He, as much as possible, buys his grains from local farmers. That's what we're trying to do, is to have the whole supply chain be local, so that the entrepreneurs that we are helping are buying from local farmers. So, when we make that kind of loan, we're not only helping the entrepreneur, but we're helping the farmers, because then they use that money to buy from the farmers.
That's an important thing to us, to look at the supply chain. We have several different small mills in Philadelphia and grain farmers for oats and cornmeal, flax seeds, and whatnot. We have another company, Mother Butter that makes this wonderful seed butter that doesn't use any peanuts, all different seeds. So, when she became a member of our circle, she was looking for local sources for her seeds. So, I was able to connect her to a flax farmer who was growing flax for linen. So, she buys her flax seeds from a local farmer. So, that's an example of some of the actions that we're trying to make. In the clothing area, our dream here in Pennsylvania is to have a dirt-to-shirt supply chain, like farm-to-table for food, a dirt-to-shirt for fiber crops. So, the natural fiber crops in our climate are hemp and flax for linen.
We have a glass-blowing business. Remark Glass. They're just an incredible company because they use all recycled glass that they reform. So they'll take, for instance, the champagne bottles from your wedding, and then they'll re-blow them to make a beautiful whatever you want, like a big goblet that you can engrave, or a big glass dish out of your champagne bottles from your wedding. But, like, I collect all my glass and give it to them. There's a local gin called Bluecoat gin that comes in blue bottles. So, I save all my blue bottles, and I give it to them, and they blow these into glasses or vases or whatever. It's called Remark Glass.
Then, they went on to start a nonprofit as well, called Bottle Underground. Like in many cities, our recycling system is inefficient. They're unable to really carry out the whole recycling process. A lot of recycling that is gathered is not really recycled because there's just not a market for it. So Bottle Underground is a nonprofit that Remark Glass started, and it's a collection service. So, they go around and collect the glass from people who, rather than putting it into their city-controlled recycling, will give it to Bottle Underground. Like if you have a business where you need glass jars or something like that, they can get them there. But a lot of it they use to re-blow into usable products. So, that's a fascinating company.
The Little Pop Shop is one of my favorites. They make artisanal popsicles but use local fruits in season. They had a wonderful sweet corn pop. They have some that have dairy in them, and the dairy comes from local pasture cows. At one point, we had three ice cream companies: Weckerly's, Zsa's, and Bright Yellow Creamery. All three of the ice cream companies bought from local dairy farmers who raised their cows in humane ways, outside on pasture. Most of our dairy comes from factory farms where the cows are just kept indoors all the time, hooked to machines to milk them as though they're a piece of equipment. So, we really look at the whole supply chain, and we try to loan to companies who already do this, but we often will educate our entrepreneurs on how to buy locally if they don't already know.
Ame Sanders 19:51
The Circle of Aunts and Uncles is one manifestation of your belief in creating a vibrant and more just local economy. But I know this isn't by any stretch of the imagination a new idea for you--this incarnation that we're talking about here with the aunts and uncles. I mean, you've even written a book about this. You know, Good Morning, Beautiful Business: The Unexpected Journey of an Activist Entrepreneur and Local Economy Pioneer, which I've been reading this week, and I have to say, I enjoyed it quite a lot. One of the quotes early in your book that really caught my attention, I'll just share it, the quote,
"When you connect head and heart in business, you can transform not just business as usual, but the economy in general. You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions."
That is a pretty different vision from the way many of us go about commerce and this sort of transactional money-centered anonymous way as buyers and as sellers. Maybe you could unpack that quote a little bit for us and talk about your experience and your vision for local economies.
-Importance of Supporting Local Economies
Judy Wicks 21:12
Yeah. It has been my life's work, and you're right, the aunts and uncles is one manifestation of that. I got into this idea of local economies from being in the restaurant business and buying from local farmers. So, once I started buying from local farmers, it became kind of our market niche. We were known as a farm-to-table restaurant, one of the first in Philadelphia. Over the years, at the White Dog Cafe--that's the name of my restaurant--we developed a network of farmers that were supplying White Dog produce and fruits and vegetables, animal products, eggs, cheese, dairy, you know, whatever. In a way, this was our proprietary resource for us, all these contexts of where we get our supplies. So, I was thinking, "Oh, this is my competitive advantage. This is my market niche. You know, this is all about us."
Then, I realized that if I really did care about the local farmers and I cared about the farm animals that were in the factory farm system being mistreated, if I cared about the environment and cared about the consumers eating something healthy, that rather than just focusing on my little network of farmers supplying me in my restaurant, that I would work on creating a whole economy that was based on these values. So, I decided to share my information with other restaurants. I didn't want to be telling other restaurants what to do, so I started a nonprofit called Fair Food, and then hired somebody to create a brochure listing all of the suppliers of the White Dog, but not mentioning the White Dog. I said here's where you can get eggs, here's where you can get pork, and so on.
One of my passions, really, is around the farm animals, that the factory farm system is so cruel, where the animals are kept in cages their entire lives. You know, the mother pigs are kept in these crates, and the same with the chickens, with the battery cages, and so on. I wanted to encourage other restaurants to support the free-range chicken farms and the pastured pork and the grass fed beef, which is all like hallmarks of the White Dog. But having one restaurant buy this is not going to support the system. So, I wanted all the restaurants, to buy from all these farmers to build and strengthen our local food system. So, that's how I got into this. Really, the whole thing being about seeing that it's bigger than our own business.
There's no such thing as one sustainable business, no matter how good all your practices are and so on. You have to be part of a sustainable system. We have to work in cooperation with our competitors, with other restaurants and grocery stores or whatever, to build a system that works for everyone. Again, it's different than the mentality of the corporations, which are all about competition and control and domination. Here we're trying to share what we have, and I tried to model that. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but now I understand that what I was doing, I was sharing for the for the common good. So, that's something that's missing in our culture and our business culture. So, that I think is really such an essential aspect of growing an economy that works for everyone is seeing it as a cooperative system.
There's plenty of room for competition within a cooperative system, just as nature itself works. Nature is a cooperative system, but within that cooperative system, there's competition for sunlight, for resources, for whatever it is. The same way, taking a restaurant as an example, we may cooperate in building a sustainable system to support our local farmers, but then we compete on how can we use those good local products to make the best possible dishes so that there's competition among the chefs and so on? Which is also an important part of a robust economy. You don't want to be like a communist country where there's no competition and, therefore, no quality. It's that whole concept of creating a cooperative system and then having friendly competition within that. You're not trying to put your competitors out of business. You're all part of the same system. You're just differentiating and giving customers choices, and that's the way the system should work.
After I started Fair Food, then I thought, well, what about the economy? This is the food economy, the one I've been engaged in. What about energy? What about clothing? You know, the other aspects of an economy. So, I started the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, and I thought about what are the building blocks of an economy? You have food, clothing, plant medicine, transportation - all these different areas.
So, I focused on trying to find a leader in each of these areas to be on our board so that we covered all these issues, because I saw that things were happening. Say, take green building, the building trades of building houses in a sustainable way, using local products (local sustainably harvested woods, local stones and so on) rather than cutting down trees in the Amazon and shipping them up here. We should be building our houses from local products, and hemp, one of those products, for instance, making hempcrete. I sort of expanded my vision, saying, okay, there's these great things happening in green building. There's great things happening in renewable energy. There's great things happening in local food. But they're not talking to each other. We want to get the renewable energy people to be buying local food, and we want the local food people to be buying locally made clothing and so on. So, bringing together all these different aspects of the local economy into our organization, Sustainable Business Network. So, that was my next move.
-Building a National Movement
Then, I realized that, really, we needed to have a national movement because the corporate control of our economy is so vast that we needed to connect the dots of what was happening locally so that we could learn from each other. And we can also buy from each other because there are things that grow in South Carolina that don't grow in Pennsylvania and vice versa. So, how can we have an economy that's small-to-small and including international? So, when we talk about local economies, we're not going to just have everything we need locally. The idea is to produce as much as possible locally in terms of our basic needs but then to buy through fair trade relationships, our coffee, our bananas, our pineapples, whatever things for a northern city like ours don't grow locally. But when we buy them, we want to buy them fair trade rather than going through the corporate system, which is exploitative and extractive. We want to buy through a local economy. So, the vision is that we have a global economy that's a network of sustainable and just local economies that are connected to fair trade relationships around the world. So, we have the small, small connections going around the world, rather than having these large corporations controlling everything. It really needs to be a national and even international movement.
With that in mind, I started with a colleague of mine, started BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. What BALLE did was bring together what was happening in different parts of the country on the local level. So, really developed a national network of these small organizations that were supporting local economies.
More recently, I guess it was maybe like five or eight years ago, I started a local statewide group called All Together Now Pennsylvania. When I was running BALLE, there was a group of us. I was a co-chair with another founder. But we did a lot of traveling around to other places, helping communities get a local network started. So, then I said, "Okay, well, now I want to focus on my state." So I started All Together Now Pennsylvania coalitions in each of those areas of food, clothing, plant, medicine, and building materials. Focusing first on hemp because it was a new industry, and we wanted to have that be a localized industry instead of becoming part of the global economy. Using local products with local labor to sell to a local population. So, we cut down on long-distance supply chains.
A long time ago, I heard this story about a man who was saying that when he was young, he wanted to save the world, and now that he was old, he just wanted to save the pond in his backyard.
So, I'm a little bit at that stage where I moved to be closer to my daughter, and our dream had always been, when I got older, that we would buy property together and be able to grow our own food. So, I bought this two-acre property here, and we started raised beds. So, we're creating a model sustainable household. We call it the homestead. It. So, we're in the process of doing this right now, of putting in solar, so we're going to be totally run off solar. It's a ranch house, so I have enough roof space to put in enough panels that I can totally run my household, even in the winter, and charge my electric car, all from my own solar panels. So, we're in the process of doing that. We want to be a model of this.
A lot of this property was a big lawn, a green lawn, and so lawns are like deserts to nature. Lawns are terrible. I mean, they look good, but they're really bad for the environment, and it's killing off the insects and small creatures and so. So anyway, I've had this property for a year now, and I've not mown the lawn at all. So, it's just turning into a meadow. We're helping it along, and we're experimenting with different things. We're planting a lot of fruit trees and nut trees, so we have peach and apple and plum and cherry and hazelnuts. So anyway, we're trying to become self-reliant in our basic needs as much as we can, just as a homestead.
Then we want to have workshops here to teach what's involved with putting on solar on your house. How do you create raised beds and grow organic fruits and vegetables and so on? Because ultimately, what I feel about local economies is that local economies will, someday, I hope, help our civilization survive. Because as things break down from climate change, these long-distance supply chains are going to fail us. We saw that during the pandemic, how the corporate supply chains broke down during the pandemic. So, when you go to the grocery store, you see empty shelves. Meanwhile, the local farmers--at least this is what happened in the Philadelphia area--the local farmers started bringing food directly into town, as an example. So, all the restaurants had closed down. So, the farmers had to pivot and find out a way to sell directly to consumers, and that's what happened. And then use social media to reach people. Then, this particular farm that used to deliver to all the restaurants started showing up at designated places in the city. The corner of Fourth and Waverly, or whatever it happened to be, on certain days of the week. You'd order from the farmer, and you'd show up there and you get your box of food or your chicken or your vegetables and so on.
So, it was the local economies that rose to the occasion that kept people fed during this time, during the pandemic when supply chains broke down in different places. If you take climate change and all the weather chaos, that's going to affect long-distance transportation, and you take more COVID situations and more disease--and that's going to become even more rampant as climate change increases and terrorism and war. Right now, Ukraine is the breadbasket of the world for grains and so on. So, we need to localize in order to survive because the global supply chains are not sustainable.
Now, I'm sure there's people that argue with that. The large corporations think they are, but we're all like sitting ducks because we don't produce what we need to survive right now. We're dependent on these corporate supply chains to deliver us. We're just sitting here like baby birds or something with their mouths open and have been waiting for the corporations to feed us. We need to change that system. We need to become self-reliant in basic needs around the world, to re-localize. Not only that, that's how this huge inequality of wealth has come about because large corporations drain money from local economies and concentrate wealth and power. So, the more we can decentralize the economy and decentralize ownership, the more equal it will be in terms of income, there are a lot of benefits to local economies.
Another benefit of local economies is that it makes the business decision maker or the owner of that business closer to those affected by your business decisions. Now, with large corporations, those making decisions never personally see the results of those decisions. What are those decisions, and how do they affect the environment? How they affect a local economy, even the consumers themselves. There's such a long distance that they're not even aware of the workers and so on. But with smaller businesses, they're locally based. You see every day the people that are affected by your business decisions. Your customers, you see every day. Your employees, you see every day. The natural environment in which you work, you see every day. It's part of your life. Therefore, local entrepreneurs are more likely to make responsible business decisions having to do with where their waste goes or the quality of their products and those ingredients, they are healthy, and so on. So, I think that's another benefit.
Again, it comes down to relationships. You know, when it's your community that you're serving, you're more likely to do a good job and use responsible business practices. Another benefit is local character. The local stores are what give a town character. The local restaurants, the local shops and so on, especially if they sell locally made products that you can't get other places. There's nothing more depressing, I don't think, in going somewhere...some malls are just all corporate chains. Or you walk down the street, it's just one chain after another. You don't even know what city you're in, because it's all the same corporate stuff.
Cities that have strong local economies are much more vibrant. I mean, every state has the benefit of local businesses that make them unique and give them character. So, everything is so basic as human survival to joy and happiness in terms of knowing who bakes your bread, knowing who sews your clothes, and knowing who brews your beer. It's important for happiness and for building community, that these relationships between citizens and consumers and the producers are the basis of community life.
When globalization happened, it severed all these ties between rural and urban communities, because it used to be that rural and urban communities depended on each other for their survival. That the rural communities grew the food. They also harvested coal or whatever for energy and that the cities use those those products. So, there were these local supply chains that connected people. So, there was an understanding and a trust between urban and rural people that was severed by corporate globalization. So, that's another consequence of local economies, as we build them, is reestablishing these trusting relationships between urban and rural people to knit back together our society that's been so fractured. To me, it's just such an important movement, if you want to call it that, the local economy movement for so many reasons. So, that's why I dedicated so much of my time to that. So, it always makes me happy to talk about it.
-How You Can Support Your Local Economy
Ame Sanders 37:09
So, if people are listening, they're thinking, "Wow. I want to build a more inclusive and equitable and just economy in my pond." Where is a good place to start and are there some principles that you want to just take a minute and distill for us that we all should have in mind as we go about this work?
Judy Wicks 37:30
Now, the first thing would be to identify local businesses in your own community that you can support. One obvious thing is farmer’s markets. I think that it has become pretty big in most places, and that's a fairly recent phenomenon. Most places now, I hope, have farmer’s markets, but it's very important to support them and break our habits of just buying from corporations. So, there are the farmer’s markets, and there are local food producers. So. the farmers markets, some of them do have locally produced products too. It's not just all the raw fruits and vegetables and so on, but locally made things like ice cream or preserves or granola or bread if they're using local grains. So, finding out, is the place where I buy my bread buying from local grain farmers? Ask the bakers, and if they're not, suggest that: “could you buy from local grain farmers?” Maybe not every place has local grain farmers. I don't know.
But I guess as much as possible, we want to buy from businesses that already exist that are doing that. Another thing is that when people are looking for a career or business to start to think about looking at where there's gaps in the local economy, where the only choice...I mean, take ice cream for instance. If the only choice people have there is to buy ice cream that's sent in from far away, Ben and Jerry's from Vermont, or wherever, how about starting an ice cream home to yourself? Finding out where are the local dairy farmers? Can I use local fruits and vegetables in my ice cream? Our local ice cream companies come up with the most unique flavors because they use things as they come into season. So, I always encourage young entrepreneurs to think about that. Think about starting a local business that uses local supplies.
Same with clothing. Do you have any local clothing makers in your community? If you do go and visit them, see what you can buy there. I mean, a lot of times, the local manufacturing is more upscale, so it's more like a party dress or something like that. Now, I hope we get to the point where we're also locally manufacturing things like underwear and jeans. I always wanted to have a hemp jean company where it's a dirt-to-shirt jean company, or dirt-to-pants, so that the hemp, or if you're in the south, the cotton, whatever comes locally. So anyway, I guess the first step is to identify what's already there in your community that's made locally in the way of food and clothing.
Energy: where does your energy come from? What I always say to people is do a little analysis of your community. Where does my food come from? Where does my energy come from? Where does my water come from? Where does my waste go? To understand the local systems. A lot of times, things exist in one's community that you don't know about. So, I think that's really important is just to find out what's going on and support those things that are already happening. To start the businesses if you're an entrepreneur that are needed.
I think also legally, there are things that you can do. I mean, there are a lot of communities that provide tax breaks for local businesses, depending on what it is. I mean, the legalization of hemp was really important. That's a federal legalization, but there is a lot of legislation involved. We got involved with the legalization of marijuana to make sure that that is being done in a way that benefits communities of color that were so devastated by the war on drugs and that benefits small farmers. Because like everything else, the marijuana industry is being monopolized by large corporations, and as it's legalized, the large corporations get in there and monopolize the business. It's a very lucrative business that could be a game changer for small farmers. The small farmer is struggling to grow produce. If they had a little plot of marijuana, that's a very high return. They could really save the farm.
But what's happening is that these large corporations are planting these big plantations that are just owned by the corporations, and the small farmers aren't getting a chance. So, that's just one example of local legislation as a state legalizes marijuana to make sure that it's done in a way that will benefit local farmers and local entrepreneurs. That's not an easy thing to do, but I think that having laws that support local economies because it's often the other way around, and everything favors wealthy people and large corporations. So, we have to fight back legislatively to have laws that support small economies instead of just supporting large corporations. We need to break up monopolies in the way that we used to, but there's so much concentration.
There's something like seven large corporations that control the majority of the food system. Nestle's and Unilever and Kellogg's and so on. It's a really big problem, and I don't think enough people are aware of it, of how much of our lives are controlled by corporations, and how, eventually, when climate change really hits the fan, that's going to become a matter of survival. We need to be working now to build up local self-reliance and our basic needs so that when things get rough with climate change that our future generations--I don't think that's going to happen in my lifetime, but what I'm working for is that my children and my grandchildren will be able to survive if they have local economies can support them with the basic needs.
-Conclusion and Summary
Ame Sanders 42:56
Judy Wicks, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your life's work and your experiences. Judy, you've given us some great things to think about as we think about the larger issues that we face around the world, but also in our own pond. We got a lot more than just a discussion about Circle of Aunts and Uncles, even though that's so important in your local community. Thank you so much for sharing all this with us today,
Judy Wicks 43:21
You're welcome. It was fun talking with you. Ame.
Ame Sanders 43:28
My interview with Judy Wicks reminded me that we can each start positively impacting our community wherever we find ourselves. If we follow Judy's inspiration, we can start small but keep asking ourselves, how can we do more? How can our work have more impact? For Judy, it led her to establish and grow a national network in the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, or BALLE. But talking to her later in her career and life reminded me that often, our ambitions are influenced by the season of our life. Sometimes, we want to save the world, but sometimes, we just want to save the pond in our own backyard.
Judy told us that there's no such thing as one sustainable business, no matter how good. It takes a system, an ecosystem, a web of interconnected people and organizations working together. So, it isn't surprising that one thread running throughout Judy's life and work is that of relationships. Of recognizing the importance of building, nurturing, and sustaining trusting relationships across her community and beyond.
Most importantly, Judy reminds us that community building is a team sport, and that joining hands and collaborating with our neighbors and colleagues not only makes the work easier, but also makes it better, more enjoyable, and more lasting.
This has been the State of Inclusion podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, the best compliment for our work is your willingness to share the podcast or discuss these ideas with others.
If you'd like to hear more about the practice of building an inclusive and equitable community, head over to theinclusivecommunity.com and sign up for our newsletter. Also, feel free to leave us a review or reach out. We'd love to hear from you.
Thanks so much for listening and join us again next time.
CONTRIBUTORS
Guest: Judy Wicks
Host: Ame Sanders
Social Media and Marketing Coordinator: Kayla Nelson
Podcast Coordinator: Emma Winiski
Sound: FAROUT Media