Community gardens combine the multiple physical and psychological benefits of gardening with another vital element of well-being: connecting with other people. Community gardens not only bring people together in meaningful land-based work and boost food and nutrition security, they also beautify urban spaces, provide ecological niches for wildlife, and create open green spaces that cities desperately need. With secure tenure through mechanisms like land trusts, community gardens can even withstand the pressures of real estate development, ensuring that these green spaces can persists into the future.

Take action

• Find a community garden with the American Community Gardens Association's map of Gardens (US and Canada), the UK government's site Apply for an Allotment (England and Wales), Community Gardens Australia's map (Australia), or by contacting your local government or gardening society.
• Start a community garden with Community Gardening's How to Start a Community Garden: A Comprehensive Guide and the many valuable resources from Community Gardens Australia.
• Work together with your local government to find land for community gardens with ChangeLab Solutions' guide Dig, Eat, and Be Healthy: A Guide to Growing Food on Public Property.
• Consider collectivizing the plots of your community garden so that anyone can volunteer and receive a share of the harvest. 
• Create a movement to turn public spaces all over town into gardens by joining or starting a chapter of the Incredible Edible Network in the UK.

Get inspired

• Mountain Roots Food Project in Colorado, US, runs two collaborative community gardens where members work together to grow food and share the harvest.
• Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin, Germany, is built from mobile container gardens. Volunteers periodically use the containers to create pop up gardens on vacant land to demonstrate the potential of these spaces for new community gardens.
• The Consumers' Association of Penang Urban Farm in Penang, Malaysia, transformed an abandoned car park into a thriving community garden, using indigenous farming techniques.
• Through the Incredible Edible initiative, the UK town of Todmorden has turned public spaces into gardens all over the town, and allows anyone to harvest food.
• Nuestras Raíces in Holyoke, US, is an immigrant-founded urban agriculture organization managing 14 community gardens as well as an urban farm.

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Multiply the benefits of buying locally by creating a campaign to encourage local residents and visitors to support independently-owned shops and artisans.

Take action

• Start a "buy local" campaign with Totally Locally's comprehensive Totally Locally Town Kit. The kit includes templates for posters, bag stuffers, badges, postcards, press releases and more, plus step-by-step advice for a successful campaign. It is UK-based, but applicable in any English-speaking country.
• This factsheet produced by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance tells you How to Start a Buy Local Campaign, including tips on creating a local business alliance.
• Improve existing campaigns with the American Independent Business Alliance's guide to best practices, Building "Buy Local" Campaigns that Shift Culture and Spending.
• Find an existing 'buy local' initiative or group through the network members of the American Independent Business Alliance's list of Members (US) and Totally Locally's list of Totally Locally Towns (UK), and Go Local First (Australia).

Get inspired

• Teenagers in the US state of South Dakota launched the Miner County Buy Local campaign, encouraging residents to spend 10% more at local businesses. In the following year, money spent locally increased by $15 million.
• The Buy Fresh, Buy Local campaign in the US state of Iowa has been around a while: it was launched by the University of Northern Iowa in 2003. It's also very successful: the dollar volume of purchases by retailers that partner with the program has grown by at least 10-fold since its start.

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One of the easiest steps you can take to help your local economy is to move your bank account from a large national bank to a community financial institution: a local bank or credit union focused specifically on supporting local businesses and citizens. The collective impact of millions of people transferring assets from multinational to local institutions would significantly shift the dynamic of the global financial system.

Take action

• Find a credit union near you with the World Council of Credit Unions' map Our Global Networks. We encourage you to choose smaller, locally based and rooted credit unions if possible.
• Learn more about why and how to move your money with Green America's Community Investing Guide (US).
• Organize a local move-your-money campaign with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's resource list Tools for Starting a Local Move Your Money Campaign.
• Find a community bank near you with the directories on Find a Better Bank (US) and the Community Savings Bank Association (UK).
• Compare banks and credit unions in your area based on a number of local impact metrics with Banklocal.info (US).
• Find a bank that offers environmentally and socially-responsible services through the Global Alliance for Banking on Values' Members map. Note: some of the member banks are national in scope.

Get inspired

• Triodos Bank in the UK focuses on financing social, cultural, and environmental initiatives such as organic farming, childcare facilities, small businesses, and renewable energy projects.
• The Ecology Building Society in the UK offers savings accounts and mortgages for co-housing, renovations, and other sustainable construction projects.
• Maine Harvest Federal Credit Union is the only financial institution in the US that focuses its loans on growing a healthy local food system.
• The Clean Energy Federal Credit Union in the US state of Colorado focuses on financing small-scale renewable energy projects.

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Private corporations own most of the world’s electricity infrastructure, which means local governments and citizens have only limited control over their utilities. Taking back ownership creates the conditions for local, democratic decision-making around infrastructure placement, availability, pricing, and power sources.

Take action

• Form a publicly-owned electric power provider with The American Public Power Association's guide Public Power for Your Community, which includes case studies (US).
• Pair this action with other campaigns and policies for energy democracy by visiting our Advocate for energy democracy page in this guide.

Get inspired

• The German community group Our Hamburg, Our Grid, Germany ousted multinational energy giant Vattenfall and replaced it with a local power utility.
• The residents of Feldheim, Germany, funded and built their own electrical grid powered by 100% renewable energy after the utility company refused to sell or lease its grid to the village.

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Tool libraries offer access to a wide variety of specialty tools, recreation and outdoor equipment, kitchen gadgets, and more – without contributing to an individualist, wasteful and energy-intensive throwaway consumer economy. Tool libraries are also known as lending libraries or libraries of things.

Take action

• Find a nearby tool library with Local Tools' worldwide map Find Your Local Tool Lending Library.
• Check your local public library: many host small libraries of things in addition to books.
• Start a new tool library with Share Starter's kit Start a Tool Library or Library of Things, with tools and templates for nonprofits, social ventures, and public libraries. 
• Make use of Shareable's Library of Things Toolkit, a "comprehensive guide to starting (and growing) a sharing hub in your community."
• In the US, connect with the Tool Library Alliance, which unites tool libraries across the country to "foster community resilience, increase sustainability, and build a culture of generosity through the sharing of tools, skills, and knowledge."
• If you have tools you rarely or no longer use, donate them to a local tool library.

Get inspired

• The Thingery movement in Vancouver, Canada is a growing set of community-owned libraries of things housed in modified, self-service shipping containers.
• Students at Edventure Frome in the UK started SHARE:Frome, which rents more than 1000 items at a low cost.
• The Brisbane Tool Library in Australia lends tools and actively advocates for reducing consumerism in Brisbane and beyond.
• The article The library of things: could borrowing everything from drills to disco balls cut waste and save money? profiles a number of successful, inspiring tool lending libraries across the world.

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Citizens' assemblies (or juries) are one method of direct democracy. They involve a randomly selected group of local residents who deliberate on key issues and generate policy recommendations. Citizens' assemblies are being designed and implemented in many places to address urgent issues like the climate emergency. 

Take action

• Citizens’ Assemblies: Guide to Democracy that Works is a comprehensive guide to the rationale, organization and impacts of citizens’ assemblies.
• Learn about citizens’ climate assemblies and juries and how to design, facilitate and implement them with the Extinction Rebellion Guide to Citizens’ Assemblies for activists.
• UK-based Shared Future created Climate Assemblies and Juries, a guide specifically aimed at local governments.  
• Another UK-based guide for local governments on running a citizens' assembly was created by the Royal Society for the Arts and several British ministries.
• For a deep dive into the why and how of citizens’ assemblies – both in general and as applied to the climate crisis – check out this amazing set of resources – books, articles, reports, videos, websites and podcasts – curated by Extinction Rebellion NYC, and this set by Extinction Rebellion UK.
   

  Get inspired

• The Leeds (UK) Climate Change Citizens’ Jury met in 2019 and developed a set of robust recommendations to the Leeds city council.
• Scotland's Climate assembly met to discuss "How should Scotland change to tackle the climate emergency in an effective and fair way?" The final report identified 80 bold climate policy actions Scotland could take.
• The UK Climate Assembly was formed of "100+ people from all walks of life and shades of opinion" who met over six weekends to discuss the UK's climate goals. Their report was issued in September 2020.

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Caring for our local ecosystems rests on deep knowledge of the rhythms of the seasons, indicators of health or degradation, the state of the water and the other species that call it home. Learn more about your home environment, form community around ecological literacy, and address the planetary crisis with the actions below.

Take action

• Gain a baseline understanding of what you know about your local ecology, and how to deepen your understanding, with the Bioregional Awareness Quiz published by Watershed Commons.
• Visit a local cultural heritage center or history museum to learn about traditional tools and lifeways in your region, keeping in mind that history is usually written by the privileged.
• Talk to your grandparents or other elders in your community about traditional ecological knowledge both where you live, and where they are from (if different).
• Learn how to steward your local environment from locals. Native plant nursery owners, herbalists, environmental educators, and agricultural education centers are good starting points.
• Record the stories and local ecological knowledge held by these elders and community leaders, with their enthusiastic consent. The Oral History Toolkit from the Claremont Colleges offers a good primer on conducting interviews.
• Document knowledge and folklore in other creative ways: for example, articles, visual journaling, filmmaking, songwriting, developing localized teaching modules, and more.
• Explore biocultural diversity mapping, measurement, documentation, policy, and education with the Biocultural Diversity Toolkit and Biocultural Diversity Education Initiative by Terralingua.
• In North America, learn traditional skills by connecting with the Folkschool Alliance network of learning centers.
• Teach children to engage with local ecosystems by downloading a free copy of Shelburne Farm's Cultivating Joy & Wonder: Educating for Sustainability in Early Childhood Through Nature, Food, and Community, which includes over 75 facilitated sustainability learning experiences.

Get inspired

• Two friends in Indonesia took off on the adventure of a lifetime traveling their homeland by motorbike and recording 55 videos of traditional local practices. Watch their Ekspedisi Indonesia Biru series (in Indonesian) on YouTube.
• The Honey Bee Network in India organizes walks among villages documenting grassroots innovations, folklore, and medicinal plant use. Over more than three decades, the network has documented more than 100,000 ideas, shared in quarterly newsletters in eight languages, on the Honey Bee website, and on the United Nations Grassroots Innovation Database.
• The Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in Canada offers accredited post-secondary courses in Indigenous land-based studies and self-determination, in addition to videos, articles, toolkits, and public speaker series on those themes.
• The people of Lauru in the Solomon Islands, with support from TerraCircle in Australia, published the book The Forest Foods of Lauru to document their traditional food gathering and cooking practices for their children.
• The Chesapeake Bay Foundation runs the Smith Island Environmental Education Center in Maryland, USA, offering multi-day excursions to connect children across the state with the ecology and traditional maritime culture of the Chesapeake Bay.
• Cultural Survival shares articles about nine initiatives by traditional cultures to strengthen and share their traditional ecological knowledge, from radio shows to schools, festivals to music classes, in the magazine issue Indigenous Education: Safeguarding our Knowledge.

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