Local Business & Finance
Agrarian Trust
USA
Across the United States – where one acre of farmland is lost to development every minute – young farmers are having an increasingly hard time finding affordable land. Agrarian Trust works to come up with various unique ‘commons-based’ approaches to land ownership to strengthen local and regional food and farm economies. In doing so, they’re able to permanently protect farmland for sustainable agriculture and preserve its affordability for new and disadvantaged farmers in communities across the country. Learn more at www.agrariantrust.org.
Banco Palmas
Brazil
This community development bank in Fortaleza, Brazil is governed and managed by local residents, for local needs. Their founding mission was to help revitalize the local economy, create badly needed jobs, and increase the collective self-reliance of the financially disadvantaged Palmeira district where the bank is located.
To learn more, visit Banco Palmas’ website (in Portuguese), or its entries on Wikipedia and the P2P Wiki.
http://www.institutobancopalmas.org/
Boston Ujima Project
USA
The Boston Ujima Project is a local economic alliance in the city of Boston, comprised of working-class residents, small businesses, and grassroots organizations, all devoted to challenging poverty and building a local ‘people’s economy’ to meet their own needs. They’ve created a local business alliance and directory, a jobs board, and an investment pool, and their plans for the future are both far-ranging and ambitious. Check them out at https://www.ujimaboston.com/.
Building A Local Economy (BALE)
USA
BALE engages in a number of grassroots community localization initiatives from their home base in the White River watershed of Vermont. The overarching goal of these efforts is “to build appropriately scaled solutions from the ground up, taking back, as much as possible, our economy, our culture, and our democratic instruments by re-injecting humanity and authentic relationships into all that we do.” Projects include The Commons @ BALE (a community space open to all and used most evenings of the year), a community solar initiative, a local investment club, a documentary film series, and a Locally Grown Guide to local businesses. Learn about these projects and more at https://balevt.org.
California FarmLink
USA
Established in 1999, California FarmLink supports a diverse range of beginning limited-resource and immigrant sustainable farmers. They work across the state of California, with a particular focus on central agriculture regions, to help these farmers find land, develop sound lease agreements, partner with landowners to purchase farms or transition farms to the next generation, participate in training on financial and business management, and access capital through FarmLink’s loan program and other lenders. Learn more at California FarmLink’s website.
Photo by Steve Corey (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
http://www.californiafarmlink.org/index.php