Local Economy

Nourishing The Bioregional Economy: Essential Resources

January 15, 2026 Richard Heinberg, Resilience. Create! Bioregions, Energy, Food and Agriculture, Local Economy

In this piece, I provide a brief overview of what people can do, and are doing, to nourish bioregional economies. There are plenty of examples—far more than can be named here, and certainly more than I’m aware of (I’m just sharing what I’ve personally found valuable; if you know of an important resource that I’ve missed, please add it in the comments). After I mention a few general resources, I’ll focus on some of the more relevant publications and organizations in each of six broad and essential areas: food, money, energy, communication, culture, and governance.

Ireland: Breaking New Ground For The Local Food Movement

January 8, 2026 Oliver Moore, Resilience. Create! Farming, Food Sovereignty, Ireland, Local Economy

Feeding Ourselves is a community of practice in Ireland (CoP) – an organised but informal network of food system animators from production to consumption and all the elements in between – which has been running for some years. Initially it was just a gathering, one that ARC has partnered with many times (e.g. last year’s here). Now, the CoP runs webinars, newsletters and organises events to build its knowledge and action base. Its most recent event was a big step forward for the good food good farming movement in Ireland.

Crowdfunded Real Estate Projects Bring In Community Investors

January 7, 2026 Sandra Larson, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Community Ownership, Crowdfunding, Local Economy, Real Estate

West Oakland’s 7th Street was historically home to a bustling Black business corridor known as the “Harlem of the West.” During the day, it served customers looking for grocery stores, pharmacies, ice cream parlors, and lunch spots. At night it had a legendary blues music scene that flourished from the 1930s through the 1960s. One of that scene’s anchors was Esther’s Orbit Room, hosting the likes of T-Bone Walker, Ike and Tina Turner, Etta James, and many other well-known acts in its heyday. In the second half of the 20th century, however, the thriving district suffered waves of economic decline, displacement and fragmentation, with the disappearance of wartime jobs and the construction of new freeways and BART tracks cutting right through the neighborhood, leaving a string of vacant or underused properties.

Gift Economies And Cultural Commons

January 1, 2026 David Bollier. Create! Anti-capitalism, Capitalism, Gift economy, Local Economy

In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social relationships wrought by gifts and their karmic ramifications, all of which Hyde brought vividly into view. Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ famous 1923 book on gift-exchange, Hyde took the idea much further, showing how gift exchange is a ubiquitous social phenomenon for forging and maintaining reciprocal relationships.

Bronx Project Sets New Standard For Community-Controlled Development

December 10, 2025 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Organize! Local Economy, New York City (NYC), Participatory Democracy, Urban Planning

Located in the Kingsbridge Heights section of the Bronx, the 570,000 square-foot Kingsbridge Armory was said to be the largest armory in the world when first completed in 1917. Above its columnless, 180,000 square-foot main drill hall, the vaulted ceiling peaks at around 120 feet. Two 140-foot tall headhouse towers flank the main entrance on Kingsbridge Road, giving the building its castle-like appearance. After the National Guard vacated the armory in 1994, the building reverted to city ownership two years later, and has sat mostly vacant ever since.

Who Really Pays For Your Cheap Flight?

December 8, 2025 Rachelle Wilson Tollemar, Resilience. Educate! Air Travel, Environment, Local Economy, Tourism

In September 2025, I log into social media. My algorithm advertises a $137 Iberia Airlines flight from the US to Spain. The fare is crazy cheap. I can’t even fly to visit my family within the continental US for $137. I know I’m not the only one whose hand is twitching to click. But $137 is also conspicuously cheap. It is an obvious effort to keep encouraging international travel (and capital) in the turbulent contrails of a Spanish summer boiling hot with both a record number of foreign tourists and domestic-led anti-tourism movements. Sitting in the middle of this stand-off are these mass cheap flights, like those of Iberia, that are funding, fueling, and accelerating profound consequences on the peninsula.

Navigating Collapse Together: Toward Regenerative Public Life

December 4, 2025 Nicole Negowetti, Resilience. Strategize! climate crisis, Ecological Collapse, Local Economy, Transformation

How does change actually happen? This question has followed me across every chapter of my life, from political science and philosophy studies, to graduate work in peacebuilding, into law and food policy, and now into conversations about the polycrisis and metacrisis. Across these settings, I have worked at many scales, always searching for where transformation truly takes root. In the first essay in this series, I explored how food and place reveal the limits of our political binaries. In the second, I examined resistance as an expression of kinship rather than opposition.

In The Year Of The Cooperative, Rural Grocers Find Power In Partnership

October 14, 2025 Jill Dutton, The Packer. Create! Cooperatives, Food and Agriculture, Food Sovereignty, Grocery Stores, Local Economy

As 2025 marks the United Nations’ International Year of Cooperatives, communities across the U.S. are spotlighting how cooperative models can sustain local economies and strengthen food systems. That mission was front and center during a recent Rural Grocery Initiative webinar that unveiled findings from a two-year project on local sourcing in rural grocery stores. Led by Rial Carver, program director for RGI at Kansas State University, the project was designed to identify innovative ways to help small-town grocers connect with local producers — and, in doing so, keep grocery access alive in communities often bypassed by large retail chains. “Rural grocery stores are anchor institutions,” Carver says in an RGI webinar. “Without them, communities lose out on economic, health and cultural benefits.”

Digital Tools Fuel The Rise Of New ‘Time Exchange’ Solidarity Economies

September 18, 2025 Ella Fassler, Truthout. Create! Alternative Currency, Local Economy, Solidarity Economy, Time Banks

In Kent, Ohio, older white women and immigrant families are forging unexpected connections through a time exchange network. Through time exchanges — sometimes called time banking — members earn time credits by helping others, then redeem them when they need assistance themselves. It’s not barter, or charity; time banking emphasizes reciprocal exchange, recognizing that everyone has something to offer, and that we all need help sometimes. “The time bank usually has a need for healthy young men,” laughed Dawn Albright, president of the Kent Community Time Bank’s board of directors. “I would say, 70 percent of the members are older women.” Younger immigrant members of the time bank often offer assistance with household tasks, like carrying heavy things up the stairs.

Rural Europe Takes Action: Food System Lessons From Marburg

September 17, 2025 ARC2020 Staff, Resilience. Create! Europe, Food Security, Food Sovereignty, Local Economy

Summer’s flowers hang dried in neat bunches around the workshop room of the Ecological Folk High School in Grzybów, as changemakers from France, Germany and Poland gather in the early days of winter 2024. What can rural communities do in the face of the ecological, social and economic crises society faces today, and what role can cross-border exchange between local actors play? These questions marked the coming together of what we have come to call the rural Weimar triangle, a grassroots counterpart – and perhaps challenge to – the high-level diplomatic agreement between the governments of these three countries. Villages, towns and cities, after all, have a lot to offer in response to today’s global challenges.

It’s Time For Community Incubators

August 28, 2025 Elias Crim, Solidarity Hall. Create! Community Incubator, Community organizing, Jobs, Local Economy

Let’s imagine something new has arrived in the neighborhood—a community incubator. It’s a little like a free health club, if you take health in the broadest sense—i.e., including social and economic health. You could think of the incubator as working like a golden funnel turned on its side. It’s wide-open at one end (which most business incubators are not really) but it channels and directs the flow to particular places—like toward a good job. Or even a new business you co-own. The logical home for a program like this is a community hub. You probably know this kind of place. It’s not a community center with yoga classes and senior swimming groups. An authentic community hub feels grassroots-y and kinda political.

A Makerspace Revitalizes Lives, Small Businesses And A Neighborhood

July 22, 2025 Ilana Preuss, Next City. Create! Atlanta, Collective, entrepreneurship, Local Economy

The scent of sawdust greets Gabriella Mooney as she walks through the doors of MASS Collective, heading for an office in the back. It’s a busy weeknight, and Julia Hill – a local master welder, artist and sculptor – is showing a group of five apprentices the tools for MIG welding. At Hill’s cue, they pull down their masks, and the welding torch lights up the room with sparks. As Mooney walks farther into the shop, she hears the grind of the CNC machine from another class of 10 people and sees several young adults refining their creations with the woodshop sander. This space has been like a second home for Mooney, who over the past decade has led the charge to create a neighborhood makerspace and apprenticeship program in downtown Atlanta.

Unpacking The Localism Manifesto: Solving Our Crises From The Bottom Up

July 14, 2025 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. Featured Campaign, Podcast - Clearing The FOG Democracy, Governance, Local Economy, popular power, Sustainability

The United States is a failing country. Political leaders at all levels have failed to effectively solve the many crises we face such as the climate crisis, economic insecurity and growing inequality, and the need for affordable housing, education, and health care, and more. Action at the local level, where people have the most control, offers a pathway forward. Clearing the FOG speaks with Michael Shuman, author of A Localism Manifesto, which can be found at The Main Street Journal. Shuman explains how decentralized action works, the principles involved, and how it offers a radical new politics that can heal the current polarization of our society.

This Baltimore Food Incubator Is A Local Economic Engine

July 13, 2025 Ilana Preuss, Next City. Create! Baltimore, entrepreneurship, Jobs, Local Economy

Walking up the stone steps to MFG Toffee & Bark Company a few days ahead of the shop’s grand opening in Baltimore’s Little Italy, chef Sylva Lin inhales the scent of sugar and espresso coming from the kitchen. She’s dropping by to see the fruit of her efforts incubating local food businesses out of Culinary Architecture, the project she launched a decade ago. After a successful career in catering and professional kitchens, Lin’s entrepreneurial spirit was hungry to create a space that would benefit her neighborhood in Baltimore. She didn’t just want to offer interesting foods. She wanted to connect with neighbors, create good-paying jobs and draw foot traffic to support other businesses on the block.

A Localism Manifesto

July 10, 2025 Michael Shuman, The Main Street Journal. Create! Collective Wisdom, Local Economy, Localism, New Economy

Planet Earth is experiencing a five-alarm emergency, yet our political systems are paralyzed and incapable of responding. Unprecedented hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, and other climate disasters are overwhelming us. Inequality is at a historic high, with 3,000 billionaires shaping our political systems and civil societies. Our once open and vibrant democracies are mutating into dictatorships. Our economies, which were remarkably stable after World War II, continually careen between uncontrolled inflation and unemployment. The list of seemingly insoluble national and global problems is growing.

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