Local Economy

Rethinking The Farm Bill: Supporting Farmers Close To Home

May 7, 2026 Emma Nicolas and Jessica Cusworth, Farm Action. Create! Farming, Food and Agriculture, Food Security, Local Economy

America’s food system isn’t set up to get food from independent farmers to their communities. Decades of consolidation and underinvestment have left farmers and consumers reliant on long, vulnerable supply chains controlled by a few companies. But the collapse of local and regional food systems wasn’t inevitable—it was the result of deliberate choices, and people are working to change it. We sat down with Benji Ballmer, co-founder of Yellowbird Foodshed in Mount Vernon, Ohio, to discuss what it takes to reconnect farmers with their communities.

Reversing Downtown Decline In A Small South Dakota Town

May 6, 2026 Bart Pfankuch, Next City. Create! Local Economy, Small Businesses, South Dakota, Urban Design

This small eastern South Dakota town is well known for its deep agricultural roots, its popular Fourth of July celebration and its regionally famous bakery specializing in bi-colored “zebra donuts.” But now, Centerville has a new claim to fame: The town of about 900 people located 40 miles southwest of Sioux Falls has become known as a statewide leader in downtown redevelopment. The successful effort to buck the trend of declining Main Street districts in small South Dakota towns has been fueled in part by a progressive approach to development by local leaders and a sense of entrepreneurship by local business owners.

North Philly Has A New Option To Invest In Its Future

March 31, 2026 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! Banking, Credit Union, Local Economy, Philadelphia, Underbanked

Yazmin Auli’s neighbors in North Philly were the first to believe in El Coqui Panaderia y Reposteria. After almost two decades, 28 employees hired and millions of loaves of pan sobao, Auli is excited to be investing back into that same community. Literally. In December, Auli opened up new accounts for herself and for her bakery at Finanta Credit Union, which had just opened its first branch in Philly just a five minute drive from El Coqui’s location at the Harrowgate Plaza shopping center. She’s moving the bakery’s everyday banking out of the big bank that’s been charging her for daily operations like making change.

Small-Scale Supply Chains In Action

March 1, 2026 Zoe Gilbertson, Resilience. Create!, Podcast – WTF is Going on in Latin America & the Caribbean Cooperatives, Local Economy, Supply Chain, Sustainability

Re-thinking governance requires changing how we organise, share knowledge, and develop structures emphasising value beyond the monetary. Systems that encourage cooperation require more social input but have many long-term and wide-reaching benefits. Cooperatives provide an enterprise container that can embody agroecological values such as social and ecological care. Due to the complexities of organising complex fashion supply chains, textile cooperatives are a rare form of business around the globe. However, we can find some inspiring examples in France and Spain.

Top Ten Local Policies For 2026

February 27, 2026 Michael Shuman, The Main Street Journal. Create! Green Transition, Local Economy, Local Investment, Sustainability

Last month, I circulated a list of the top ten policies that state governments could enact to support local business and local economies. Some of you wanted me to repeat this exercise for local governments, where the ability to enact law is more limited, but there’s also the possibility of moving faster. Most of my suggestions below really suggest how your community ought to carry out economic development (ED), which sometimes is done by your municipality and sometimes by an independent agency. The starting place for most of our readers is to compare this list with what purports to be economic development in your community right now. Note the gaps—I doubt you’ll find more than one or two of my items being taken seriously—and push for change.

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.

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