Individuals

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 Democracy Collaborative's Community Garden Start-Up Guide (US) 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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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' map Find Members. 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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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. 
• 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 this guide to climate assemblies, 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?" They have created an interim report.
• 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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One of the best ways to participate in the local food movement is to grow some of your own. Doing so will connect you more closely to the place you live – the soil, the seasons, the sun, the rain, and even the wildlife, from beneficial pollinators to garden pests.

Get started

• A Crop-by-Crop Guide to Growing Organic Vegetables and Fruits by Mother Earth News explains how to plant, when to plant, best harvest practices, how to save seeds, and how to deal with common pests and diseases naturally for a wide range of vegetables and fruits. Primarily for use in temperate climates.
• Those in tropical climates can learn about, design and implement a permaculture garden with the help of Volume 2: House and Garden of The Tropical Permaculture Guidebook by Permatil Global.
  Back to Earth: Composting for Various Contexts
• by Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, is a comprehensive guide to various composting techniques and approaches, focusing especially on tropical Asia but widely applicable.
• Learn to grow your own food and live more sustainably with these free online permaculture courses from #freepermaculture, and free and low-cost courses by and for women, by the Permaculture Women's Guild.
• If you live in an apartment or other space without access to a garden, check out these gardening tips for renters and city dwellers by the Permaculture Women's Guild.

Get inspired

• Writer Fran Sorin's blog post gives you 13 Reasons Why Gardening is Good for Your Health. Among other effects, gardening reduces the likelihood you'll have a stroke, osteoporosis, and dementia. Sorin's focus is on growing ornamentals; growing food greatly expands the benefits of gardening.

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Lawns of grass are monocultures that consume tremendous quantities of water and energy (predominantly fossil fuel-powered equipment) to maintain, and are often treated with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. They diminish biodiversity and harm environmental health. If you have a lawn - no matter how small or how shady it is, or how busy you are - you can have a source of fresh, local food right in your backyard, and nurture biodiversity at the same time, by converting it to a food garden. Check out these resources to transform your lawn into a productive ecological haven and abundant source of hyper-local food.

Take action

• Learn how to start transforming your lawn with Food Not Lawns' free ebook Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community. Post a picture of your lawn-to-food project, and get advice on Food Not Lawns Facebook page. For a summary version by author Heather Jo Flores, see this guide at Permaculture Women Magazine.
• Connect with neighbors transforming their lawns into gardens with the Food is Free Project's 350+ chapters worldwide.
• No chapter near you yet? Start one with their guide How to Start a Food is Free Project.
• Create vibrant polycultures in your home garden with Amy Stross' book The Suburban Micro-Farm and David Holmgren's book Retrosuburbia.

Get inspired

• At JWR Farm in Maryland in the US, Alan Black converted his 2-acre suburban lawn into a vegetable farm and community music venue with monthly gatherings.
• At the Ron Finley Project in Los Angeles in the US, Ron Finley's movement for food sovereignty begins in his own lush urban backyard garden.
• At New World Growers in Tampa in the US, Mike Chaney transformed his yard into a food forest and community space in just under a year.

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Farmland matching programs unite farmers looking for stable, long-term access to land, and landowners who have farmland sitting idle, or who wish to donate their land to leave a legacy for future farmers.

Take action

• In the US, connect with one of these five groups working to help new farmers access land.
• Find an existing land access and farmland matching program. In the US, check out Agrarian Trust's Resources List, the National Young Farmers Coalition's Land Access resources, and the Find Farmland and Farm Link tools from American Farmland Trust. In Canada, see the Young Agrarians' Finding Farmland & Land Access Tools. In the UK, support the Landworkers' Alliance New Entrants campaign, and in Europe, connect with Access to Land’s Member Organizations and read its handbook, Europe's New Farmers: Innovative Ways to Enter Farming and Access Land.
• Elsewhere, contact a local land access organization, land-matching program, university agricultural extension, La Via Campesina chapter, or your local government to find programs near you.
• To find farmland owned by a community land trust, see Finding Farmland: A Farmer’s Guide to Working with Land Trusts, by the National Young Farmers Coalition (US).
• Set up a new land access program In Europe with Access to Land's handbook A guide for setting up a land initiative and developing a land strategy.
• Develop a farmer-landowner partnership with guidance from Fresh Start Land Enterprise's Land Partnerships Handbook.
• Consider donating land to a land access organization or community land trust. In the UK, donate land to the Ecological Land Cooperative which will protect it "for ecological agriculture in perpetuity." In the US, if you own farmland, consider gifting it to the Agrarian Commons program of Agrarian Trust, or connect with the American Farmland Trust's national Farm Legacy initiative, which "works to ensure that land remains in farming as it transitions to the next generation, while improving access to land for new farmers."
• Work with your local government and nonprofits to provide farmers with leased land. This is the model employed by the nonprofit Intervale Center, which owns, leases, and manages 350 acres near the city of Burlington, Vermont in the US, and subleases land to ten or more independently owned farms.

Get inspired

• The Young Agrarians land-matching program in British Columbia, Canada, has made 109 matches so far, representing almost 6,000 acres of land.
• Terre de Liens in France is "a civic organization which promotes land preservation and facilitates access to farmland for organic and peasant farmers in France" and has so far connected 320 farmers with land.
• Agrarian Trust in the US has stewarded numerous successful land transfers for aspiring farmers through its Agrarian Commons program, including in Maine, West Virginia, and New Hampshire.
• The American Farmland Trust's Farm Legacy Stories of Success document numerous cases of retiring farmers transferring their farms to the trust to keep it in farming and save it from development.

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Getting into small-scale agroecological farming can be a daunting process. Thankfully, many organizations facilitate this process through trainings, apprenticeships, and help from supportive networks of experienced peers and mentors.

Get started

• Make use of the many resources for new small farmers from the Landworkers' Alliance (UK), including Mentoring by experienced practitioners, the Farm Start Network, and the Agroecology Training and Exchange Network.
• In the UK, the guide Access to Land: Working with Local Authorities by Shared Assets will help you access land for your community food enterprise.
• In Europe, connect with an organization working on access to land for agroecological farming through the Access to Land network's Directory.
• In the US, the guide How to Start a Farm: Your Complete Guide to Success from BPlans.com lists the steps needed to start a farm. Much of the focus is on the financial side – getting financing, identifying markets, writing a business plan, etc. – but more practical matters are also discussed.
• In Canada, find farm apprenticeships, trainings, networking opportunities and more through Young Agrarians.
• The Small Farmer's Journal features essays by and about people who are farming on a small scale, mostly in the US and Canada. Much of the focus is on how to use, maintain, and repair old animal-powered farm equipment, and how to care for draft animals.

Get inspired

• The short film Future Farmers in Europe focuses on eight young farmers who have returned to the land in France, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands.
• This 5-minute film Back to the Land: the Organic Movement in China profiles Zhang Yuqiu, a young woman who left a job in the city to start her own organic farm just outside Beijing.
• The Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture (MESA), based in the US and internationally, is a cross-cultural network of farmers, elders, and educators, who share ancestral knowledge and practical skills with each other to build ecologically sound food systems. Their on-site training program in Oakland, California helps immigrants, refugees, and former prisoners who aspire to be farmers.
• Bristol Food Producers in the UK provides mentorship for aspiring young farmers in the area, through a land matching program, skills development courses, access to markets, and events for socializing and networking.
• NEED-Myanmar in Yangon, Myanmar operates the Eco Village Farm School, a practical school for agricultural training focused on young farmers and a model for rural resilience.

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Placing land in a community or conservation land trust, agrarian commons, or community-managed farm is a good way to preserve farmland, open space, and community control over land for generations to come.

Get started

• Download the many tools in the Community Land Trust Toolkit provided by the Schumacher Center for New Economics (US). The materials include legal documents used to set up existing land trusts that preserve land for farming, affordable housing, and green building.
• For a deep dive into the theory and practice of creating a community land trust, download Starting a Community Land Trust: Organizational and Operational Choices by the Democracy Collaborative (US). Although first published in 2007, it is still an excellent and thorough guide.
• The Center for Agriculture & Food Systems (US) created this Guide to Creating an Agrarian Commons, a model of land stewardship and access that allows for community ownership of farmland.
• Check out this Beginning Farmers' Guide to Conservation Easements and support the Protecting Farmland program of the American Farmland Trust (US).
• The Community Land Trust Handbook by the National CLT Network provides step-by-step instructions for setting up a community land trust in the UK.
• For those in Europe hoping to set up a land trust, use this guide from Access to Land, a network of European NGOs: Agroecological Farming: A guide for setting up a land initiative and developing a land strategy.
• Organize a campaign to persuade your local government to allocate funds for land trusts. This Campaign Toolkit from the Trust for Public Land can help you get started.
• If you own land, consider donating it to a land access organization or community land trust. In the UK, donate land to the Ecological Land Cooperative which will protect it "for ecological agriculture in perpetuity." If you own farmland in the US, consider gifting it to the Agrarian Commons program of Agrarian Trust.

Get inspired

• The Little Jubba Central Maine Agrarian Commons makes 104 acres of permanent farmland available to 210 Somali Bantu refugee farmers. Read their story in this article: 'We're trying to re-create the lives we had': the Somali migrants who became Maine farmers.
• The 52 land-owning families in a village in Maharashtra, India, have donated all of their agricultural land to the gram sabha (village council). The step was taken to reverse the harmful effects of private ownership of land in agriculture-dependent communities. Read more in this article, Mendha Lekha residents gift all their farms to Gram Sabha.
• In an effort to create more land-based livelihoods in West Virginia as the coal economy withers, a consortium of local government, farmers, and the Agrarian Trust has acquired 82 acres of farmland that will be leased permanently to a non-profit community farm and a farm cooperative. Read more in this article, 'Commons' effort seeks to keep U.S. farmland affordable: indefinitely.
• The nonprofit Intervale Center owns, leases, and manages 350 acres near the city of Burlington, Vermont, and subleases land to ten or more independently owned farms.
• The Montgomery County, Maryland agricultural reserve, adjacent to Washington DC, has protected 30% of the district as agricultural land even under heavy development pressure through a Transfer of Development Rights program. 

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Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), also known as a subscription service or box scheme, is a way for farmers to connect more closely with their customers. Customers buy shares of a farm's harvest in advance, thus sharing in the risk that farmers take every year. And with an up-front guarantee on sales, CSAs enable farmers to purchase equipment and seeds without loans, lessening their dependence on the financial system. While CSAs are typically associated with vegetable growers, producers of many kinds have used the model: bread bakers, cheesemakers, meat producers, fruit growers, herbalists, foragers, fisherfolk, and more. And some farmers link up to assemble a range of locally-produced foods into whole-diet offerings.

Get started

• Learn how to create a CSA with North Carolina State University's Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Resource Guide for Farmers (US). The guide supports farmers who want to create a CSA, as well as groups of people – offices, churches, schools, buying clubs, and groups of neighbors – who would like to approach a farmer to start a CSA.
• The European NGO Urgenci has produced a detailed Trainers Guide, which can be used to introduce both farmers and community members to the theory and practice of Community Supported Agriculture.
• Create a cooperative CSA with other small farmers. Read Civil Eats' article Banding Together to Build a Better CSA, featuring City Commons CSA in Detroit, US, to learn more.

Get inspired

• Shared Harvest Farm in Beijing, China is an organic farm and CSA providing vegetables, free-range eggs, chicken and pork to hundreds of people.
• Members of Skipper Otto’s Community-Supported Fishery in Vancouver, Canada, buy shares and receive installments of local, sustainably-caught seafood throughout the fishing season.
• Through Better Together CSA in Albuquerque, US, 11 farmers pool their harvest to provide local food shares to 75 families. Read more in Edible New Mexico's article A Sudden Flourishing: New Mexico CSAs and Local Food Subscriptions Services in the time of COVID-19.

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A rich diversity of wild or uncultivated foods can be found in our local environments, from urban areas to the backcountry. With sustainable harvesting practices and ethics, these foods can provide a dependable, perennial source of exceptional nutrition. Learning to identify, harvest and prepare wild foods provides not only nutritious sustenance, but opportunities for intergenerational and intercultural learning, preserving biological and cultural diversity, and deepening an ecological ethic of care and respect for the land.

Take action

• Gain knowledge about wild food in your local area by reaching out to a local herbalist, ecologist, or elder.
• Learn to gather wild foods ethically and safely with The Forager’s Toolkit.
• Find a group that harvests and prepares wild foods together; check out Meetup's 80+ foraging groups (US), or start your own group.
• Find an experienced forager in your area through Rob Greenfield's database Find a Forager (US and Canada).
• Learn to cook wild foods of temperate North America and Europe with Dina Falconi's book Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook, and wild foods of Southeast Asia with The Non Timber Forest Product Exchange Program's webinar What's Cooking? Discovering Wild Tastes in Asia.
• Identify dispersive, prolific animals and plants near you with the database Eat the Invaders, and help bring balance to their role in your local ecosystem one meal at a time.
• Learn to collect seaweed with Milkwood Permaculture's article and zine Foraging Seaweed for Home & Garden Use (Australia).
• Learn to identify, forage and prepare 13 wild weeds found all over the world with Katrina Blair's book, The Wild Wisdom of Weeds: 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival.
• Host a themed potluck dinner – where everyone brings a dish to share – to showcase the variety of wild foods in your area.

Get inspired

• The Deccan Development Society in Hyderabad, India helps introduce the public to neglected, highly nutritious and abundant wild foods through its Festival of Uncultivated Foods.
• Fox Haven Farm in Maryland, US runs 10-month foraging education programs with a focus on ecosystem stewardship, within and alongside an herbal farm, ecological retreat, learning center, and wildlife sanctuary.
• Linking Wild Foods, Biodiversity, and Forest-Based Livelihoods, an online conference held in 2021, offers stories and conference presentations from across South and Southeast Asia.
• Forgotten Greens, based in India, connects people with wild plants growing near them through 11-day virtual group programs, as well as place-based plant walks, festivals, and workshops celebrating the plants that form the often invisible backdrop of our everyday lives.

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Gleaning refers to harvesting and gathering foods that would otherwise go to waste. From city fruit trees to leftover crops on farms, the amount of food that can be gleaned is huge, and many organizations and initiatives have emerged to collect this food for local consumption. In many cases, the gleaned food is donated to local anti-hunger programs. Not only does this tap into hitherto ignored local abundance, but it helps reduce dependence on the global industrial food system.

Take action

• Find a local gleaning group with the Center for Food and Agriculture Systems' Nationwide Gleaning and Food Recovery Map (US), Feedback Global's Go Gleaning map (UK), and Alive's Gleaning Fresh Food list (Canada). Elsewhere, find a local gleaning or urban harvesting group with Falling Fruit's worldwide database Grow Pick Distribute.
• See an overview of approaches to gleaning with How to Glean for Good, featuring examples from around the US.
• Start a new gleaning group with Feedback Global's Toolkit (UK) or the United States Department of Agriculture's Let's Glean! toolkit.
• Map out the trees in your city with FallingFruit.org, a worldwide database of fruit trees available for public harvest. A gleaning or urban fruit organization near you may already have its own database, too.
• Create and distribute a paper map of public fruit trees with Fallen Fruit's Public Fruit Maps.
• Organize a group city fruit harvest with Solid Ground's guide How to organize an urban fruit harvest.
• Understand the laws around gleaning in your area with the National Gleaning Project's Legal and Policy Resources page (US).

Get inspired

• Volunteers with Not Far From the Tree in Toronto, Canada, pick fruit from private trees all around the city and share the harvest with owners and local food banks.
• Food Forward in Los Angeles, US, collects fresh fruits and vegetables from backyard fruit trees, public orchards, and farmers markets, and delivers it to people in need.
• Smarta Kartan in Gothenburg, Sweden, maps out the sharing economy of the city, including public fruit trees.
• Fallen Fruit in Los Angeles, US is an urban fruit trail highlighting 150 edible trees in one neighborhood.

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Reduce packaging waste and emissions from shipping by joining or starting a bulk buying club: a group of people who periodically purchase food and other supplies wholesale from farms, food producers, and other suppliers. To have the greatest positive impact, choose local producers whenever possible. Otherwise, try to build direct relationships with trusted organic and fair-trade suppliers.

Take action

• Start a buying club with Start a Buying Club's detailed guide.
• Find bulk buying suppliers and other food coop resources from Sustain's Food Coops Map (UK).
• Use the Fair World Project's guide The New International Guide to Fair Trade Labels to distinguish authentic, transformative fair trade labels that support small-scale, ecological producers from "fair-washed" corporate co-opted labels.

Get inspired

• Melliodora near Melbourne, Australia, has been operating a home-based food coop once a week for 20 years, offering dry goods and a Community Supported Agriculture box from the founder's garage.
• The 350,000+ members of the Seikatsu Club in Japan order bulk supplies in groups of 8-10 households arranged into autonomous local branches. Their collective demand has established more than 600 local cooperative suppliers and catalyzed a movement for local, chemical-free food throughout the country.

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Online shopping seems convenient and chain stores appear cheap, but both have many hidden costs: as local businesses lose trade, the local economy loses vitality, our neighbors lose their livelihoods, and the environment suffers. From a big picture perspective, shopping locally is the real bargain.

Take action

• Make a list of things you regularly purchase at large stores, and services you contract from large non-local companies. This is a great activity to do with neighbors and friends!
• Draft a list of local alternatives that address these needs.
• Fill in gaps by consulting local business directories, local markets, neighborhood listserves, and friends. Find local businesses through a business alliance such as the American Independent Business Alliance's list of Members (US).
• For goods and services that you can’t readily find, see if you can work with a local business or artisan to produce what you need. For example, before purchasing plastic furniture, reach out to a local woodworker.
• Make a commitment to start shifting your purchases towards local producers and retailers, and share your journey with your community.

Get inspired

• Neal Gorenflo, executive director of Shareable, committed to buying 100% from local businesses for one year. Read about his experience in his article How my hyper-local COVID-19 year changed my consumption habits.

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When something we need can't be produced locally or regionally, sourcing it fairly from small ecological producers or businesses in another country is the next best thing. If done right, this can help support dignified local livelihoods elsewhere. But there is a risk: by encouraging small producers, especially those in the Global South, to join an export-led economy rather than producing for local consumption, we may be unintentionally undermining genuine self-reliance in their communities. Even producers engaged in fair trade can find their livelihoods threatened by competition from other countries, shifts in global markets, or changing consumer preferences. Trade is genuinely fair when small producers are meeting local needs first before exporting any surpluses, and have a real say in determining prices and terms of trade.

Take action

• Use the Fair World Project's guide The New International Guide to Fair Trade Labels to distinguish authentic, transformative fair trade labels that support small-scale, ecological producers from "fair-washed" corporate co-opted labels.
• Quickly decode the labels at your store with the Fair World Project's summary Reference Guide to Fair Trade and Worker Justice Certifications.

Get inspired

• The Community Agroecology Network works with small-scale coffee farmers in Mexico and Central America promoting ecologically-sound growing practices and vibrant local food economies that foster fair market channels and farmer control of seeds. The network prioritizes local food needs first, and then shade-grown organic coffee for export.
• Good Market Global, an online platform started in Sri Lanka, is a place for customers, businesses, and small producers to connect with each other and form business relationships. All Good Market members adhere to rigorous environmental and human rights standards, and the website publishes a detailed audit of each member's practices.
• The Small Producers' Symbol is a 100% producer-driven, democratically-run intercontinental network of over 120 ecological small-scale agriculture organizations. They work with committed companies and customers to produce and trade products that are high-quality, agroecological, organic and free of exploitation, providing living income for producers and complete traceability from producer to consumer.

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Choosing items that are biodegradable and long-lasting reduces the environmental burden of manufactured goods, both during production and when their useful lifetime has finished. In the words of Pete Seeger, ​“If it can't be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.”

Take action

• Purchase from companies that reject planned obsolescence and offer a lifetime guarantee on their products. For products that aren't made locally, the website Buy Me Once (US) is a directory of companies that intentionally design for durability.
• Consider objects that are made of natural fibers, stone, clay, bamboo, wood, or plants, rather than synthetic materials like plastic. Be cautious of chemical or plastic coatings, and use locally-harvested materials when possible! 
• Check out iFixit's instruction manuals and online community for help with repairing electronics.

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Sharing items with neighbors and friends builds relationships and interdependence, and reduces the environmental impact of buying objects that are rarely used. Recreation and outdoor equipment, tools and kitchen implements are all great candidates for informal sharing networks.

Take action

• Learn ways to start either an online or offline network with How to Start a Neighborhood Tool Share, an article by Earth Easy.
• Join the simple, free online platforms Neighborhood Share Network (US) or Streetbank (UK), by providing a list of items you are willing to lend and people you are willing to lend to.
• Expand your local sharing economy further with Shareable's links to more than 300 guides to help you share resources in your community, spanning food, housing, transportation, tools and beyond.

Get inspired

• Sharing items is a key aspect of Dama, the traditional gift culture in Mali that forms the backbone of community. Learn more about this philosophy in the Gift Economy page of this Action Guide.
• The Small Farm Guild in northern Vermont, US, shares farm equipment – cider press, chicken processing equipment, food dehydrator, rototiller, and much more – among local farmers, homesteaders and gardeners.

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Joining or creating a time bank or LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) is a great way to decouple valuation from the mainstream financial system, and to keep value circulating in our local economies. A Time Bank is an extended bartering system that allows people to exchange their time, measured in hourly credits, rather than money. LETS expands this concept by creating platforms on which people can exchange goods and services using a local currency that is not pegged to government-issued money. Both systems build social support networks, help members save money, and make visible the multitude of knowledge and skills already present in our communities.

Take action

• Find a Time Bank or LETS near you with the Community Exchange System's database of Networks, covering more than 1000 local exchange initiatives worldwide.
• Find additional networks with LETS Link UK's map UK Regional Links (UK) and TimeBanks.Org's map Directory of Time Banks (US and New Zealand), and in Australia, Timebanking and the Community Exchange System Australia.
• See How to Start a Timebank, based on materials gleaned from The California Federation of Time Banks and Timebanks USA.
• Dive into the details of how to start a time bank with the Center for a New American Dream's webinar How to Start a Time Bank and Skill Exchange.
• Find a time bank near you with the Directory of Time Banks from TimeBanks USA, featuring both North American and international projects.

Get inspired

• The Cape Town Talent Exchange in South Africa facilitates exchanges of skills and goods at their currency-free weekly Claremont Talent Market and the annual Learning Clan Festival.
• Adelaide LETS, Australia, operates a shop and a pick-up and drop-off service, for members to exchange handmade goods.
• Bristol LETS in the UK hosts an open online directory of offers and wants, to share a sense of the breadth of goods and services exchange through LETS systems.
• The Neighbor-2-Neighbor Time Bank in Allentown, Pennsylvania, US, has more than 30,000 members, who have exchanged over 200,000 hours of time.
• ‘I like giving the gift of time’: Time banks build economies — and communities — without the almighty dollar, by Justin Moyer, profiles the work of the Silver Spring Time Bank in Maryland, US.

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Bartering – the direct exchange of goods or services – is one of the oldest forms of economic transaction, and it still thrives in many parts of the world today. Barter not only provides a way for people without cash to exchange what they have for what they need, it also strengthens social ties in the process.

Take action

• One-on-one bartering is difficult: you need to find someone who has exactly what you need, and who needs exactly what you have. Increase the odds by adding "willing to barter" whenever you post something for sale.
• Set up a barter market in your community.
• If you have a business, consider ways that you could incorporate payments by barter.
• For an understanding of the laws around bartering in the US, check out Money Soup: A Legal Guide to Bartering, Giving, and Getting Stuff without Dollars, put together by the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

Get inspired

• The report Barter markets: sustaining people and nature in the Andes by Neus Marti and Michel Pimbert explores how barter markets in Peru contribute to food sovereignty, agricultural biodiversity, and community resilience.
• Alam Sehat Lestari in Kalimantan, Indonesia runs a medical clinic that accepts payments in seedlings, handicrafts, manure, and more. In addition, the clinic offers discounts up to 70% for patients from villages that have collectively reduced illegal logging.
• The patients at Panamédica Cooperativa de Salud in Mexico City, Mexico can choose to pay for medical services with a “solidarity fee,” where 50% of the payment is done in-kind through community service.
• The Fitzroy Urban Harvest in Melbourne, Victoria is a monthly event where residents both barter and give away homegrown and homemade food.

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A local currency helps keep wealth circulating within the community, rather than leaking out of the local economy. This section covers paper and digital notes whose value is pegged to and backed by government-issued currency, and which therefore function as coupons to encourage local spending. Time banks, LETS, and other non-monetary local means of exchange are covered elsewhere in the Beyond Money topic page.

Take action

• Find a local currency, mutual credit or barter system in many countries around the world with this Local Currency Directory from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.
• Create a new local currency with Shareable's short guide How to Start a Community Currency.
• Deeply explore tools for re-engineering our relationship with money through currency innovation, with this report from the New Economics Foundation People Powered Money: Designing, Developing, and Delivering Community Currencies, and with Peter North's book Local Money: How to Make it Happen in Your Community.

Get inspired

• The locally-controlled bank Banco Palmas in Fortaleza, Brazil issues loans by default in the local currency, the Palma, to encourage borrowers to shop at neighborhood enterprises. The bank charges a fee for issuing loans in Brazilian Reals.
• The Lewes Pound in the UK is a paper currency accepted by local businesses. When people purchase Lewes Pounds with the UK£, 5 pence is given to local community-building projects.
• The Catalan Integral Cooperative in Catalonia, Spain created a local digital currency, the Eco, which is accepted at the many small shops and businesses run by its members.
• BerkShares, in western Massachusetts, US, is a local currency formed by a partnership between the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, three community banks, and 400 participating businesses. More than 10 million BerkShares have circulated within the local economy over the past 15 years. 

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Gift economies free us to give without an expectation of direct payment, and to receive without feeling indebted. They can help us shift our personal economies from a series of faceless transactions to a web of nurturing relationships. In most societies today, gift economies cannot form the entirety or even majority of our economic transactions. Nonetheless, they can be a vital part of our transition from global to local economies.

Take action

• Organize a Really Really Free Market – a space for people to get and give away goods completely free of obligations to pay, trade or barter – with Shareable's guide How to start a really really free market.
• Refuse payment – even in barter – for small goods or services you provide to others in your community. At the same time, explain the gift economy concept. See how long it takes to notice that others are doing the same.
• Join or start a Buy Nothing Group with the Buy Nothing Project, which facilitates hyper-local gift economies where people offer and request items with no transactions involved. There are more than 5,000 active local groups in 44 countries; if your area doesn't have one yet, the website offers everything you need to get started.
• Explore the economic, social, psychological, relational, spiritual and cosmological elements of gift economies with Charles Eisenstein's in-depth, self-guided course Living in the Gift.

Get inspired

• An Teach Saor in County Galway, Ireland is a thriving house, permaculture garden, and community space that operates without money. The article Happiness Without Money? This Irish Community Proves It's Possible shares their story.
• Reclaiming the Gift Culture, an anthology of 26 essays by Shikshantar: The People's Institute for Rethinking Education and Development in India, describes gift economies in Mexico, Mali, India, and elsewhere.
• GIFT, a documentary film by Robin McKenna, is "a tribute to something that can’t be measured or counted, bought or sold. An intimate exploration of real-life gift economies," covering both giving freely with no expectation, and giving to generate the wealth of social capital.
• The Singapore Really Really Free Market is one example of dozens around the world. The article The Really (Really) Free Market Operates Under a Simple, Radical Philosophy explores how these markets help us to see "how societies could function more equitably, compassionately, and sustainably."

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Producing some of the electricity you use at home is a very direct way to lessen your dependence on energy corporations. Off-grid renewable systems are more subject to the vagaries of intermittent sources of power – whether sun, wind, or water – but that’s actually a good thing: it lets you know that the energy you use isn’t endless, and encourages conservation as a way of life. All the actions below lessen our dependence on commercial energy providers, cultivate awareness of our daily energy usage, and attune us to the potential of the local environment to meet our energy needs.

Take action

• Find numerous practical guides on small-scale decentralized electricity production from LowImpact.org, including pedal-powered generators, small-scale wind turbines and home-scale solar.
• Browse dozens of creative small-scale electricity systems on Waldenlabs' Energy page.
• Learn to build a small-scale wind energy system with Windexchange's The Small Wind Guidebook.
• Design and install your own micro solar or wind energy system with LowImpact.org's book Wind and Solar Electricity and low-cost companion course, the Solar Electricity Online Course.

Get inspired

• Sundaya in West Java, Indonesia, produces and distributes home-scale 12-volt solar energy kits that don't require expertise, tools, or literacy to install and maintain.
• Resilient Power Puerto Rico is distributing solar electric power kits to families devastated by hurricanes, to help the island achieve energy sovereignty.
• The Bali Appropriate Technology Institute in Tabanan, Indonesia, empowers rural communities to fulfill their own water and electrical needs through rainwater collection, ram pumps, micro hydropower generators, and more, all made with locally-available materials. 
• The intentional community Living Energy Farm in the US state of Virginia has created a low-cost off-grid system that powers a multi-family home, machine shop, and agricultural processing center through direct drive, direct current power and long-lasting nickel iron batteries. 
• The members of Unión de Cooperativas Tosepan in Cuetzalan, Mexico, have rejected big energy projects like hydroelectric dams and high-voltage transmission lines in favor of home-scale electricity systems. 

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Although systemic economic forces make it difficult for anyone in the US to survive as a farmer  –  and even harder to acquire enough land to start a farm  –  institutional racism and other forms of discrimination have made it all but impossible for people of color. Land-based reparations give land ownership and access to people whose ancestors were enslaved or persecuted, and who continue to experience institutional racism and discrimination today. This approach empowers these farmers to grow the food their communities need. It also enables privileged landowners of means – and others who may be inclined to help – to actively heal wounds that have been inflicted over many generations.

Get started

• Read Soul Fire Farm's Take Action page for a comprehensive guide to supporting reparations work.
• Look through their Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous Farmers, matching those with resources, including land and money, with numerous specific projects and needs of farmers of color, mostly in North America.  
• Check out Resource Generation's Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit, intended for people with access to land to support land repatriation to Indigenous people. 
• In the US, donate to the National Black Food & Justice Alliance.
• Learn about the Schumacher Center for New Economics' proposal for a Black Commons.

Get inspired

• The Sogorea Te' Land Trust in California created the Shuumi Land Tax, inviting residents of the San Francisco Bay Area to contribute an annual gift that supports the return of indigenous lands to indigenous people.
• The Black Land and Liberation Movement in the US coordinated Reparations Summer: A Land-Based Movement for Black Liberation, to build a movement for land-based reparations and explore how the indigenous sovereignty and Black self-determination movements can work together.
• A Reparations Map for Farmers of Color May Help Right Historical Wrongs, by Andrea King Collier, shares the story of how, "In an effort to address centuries of systemic racism, a new online tool seeks to connect Black, brown, and Indigenous farmers with land and resources."
• In How to Give Land Back, Aaron Fernando describes the work of Dishgamu Humboldt, an indigenous-led community land trust working to return land to the Wiyot tribe in Northern California in the US.

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Planting food crops to share uses the privilege of land access to benefit the wider community. Creating a common resource is an act of resistance against cultures of privatized land and commodified food, and an act of renewal of gift economies that support abundance for all.

Take action

• Plant a fruit tree or garden plot with food that you intend to share with others, or make available for others to harvest.
• Connect with the Food is Free Project, a worldwide movement of people growing and sharing food freely, and check out their guide on how to start a project of your own.
• Register fruit trees on your land with a local gleaning organization.
• Donate excess produce from your garden to a local food bank.
• Start an inexpensive nursery to grow seedlings for your community with Lobelia Commons' Decentralized Nursery How-To Thread.

Get inspired

• Lobelia Commons' Front Yard Orchard program in New Orleans, US provides free fruit trees for people to plant in publicly accessible parts of their yards.
• Homegardens are privately-held agroforestry plots common in tropical communities worldwide. In Java, Indonesia, homegardens are often considered semi-public community land, with harvests shared throughout the village: see The Javanese Homegarden for more details.

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Grains are an often-neglected component of the local food movement, even though they comprise such a significant proportion of most cultures' diets. This is changing, however, as a movement for revival, protection and promotion of local grain growing and processing is spreading. Get involved and inspired with some of the resources and initiatives below.

Take action

• Take inspiration from the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance’s Heritage Grain Trials Project to “rekindle a thriving, localized grain economy in the Rocky Mountain West." If you live in that region, join the project as a trial grower, or participate in the Grain School to learn techniques for growing, harvesting, processing and preparing grains. The Colorado Grain Chain also offers the Grain Home School, with topics including Sourdough 101, Growing Grains, Using Whole Grains, and more. 
• In the UK, get involved in the local staple foods movement with the help of Filling the UK Food Gap: A Toolkit to Inspire Small-scale Production and Processing of Grains and Pulses, by Grown in Totnes.
• In Scotland, get involved in Soil to Slice, a “network of community groups growing, harvesting, threshing, milling and baking” with local grains, providing access to seeds, small-scale equipment, training and co-learning and more, by Scotland the Bread. 

Get inspired

• In Civil Eats, read about the efforts of Don Lewis, a "heritage wheat wizard," to revive the local grain economy in New York's Hudson Valley.

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Staple crop production, distribution, processing and consumption is an essential – if often neglected – component of the food relocalization movement. Fortunately, there is a burgeoning small-scale localized staples renaissance, often focusing on rescuing and re-popularizing a threatened diversity of heritage, heirloom, locally-adapted, resilient, nutritionally-superior varieties of grains, legumes, root crops, and more.
The below resources, while geographically limited, exemplify good sources of locally-grown staple foods. Seek out similar sources in your own country if not included below, and let us know about them in our suggestion form.

Take action

• In the UK, source British-grown pulses, grains and other staples (including quinoa) from Hodmedod’s, and buy Scottish-grown flour and grains from Scotland the Bread. 
• In the US, find local grain and flour in the Upper Midwest with this list, and across the whole US in this map, by the Artisan Grain Collaborative; in the Southwest, find regionally-grown beans, amaranth, corn and wheat from Native Seeds/SEARCH; and find other indigenous staple foods from these native-owned businesses profiled by Civil Eats.
• In India, source ‘desi’ (native/heirloom) staples including diverse varieties of rice, legumes, millet and wheat from Sahaja Sumrudha and their shop Sahaja Organics.

Get inspired

• The Grain Shed in Spokane, Washington, US, is a worker-owned cooperative bakery and brewery, using 100% locally and organically grown, craft malted and fermented heirloom grain varieties and aspiring to help seed neighborhood-sized brewery-bakeries also using local grains throughout the city.

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The number of plant foods people consume has dwindled to the point that just three grains – wheat, rice and maize – account for 60 percent of food energy consumed globally. At the same time, genetic diversity within each of those grains is narrowing year by year. The local food movement can reverse these trends, because local food promotes diversity: the crops and varieties farmers grow aren't tailored to the standardized needs of giant supermarkets and global traders, but to local soils, climate and cultural preferences. And since grains are such a major component of human diets, they are an important facet of the local food movement.

Take action

• In the UK, get involved with one of the many organizations promoting local grains:
  • The UK Grain Lab brings together farmers, millers, plant breeders, bakers, cooks, scientists and academics to promote the growing and eating of non-commodity grains.
  • The Heritage Grain Trust believes that British farmers, using heritage seeds, can produce all the grain needed to feed the UK population while improving soil health, increasing biodiversity, and sequestering greenhouse gases.
  • Scotland the Bread is “a collaborative project to grow better grain and bake better bread with the common purposes of nourishment, sustainability and food sovereignty."
  • Grown in Totnes has produced A Toolkit to Inspire Small-scale Production and Processing of Grains and Pulses. 
• In the US, connect with one of these regional groups working to diversify and localize the growing of grains:
  • In the Upper Midwest, the Artisan Grain Collaborative is working “to create a diverse regional grainshed built upon regenerative agriculture practices."
  • In the Mountain West, the Colorado Grain Chain is comprised of local businesses and consumers who believe in re-localization of grains.
  • On the East Coast, the Common Grain Alliance is building a regional heirloom grain economy, with more than 30 farmers, millers, and bakers so far. 
• In India, support the Millet Network of India (MINI), comprised of 50 farmer organizations that believe a revival of millet-based farming and food systems would place control over food, seeds, markets and natural resources in the hands of the poor.
• Sign up for the innovative Grain School organized by the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance (US). The curriculum covers the history and biology of land-race grains, crop breeding, nutritional and health issues, baking and fermentation, and small-scale production techniques.
• The local grain movement isn't just for producers. Consumers in the US can find local grain and flour in the Upper Midwest with this list, and across the whole US in this map from the Artisan Grain Collaborative.
• In India, ‘desi’ (native/heirloom) staples including diverse varieties of rice, millet and wheat can be obtained from Sahaja Sumrudha and their shop Sahaja Organics.

  Get inspired

• Vrihi is the largest folk rice seed bank in eastern India, with over 940 endangered varieties conserved. It is linked to Basudha, a conservation farm that grows all of the varieties each season. Read more in the Local Futures article Saving Our Lives One Seed at a Time.
• The Grain Shed in Spokane, Washington, US, is a worker-owned cooperative bakery and brewery, using 100% locally and organically grown, craft malted and fermented heirloom grain varieties and aspiring to help seed neighborhood-sized brewery-bakeries also using local grains throughout the city.

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Seeds local to your area will work best with your climate, and we encourage you to seek out small growers, businesses and organizations producing open-pollinated, heirloom, locally-adapted, hardy varieties bred and maintained for small-scale agroecological farming. 

Take action

• Discover local seed networks and seed suppliers with the following directories, lists and maps: Seed Savers Foundation (Australia), Seed Sovereignty (UK and Ireland), the Organic Seed Alliance (US and Canada), and the Open Source Seed Initiative's seed company partners (worldwide).
• Red de Guardianes de Semillas in Ecuador offers a wide diversity of local seeds grown in permaculture farms and gardens. Check out their catalog here.
• In Mexico, Las Cañadas center for agroecology and permaculture offers this catalog of agroecologically grown plants and seeds. 
• Vanastree is a women-run seed-saving collective in the Malnad region of Karnataka, India. Their seeds are all organic and open-pollinated.
• If your country or region isn’t listed here, ask your local gardening club, community gardening organization, permaculture or transition group, or organic nursery, and connect with nearby small-scale, organic, traditional farmers.

Get inspired

• The Desi Seed Producers Company is a collective of organic seed producers and seed savers in India whose mission is "to bring back the tradition of seed saving amongst us by collecting, propagating, and exchanging indigenous and rare varieties [and to] seek sustainable living and a more self-reliant lifestyle." Their organically grown, open pollinated vegetable and cereal seeds are marketed under the brand name "Sahaja Seeds."

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If you grow open-pollinated varieties in your garden, you can save your seeds from this season and plant them next year. This enables you to do what traditional farmers have done for millennia: select seeds from plants with desirable traits, especially for an ability to thrive in your particular climate and soils.

Get started

• The Community Seed Network (US and Canada) has curated an excellent set of seed saving resources, for beginners to experienced seed savers, plus recommended readings.  
• Seed Sovereignty (UK and Ireland) has assembled an extensive list of guides, books, videos, podcasts and more for all things seed saving.  
• The Seed Savers’ Exchange (US) has tips for getting started, as well as specific guides for 35 common vegetables and fruits.  

Get inspired

• Read the FoodTank article Twenty Initiatives Saving Seeds for Future Generations, which describes projects from Ireland to Russia, Mexico to Australia – all working to preserve agricultural biodiversity.

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Initiatives to promote local and responsible seafood, including community-supported fisheries – modeled on community-supported agriculture – enable production and consumption of local, responsibly-harvested, small-scale seafood. See the suggestions below to join the boat-to-fork movement.

Take action

• In North America, find a community-supported fishery and small-scale seafood harvester through Local Catch.
• Increase your community's awareness of local seafood with Hosting a Slow Fish Workshop, a guide by the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance in the US. Plan an event to connect food and community-based fishing communities, learn how to eat with the seasons of the oceans, reduce food waste, and more.
• If you are a fisher-person, check out the CSF Baitbox: A Fisherman’s Guide to Community Supported Fisheries, from the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance.
• Find responsible seafood options. In India, check out the Know Your Fish campaign. In the UK, support the Sustainable Fish City campaign.
• Join or support the Fish Locally Collaborative, “a network that connects nearly 400,000+ fishing families around the US, as well as in Canada, Latin America, and Europe ... to align many diverse people and organizations behind community-based fisheries in order to protect marine biodiversity and the overall health of the ocean.”

Get inspired

• Skipper Otto’s Community-Supported Seafood in British Columbia, Canada, not only provides access to healthy, local, responsibly-harvested seafood, but also supports ecological sustainability by enabling local fishermen to prioritize the long-term health of the marine ecosystems they depend on.
• Through the TRY Oyster Women's Association in the Gambia, more than 500 women have organized into cooperatives to harvest oysters sustainably while conserving their habitat.

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One strategy being pursued to address the climate crisis has been to shift from fossil fuels to electric power as the energy source for common activities. But electric power has environmental costs, too, even when renewable energy is used to create it. Consider using human power and passive renewable energy instead.

Take action

• There are many ways to produce hot water using solar energy. Mother Earth News' article How to Build a Passive Solar Water Heater describes five simple, inexpensive heaters for home use. LowImpact.org's book Solar Hot Water: Choosing, Fitting and Using a System, provides a detailed overview of the topic, whether you choose to build a system yourself or hire a plumber and use off-the-shelf components.
• Solar Cookers International has been working for decades to design and promote passive solar cooking, especially in the "less developed" parts of the world. They provide solar cooker construction plans for many kinds of cookers, including a portable one made from cardboard and aluminum foil.
• Preserving food by canning or freezing usually requires fossil-fuel or electrical energy, but there are other ways to preserve food that are just as effective. The National Center for Home Food Preservation has put together a comprehensive overview of preservation methods for various foods. You can also build your own solar fruit dehydrator with these plans from North Dakota State University.
• Learn about various non-electric tools and techniques for satisfying basic needs from the Atelier Non-Electric in Japan. The text is in Japanese, but many of the design images are self-explanatory.
• Low-Tech Magazine contains a wealth of thought-provoking articles, from discussions of "obsolete technologies" to the possibilities of low-tech solutions to modern problems: a great way to encourage out-of-the-box thinking.
• Often the best solutions are the simplest. Rather than use electricity and fossil fuels to dry clothes, hang them on a clothesline. Rather than building fleets of electric-powered vehicles, promote walking and bicycling. Find other ways to satisfy genuine needs without using mechanical, fuel-based or electric means, and rethink technology with the help of No-Tech Magazine.

Get inspired

• In Can Decreix, a degrowth community outside the French town of Cerbère, the embrace of simple technologies is a joyful way of life. The use of solar ovens and cookers is standard practice, and their many self-designed tools include a pedal-powered washing machine. Website in French and English.
• Maya Pedal is a Guatemalan nonprofit that turns donated bikes into water pumps, grinders, threshers, tile makers, nut shellers, blenders, trailers and more. They also recondition bikes for their traditional use as transportation. In English or Spanish.

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The cumulative environmental costs of industrial consumer products – from mine to landfill – are astronomical. One of the best ways to reduce our impact is to step away from the destructive pressures of consumerism by consciously choosing to live with less.

Take Action

• Learn how to "live more on less" with this action plan from The Simplicity Institute, which has many more materials on simple living and resistance to consumerism.
• Find non-consumerist ways to celebrate holidays – from Christmas to Passover to birthdays – on NewDream.org.
• Learn about the benefits of downshifting – breaking the work-and-spend cycle – from LowImpact.org.
• To fight consumerism and help build a “hyper-local gift economy”, find or start a local group of the Buy Nothing Project. Also check out the book by the project’s founders, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan.

Get inspired

• Read about 7 Invisible Benefits of Living Simply in this essay by Courtney Carver.
• For the sheer fun of it, check out these videos from Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. There's a serious side as well, including direct action against major corporations and banks that profit from unbridled consumerism.

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Choosing to use a bicycle rather than a car for personal transportation is good. Making that option possible for many others is even better – and that's what bike share programs aim to do. Most involve a system of self-service stations where users can check out a bike using a membership or credit/debit card. After reaching their destination, they can park the bike in a nearby docking station. Another option is "dockless" systems, with bikes whose rear wheels are locked until a rider uses an app to unlock them. Bike share programs are run by local governments, nonprofits, for-profit companies, or by some combination of the three.

Take action

• Use a bike share program if one is available where you live or work. More than 40 countries already have bike share programs, and more are added every year. The page List of Bicycle-Sharing Systems on Wikipedia has information on the programs available in most countries.
• If there is no local program available, ask your municipality to sponsor one. These articles from Shareable are a good place to start: Policies for a Shareable City #3: Bike Sharing and Five Things Every Mayor Should Know Before Starting a Bike Sharing Program.

Get inspired

• The largest bike share program in the world is in the city of Hangzhou, China, which boasts 175,000 bikes and 2,700 docking stations. Paris is in second place, with 30,000 bikes and 1,600 stations.

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As authors Paul Tranter and Rodney Tolley point out, "A great paradox of modern times is that the faster we go, the less time we have." On the altar of speed brought about by a modern, high-tech, globalized society, we sacrifice not only our time, but also our personal, collective, social and ecological well-being. Higher speeds demand more energy consumption, produce more pollution, and militate against building human-scale communities. It's time to slow down the pace of life, and there is a budding "slow movement" aiming to do just that. This ranges from slow food to slow money to slow cities and transport. Here we focus on cities and transportation. Quoting Trantner and Tolley again, "More time can be saved by slowing city transport than by speeding it up."

Take action

• Learn about and join the Citta Slow network, a worldwide organization whose goals include "improving the quality of life in towns by slowing down the overall pace, especially in a city's use of spaces and the flow of life and traffic through them."
• Read the Manifesto for 21st Century Slow Cities, and urge your local government to adopt and implement this vision in your town or city.
• To help both decrease the negative impacts of travel and enrich the experience for traveler and host, practice slow when setting off on your next sojourn. Learn more on the What is Slow Travel page of the Slow Movement website.

Get inspired

• The Sloth Club in Japan promotes slow businesses, tourism, alternative currencies, and more. In his talk Slow is Beautiful, founder Keibo Oiwa describes how living at a slow pace is an essential part of place-based cultures, and necessary for well-being and happiness in the modern age, too.
• Citizens of the California city of Berkeley, US, wanted slower streets, and the city's Healthy Streets initiative is providing them. Two miles of streets have been barricaded on one side to reduce traffic and increase access for pedestrians and bicycles. Cars can still use a portion of the street, but can only travel at speeds of 15 miles per hour or less.

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Creating a space for your community to come together and repair objects is not only a great way to keep waste out of the landfill and reduce consumerism, it can also create intergenerational bonding. At Repair Café events, people with specialized skills and knowledge come together to fix almost anything that's broken, from moth-eaten sweaters to smartphones. Originally started in Amsterdam, the concept has now spread around the world.

Take action

• Find a repair café near you with Repair Café's links to Community groups in the US, Europe, and Australia. There are many other grassroots communities around the world, too. 
• Start your own local group with Repair Cafe's Repair Café Manual and templates, offered for a modest fee. 

Get inspired

• Club de Reparadores in Argentina has helped organize more than 30 repair events in Buenos Aires, Río Negro and Córdoba, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay.
• The Bower Reuse and Repair Center in Australia has been in operation since 1998. Their mission is not only to reduce the amount of waste entering landfills by reclaiming household items for repair, reuse and resale, but also to provide affordable goods to low-income earners and to generate local employment.
• The Restart Project in the UK focuses on electric devices. They run regular Restart Parties where people teach each other how to fix their broken and slow devices – "from tablets to toasters, from iPhones to headphones."

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There is a desperate need today for livelihoods that provide a sense of purpose and positive contribution, and that build up and sustain local economies and environments. One way to achieve this is through local businesses oriented around providing for the genuine basic needs of the local community. Doing this successfully is a big challenge when so much of economic policy is skewed towards the big and the global, but with devoted community support it is possible.

Take action

• Transition from a 'deadlihood' to an 'alivelihood' with the help of the article 52 Alivehoods by Manish Jain of Shikshantar and Swaraj University, which includes a list of eco-careers for resilient local economies.
• The book Raising Dough, by Elizabeth Ü, is a guide to financing socially-responsible food businesses.
• The Community-Supported Industry initiative of the Schumacher Center for New Economics provides a number of resources to "co-imagine, co-develop, co-finance, and patronize “import-replacement” businesses" to create environmentally-responsible products for local markets.
• Explore the range of skills that will take center stage in a degrowth economy with Upskilling for a Post-Growth Future Together by Donnie Maclurcan of the Post-Growth Institute.
• Assess how the skills you already have (or want to acquire) can create value for your community, and consider growing these skills into a livelihood or business.
• Teaching others what you know is a way to pass on these skills and keep them alive in your community.

Get inspired

• Kerry McCurdy in New Zealand turned a passion for bee-keeping into a thriving business, first as Backyard Honeybees and now as Beezthingz. Among other services, Beezthingz links independent beekeepers with farmers in need of pollinators.
• Chris Holmgren in the US expanded his woodworking business, Seneca Creek Joinery, into a community-scale production facility that handles all aspects of wood processing, from dead tree removal to finished furniture. He works with the city government and local tree removal companies to ensure that no local wood goes to waste.
• In Two Fold: A Community-Supported Bakery, Kirsten Bradley describes the extension of this successful model from agriculture to small business - in this case a local bakery - where community members subscribe for weekly local bread by paying in advance.
• In this article on the Vikalp Sangam website, Sayantani Nath writes about two friends who started the first zero-waste shop in Goa, India to both tackle the plastic waste crisis, and strengthen the local food economy.

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It can feel daunting to embark on localizing if you feel isolated, or starting from scratch. The truth is, there is usually already a lot going on to create the new economy, but it may not yet be visible or connected. Mapping out existing initiatives is a great way get a sense for the amazing richness of localization work going on, getting involved in it, and seeing what gaps remain to be filled.

Take action

• Create a local sustainability map for your community with these tools from Green Map.
• Make the case for community-led economic relocalization by mapping existing local economy actors and opportunities with the guide How to Do a Local Economic Blueprint from the Transition Network's REconomy Project.
• Organize a #MapJam in your community with this guide from Shareable, to "bring people together to map grassroots sharing projects, cooperatives, the commons, and other community resources."

Get inspired

• SEE-Change Canberra (Australia) has created the Canberra Sustainability Map, a visual directory of hundreds of projects and organizations working in housing, energy, waste management, resources for indigenous communities, conservation, food, the climate crisis, transportation, the economy, and community-building.
• Green Map NYC (US) hosts numerous maps on everything from composting, sharing and waste reduction, bicycling, and more.
• Smarta Kartan is a digital map of sharing economy initiatives in Gothenburg (Sweden) such as free bike repair centers, makerspaces, solidarity fridges, public fruit trees, and clothing exchanges. 
• Biodiverseni is a beautiful printed map of biodiversity and cultural assets in Pejeng, Bali (Indonesia), helping local leaders, residents and visitors join together to preserve Pejeng’s culture.
• Hundreds of mappers in over 80 cities around the world participated in Shareable's #MapJam community mapping initiative to identify and make public grassroots sharing projects, cooperatives, community resources, and the commons. Find links to many of these maps at Shareable.

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Trying to eliminate waste from your life is one way to reveal just how much unnecessary single-use packaging exists in the corporate food system. It's also a way to appreciate the multiple benefits of buying directly from local artisans, farms, and bulk food stores. You'll find that beyond reducing waste, you'll support your local economy and strengthen your community at the same time. 

Take action

• Check out 100 Steps to a Plastic-Free Life, by Beth Terry, author of Plastic Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too.
• See the Get Involved page on the Plastic-Free July website for dozens of practical guides on reducing or eliminating the use of plastic in your home, office, school, community, and local government.
• From Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth Malaysia), see the toolkit, Throwing Away the Throw-Away Culture, filled with lots of simple ways to reject plastics and to move a little closer towards zero waste.
• Sign the #WeChooseReuse commitment to move away from single-use plastic and put robust reuse systems in place.

Get inspired

• Beth Terry, author of Plastic Free, tells her inspiring story in this TED talk.
• Read about how Indian activist Bhim Rawat has been leading a plastic-free lifestyle for over 15 years.

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Swapping the goods we already have is an excellent way of side-stepping consumerism and the compulsion to buy new products. Swapping enables us to let go of things we no longer need or want while enabling others to acquire them free of transactional obligations of money, trade or even barter. Get swapping with the resources below.

Take action

• Set up an event with Shareable's guide How to throw a community swap meet and How to set up a swap or free store.
• Connect with a local group in the Freecycle Network, a global movement comprising more than 5,000 groups in 130+ countries who are "giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns and neighborhoods" to promote reuse and prevent waste.

Get inspired

• Every neighborhood in and around Austin, Texas, in the US, has a Buy Nothing Group. The article Buy Nothing Groups are Changing Austin One Neighborhood at a Time shares some of their stories.
• The Fitzroy Urban Harvest in Melbourne, Australia is a monthly event where residents both barter and give away homegrown and homemade food.

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Dumpster diving is the practice of rescuing perfectly good, edible food that has been thrown out as waste by various food-related establishments (grocery stores, restaurants, supermarkets, etc.), and making it available to those in need, thereby both reducing food waste and hunger. While obviously not a systemic solution, dumpster diving is an excellent way to see first-hand and close-up what needs to change!

Take action

• Dive into the world of food waste with the guides Rob Greenfield's Guide to Dumpster Diving, The Ultimate Guide to Dumpster Diving by Assya Barrette, and How To Dumpster Dive, Eat Free & Fight Waste by Wosterweil, on Shareable.
• Learn about the legal considerations for dumpster diving in your area with the resource page Dumpster Diving and the Law by Freegan.Info (US).

Get inspired

• Learn about how Rob Greenfield survived on dumpster diving during a bicycle journey across the US.

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Food hubs are initiatives that connect farmers with customers by aggregating, processing, distributing and marketing locally-grown foods. They can play a key role in boosting local food systems.

Take action

• Check out the Food Systems Leadership Network’s resource library on Food Hubs, with survey findings, lessons from existing food hubs, how to finance them, and more. 
• The US Department of Agriculture's Regional Food Hub Resource Guide and Running a Food Hub: Assessing Financial Viability offer valuable tips for anyone considering setting up a food hub.
• ATTRA-Sustainable Agriculture (US) offers case studies, tip sheets and other publications about food hubs. In both English and Spanish.

Get inspired

• The Redd on Salmon Street in Oregon, US has warehouse space used by almost 200 local food businesses, along with event space and a shared commercial kitchen.
• The Melbourne Food Hub in Australia operates a distributed food hub, connecting networks of farmers, buyers, and urban agriculture projects throughout the region.
• The Local Food Hub in Virginia, US connects small farmers with individual and institutional buyers, and also runs farmer training and food access programs.
• Check out the inspiring story of LINC Foods, a worker and farmer owned food hub based in Spokane, Washington, in the US: Northwest co-op builds for a local food future beyond Big Ag.

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Participatory budgeting is a way for citizens to actively engage in deciding how their tax money is spent. Local residents not only discuss and vote on public investments, they also develop and present ideas. Participatory budgeting has been implemented by more than 2,700 governments and 1,700 cities worldwide.
 

Take Action 

• Learn how to set up a participatory budgeting process, and read case studies of successful examples, with CitizenLab’s Beginners Guide to Participatory Budgeting. 
• The Participatory Budgeting Project has created an Organizing Toolkit for participatory budgeting advocates, and a Scoping Toolkit for officials and staff in local government. They also offer resources for implementing participatory budgeting in schools. 
• For the UK, check out this Introductory Guide to Participatory Budgeting from the PB Network. 
• Read about the potential impacts and successful examples of participatory budgeting in this backgrounder by Will Flagle on The Next System Project’s Elements of the Democratic Economy.
   

  Get inspired

• In 2008, Lisbon, Portugal became the first European capital to adopt participatory budgeting, by empowering citizens to use parts of the city's budget each year for projects to make the city more sustainable, resilient and environmentally-friendly. Read more in the article Lisbon: a decade of participatory budget, by Miguel Silva Graça.
• Frances Moore-Lappe tells the story of how, using participatory budgeting, the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte has effectively ended hunger through creating and financing dozens of projects connecting local farmers and consumers to realize food as a fundamental right.

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Community theater is a great way to take back entertainment from corporations like Disney and Netflix, and put it in local hands. It also provides a creative way to illuminate issues important to the community.

Take action

• The American Association of Community Theatre (AACT) provides a step-by-step guide to starting up a local theater company. They also describe the responsibilities and tasks of "theater people" ranging from stage managers and set designers to choreographers.
• The Community Theater Green Room offers tips from actors, directors and theater crews on props, lighting, and effects – from “cut and paste walls” to “realistic wrinkles” – as well as advice on fundraising, insurance and other matters.
• For those who want to participate in community theater for the first time, this Beginners Guide to Community Theatre gives useful tips on auditions, rehearsals, performances, and more.

Get inspired

• Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, US has been creating politically charged entertainment for more than 50 years. A core group of puppeteers is supplemented by community volunteers of all ages – no experience required.
• Bibi Bulak, in Timor Leste, was a political theater troupe covering, among other topics, food sovereignty, environmental issues, and poverty. Part of the Arte Moris nonprofit arts school, it produced plays, dramas for community radio stations, and songs to communicate social and environmental messages to mass audiences.

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Localized economies are created by and for the people who live there. Rather than subscribing to a global monocultural model, localized economies respect local cultures and needs, while allowing for the free exchange of knowledge and ideas across borders. In fact, localization requires international cooperation and collaboration to address global problems like the climate crisis, and to forge agreements to scale back the rapacious power of global corporations and banks. For this reason, a strong, globally networked movement based in international solidarity is needed, somewhat counter-intuitively, to enable localization.

Take action

• Connect with organizations working on both resisting corporate globalization and rebuilding local economies on our  Organizations for Change page. 
• Join a global community such as Local Futures' online network, the  International Alliance for Localization, to connect with like-minded individuals from around the world, share ideas and success stories, and celebrate the sheer number of wonderful initiatives that are flourishing against all odds.
• Host a community screening and discussion of the Economics of Happiness and other related films.
• Host a do-it-yourself Economics of Happiness workshop and toolkit, designed by Local Futures for people who want to kick-start effective global-to-local action in their community or within an existing group. During the day-long workshop (approximately 6.5 hours), participants are guided through a reflective process that culminates in the elaboration of a personal Global to Local action plan.
• If you can’t find the kind of localization-oriented group you’re looking for, consider setting one up. You may be surprised at how many other people in your area are interested!

Get inspired

• Local Futures' Maps of alternatives page links to many international and regional trans-local networks working towards local, ecological and solidarity economies. Find projects around the world spanning a variety of localization-related initiatives: food, energy, local currencies, tool sharing, solidarity economies, and more.
• Local Futures' Planet Local, also linked above, is a library of dozens of inspiring grassroots localization projects across the world.

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Mapping out small farms, stores, and food access can help members of your community connect with local food suppliers. It can also reveal gaps in local food availability that might represent meaningful projects for community groups, or new business opportunities for farmers and food entrepreneurs.

Take action

• Visualize how to shift food purchases locally with Campaign to Protect Rural England's Mapping Local Food Webs Toolkit.
• Involve younger community members with Countryside Classroom's activities on Mapping local food for kids, available in English and Welsh.
• Publish a list or map in your local newspaper, in flyers around town, or in local websites.
• Use the Economics of Local Food Systems: A Toolkit to Guide Community Discussions, Assessments and Choices, by Local Food Economics, "to make more deliberate and credible measurements" of local food systems in your region.

Get inspired

• The community coalition Food in Neighborhoods in Kentucky, US, created the LouFoodGuide, a spreadsheet of local farms and food pantries that others can use as a template.
• Local Food Connect in Melbourne, Australia offers an impressive online directory of local farmers, as well as food swaps, community gardens, and food justice initiatives.

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Modern life – especially in industrialized settings – can feel alienating, lonely and disconnected, especially during extraordinary times like the COVID-19 pandemic. Meaningful dialogue can help heal isolation as well as bridge divides, creating connection that forms the cornerstone of community and civic engagement.

Take action

• Connect with your neighbors and engage in meaningful discussions with The Complete Hosting Manual from Conversation Café.
• Get involved with the My Life, My Stories project that "provides unique opportunities for young adults and older adults to engage in meaningful conversation." For women, participate in their program Conscious Conversations: Our Role in Community, "a five-week intergenerational dialogue series centered on lived experiences that shaped our civic consciousness and the meaning of community."
• Join Living Room Conversations, an organization dedicated to healing divides and connecting through conversation. Learn how to host a conversation.

Get inspired

• The New York City public library in the US facilitates and hosts community conversations, creating "a truly democratic space where we can connect together through meaningful dialogue."
• In How I'm Finding Purpose and Connection in a Pandemic, Aanchal Dhar writes about finding purpose and connection during the COVID-19 pandemic through various facilitated community conversations.

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Plastic waste, driven by the expansion of the petrochemical industry and the explosion of single-use packaging accompanying corporate globalization, has swelled to become a global ecological and health crisis, leaving no part of the biosphere uncontaminated. While individual action is important, tackling this crisis will require going far beyond that, and moving upstream to stop the responsible corporations and industries and prevent the production of this harmful material in the first place. It will also require reversing globalization, contesting corporate power, and rebuilding localized economies that require less packaging by nature.

Take action

• Join Break Free From Plastic - the global movement working to stop plastic pollution for good - as an individual, organization or business, and take action against plastic today with these resources and campaigns.
• In the US, learn about the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act - "the most comprehensive set of policy solutions to the plastic pollution crisis ever introduced in Congress" - and send this letter or make this call to your representatives to support the Act; spread the word with this social media toolkit; and sign your organization on to this letter in support of the Act.
• Make your campus plastic free with this guide from Break Free From Plastic.
• Send this letter from Beyond Plastics to urge stores to phase out single-use plastic packaging.
• Join the #WeChooseReuse campaign across Europe to help replace single-use plastics with reusable systems.
• See the Get Involved page on the Plastic-Free July website for dozens of practical guides on reducing or eliminating the use of plastic in your home, office, school, community, and local government.

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In-depth, critical news coverage about corporate power is getting harder to find, as is news about the multitude of inspiring local initiatives emerging all over the world. Nonprofit public-interest news organizations and media outlets help fill this gap and play an indispensable role in generating an informed and engaged citizenry.

Take action

• Find news sources that provide reasoned, fact-based critiques of the global economy, and real-life stories of positive change, with Local Futures' list of Independent Media Sources.
• Find a community radio station near you with Wikipedia's lists of community radio stations in the US, Canada, and the UK, and the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia's page Find a Station.
• Find local and regional newspapers in any country using Online Newspapers' directory of newspapers.

Get inspired

• First Nations Experience is "the first and only national broadcast television network in the United States exclusively devoted to Native American and World Indigenous content," and is currently broadcast to 25 US states.
• Cape Town Community Television in South Africa proves that local media can strengthen community while connecting people to the broader world. The station covers hard news from the Cape Town region, gives marginalized communities a voice, airs programs for and by young people, and screens documentary films from around the world. The station reaches 2.7 million people each month.

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While cutting down forests to feed wood-fired power plants is a bad idea, there are simpler and more sustainable uses of wood as a fuel. In places where wood is abundant, for example, a single woodstove can simultaneously heat your home, cook your food, and heat the water to clean up afterwards. Using wood as a fuel also creates many local jobs. Woodstoves aren’t appropriate for dense urban areas where the air is already burdened with other pollution, or where the fuel must be delivered from long distances. The article The Argument in Favor of Wood Heating, from woodheat.org, sums up the pros and cons.

Take action

• Learn how to make rocket stoves for various applications – from space heating and cooking to water heating – with the Permies.com Energy forums and with LowImpact.org's article Rocket stoves and mass heaters: introduction.
• Many cultures have evolved sustainable methods of harvesting wood, including coppicing and pollarding, which involve periodically cutting trees and other woody plants back, after which the roots and branches send out multiple new stems that grow quickly. This allows wood from the tree to be “harvested” every few years, providing a sustainable and local source of renewable fuel. 

Get inspired

• To learn more about the history of coppicing, pollarding, and other techniques – some of which have been used since the Stone Age – check out Low-Tech Magazine's article How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again.

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Throughout the Global South, millions of rural people cannot afford fossil fuels for cooking, and there is very little wood available. One result is that in India alone, an estimated 750 million tons of another biofuel – cow dung – is burned annually for cooking or heating. A healthier alternative is to use a biogas digester to turn the dung into methane, similar to natural gas, which is then tapped and piped to the kitchen for cooking. Biogas digesters reduce air pollution, and leave behind solids that can be used as a fertilizer.

Take action

• LowImpact.org's article Biogas: introduction offers a detailed discussion of the theory and practice of biogas digesters, as well as links to videos by people who have built their own.
• The Pakistan-based site DoScience's article Design, Construction, and Installation of Biogas Plant has instructions for building biogas digesters in English and Urdu.  
• The appropriate technology site Appropedia's article Home Biogas System has detailed plans for a biodigester design used in the Philippines.

Get inspired

• The humanitarian aid organization Anera has designed and built a biogas digester for a West Bank Bedouin community in Palestine. Most cooking there was previously done on open fires, which is both expensive and unhealthy. Since most people in the community raise animals, a biogas digester to provide cooking fuel was a logical solution. Read more on the Anera website.

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We all have voices, and we can all sing. Singing with others is not only fun, it strengthens our connections to others and builds community at the same time.

Take action

• The organizers of a community choir in Jamestown, Rhode Island, US provide answers to the most common questions about starting a local chorus. They provide further details in this follow-up.
• The UK-based NGO The Big Big Sing offers a wealth of resources for community singing groups, including start-up guides for different kinds of choirs, a songbook with sheet music and audio, and an interactive way to connect with one of more than 3,500 existing choirs in the UK.
• This 10-step guide is for setting up an “all-grrl” a cappella group.

Be inspired

• People who sing in choirs almost always find it a joyful experience. The article Your Brain and Singing: Why Singing in a Choir Makes You Happier explains this connection.

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While we must urgently reduce the energy consumption of the economy overall, we can also take immediate steps at home to reduce the amount of energy required to meet the same ends through energy conservation and avoidance.

Take action

• Get started with Tips for energy saving at home by the Centre for Appropriate Technology in Wales.
• Unplug electric-powered devices that are not in use. Many of these – from coffee makers to computers – draw power even when they are "off". The NRDC report Home Idle Load gives hard numbers about phantom energy, and suggests ways to reduce it through changes in both individual behavior and public policy. Note: this kind of action does not address the energy and resource costs entailed in manufacturing and using these devices.
• Purchase an inexpensive plug-in monitor to become aware of your electricity usage and find out where you can make the biggest reductions. Many tool-lending libraries will lend you one of these devices for free.
• LowImpact.org shows not only how we can save energy, but also discusses how society can prevent energy efficiency gains from being captured by increased total consumption.
• The downloadable 80-page booklet Home Energy Projects was written for residents of the southern US state of Alabama, but those in other climates will still find useful information and instructions on insulating, weatherstripping, ductwork, ventilation and more.
• Build It Solar's Renewable Energy Site for Do-It-Yourselfers has links to a wide range of energy conservation ideas that go well beyond the usual – like making your own indoor storm windows and insulating curtains, and how to recover heat from drain water.

Get inspired

• Read what Post Carbon Fellow Richard Heinberg has done over the past 20 years to reduce his own household energy consumption – what has worked, what hasn't, and what still needs to be done.

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Puppet shows have a long and rich history in many cultures. Although puppet shows are always powerfully appealing to children, the right content can make them both entertaining and thought-provoking for adults as well.

Take action

• This step-by-step guide How to do Effective Puppet Shows is a good starting place, providing tips on characters, plot, staging, logistics and more.
• The website Puppet Building World offers detailed instructions and patterns for making various kinds of puppets, from hand puppets to arm-and-rod puppets, as well as instructions for making puppet stages.
• Not all puppet shows are meant for a small stage. Bread & Puppet Theater has been using large-scale puppets in street parades, political demonstrations, and their own "circuses" and "pageants" for more than 50 years. Their book 68 ways to make really big puppets shows how it's done.

Be inspired

• Modern Times Theater has been performing Punch and Judy puppet shows to overflow crowds in Vermont (USA) since 2007. Their shows combine humor, action and music in a way that engages children and adults alike. They also run workshops to teach puppetry to "participants from 7 to 107 years old."

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Because the global economic system promotes and depends upon competition, individualism, and separation, it has created what is being increasingly recognized as an epidemic of loneliness. In the long run, putting an end to this epidemic will require shifting from a growth- and consumption-obsessed global economic system to a plurality of local, sufficiency-based economies. In the meantime, connecting with others can both relieve the sense of loneliness we feel, while also helping to bring about systemic cultural and economic shifts.

Take action

• Get involved in projects working directly to tackle loneliness: The UnLonely Project (US), and the Campaign to End Loneliness and Be More Us (UK).
• Join the worldwide Transition movement and meet others in your community working on relocalization. Find or start a Transition initiative near you.
• Connect with your neighbors and engage in meaningful discussions with the help of The Complete Hosting Manual from Conversation Café.
• Support local businesses and local business alliances (see our Local Businesses page), which help build and strengthen local community connections.
• Work with your local government to affirm your town's commitment to wellbeing with the Charter Toolbox from the Charter for Compassion, promoting Compassionate Communities, where "the needs of all the inhabitants of that community are recognized and met, the well-being of the entire community is a priority, and all people and living things are treated with respect."

Get inspired

• Check out Shareable's e-book Community Solutions to the Loneliness Epidemic, which is brimming with strategies, projects, policies and inspiring examples from around the world showing how building community is the antidote to loneliness.

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In a world increasingly saturated with mass-produced, high-tech, energy-intensive gadgets and machines, the knowledge and skills needed to meet our needs with simpler, manually-powered tools and crafts is rapidly disappearing. Fortunately, many people and institutions are working to remedy this problem through various learning programs. Many such training opportunities exist around the world; the following are just a few ideas of where to start.

Take action

• The Berea College Student Craft program (Kentucky, US) offers a tuition-free education in traditional crafts. Learn more in the article At Berea College, Students Craft a Bright Future, Tuition-Free from The Craftsmanship Initiative.
• The Wendell Berry Farming Program at Sterling College (Kentucky and Vermont, US) offers a tuition-free farming curriculum focused on ecological agriculture and forestry using draft animals and other appropriately scaled mixed power systems.
• The Building Craft Program of the Prince's Foundation (UK), seeks to "preserve the wisdom and knowledge that embodies many of the traditional building skills."
• The short courses offered by the Centre for Alternative Technology (Wales) and workshops run by the Low Technology Institute teach various practical appropriate technologies and sustainable solutions.
• Training courses by L'Atelier Paysan (France) aim to reclaim and create skills and tools for self-sufficient small-scale ecological farming systems.
• Learn everything from compost toilet making to soap making to weaving with LowImpact.org's online courses.

Get inspired

• L’Atelier Paysan is a French cooperative that helps farmers design tools appropriate to the needs of small-scale farms practicing agroecology. The group makes plans for its tools available for free on its website and organizes trainings and workshops. Learn more in the Commons Transition article Julien Reynier and Fabrice Clerc from L’Atelier Paysan on self-build communities in farming.

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Many people have a lawn and would love to see food grown on it, but don't have the time or expertise. Other people are itching to get their hands in the soil, but don't have or can't afford their own land. Enter yard sharing programs – connecting these two groups and enabling more food gardens to flourish.

Take action

• If you have an unused lawn, invite neighbors without land to grow food on yours.
• If you don't have land, offer to create and maintain a garden in a neighbor's yard.
• Check out Shared Earth (US), an online platform that "connects people who have land, with people who want to garden or farm," as well as Farm My Yard (US) offering similar resources and ideas.
• Build a lawn-sharing system for your whole community using Utah Yard Share's toolkit Share a Yard as a model.

Get inspired

• Liberating Lawns in Toronto, Canada connects Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) young farmers with landowners.
• Farm it Forward in Sydney, Australia connects urban and suburban landowners with young people interested in farming. The landowner gets a weekly box of fresh produce, and the young gardeners gain valuable growing experience and a stipend. All excess produce is sold locally, and all funds are dedicated to continue employing young people to grow food.
• The nonprofit Fleet Farming, in Orlando, US converts the lawns of private homes into market gardens. Volunteers maintain the garden and share the harvest between homeowners and low-income farmers markets.
• The Back-Farms program in Salt Lake City, US "connects volunteer Garden Apprentices with senior citizens to build, cultivate, and maintain organic gardens in their backyards, providing a hands-on educational experience, connections, and fresh, local produce to all participants."

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Ecovillages are rural or urban communities that are, according to the Global Ecovillage Network, "consciously designed through locally owned, participatory processes in all four dimensions of sustainability (social, culture, ecology and economy) to regenerate their social and natural environments." Many traditional villages and new planned communities alike identify with the ecovillage movement. By building localized alternatives communally, ecovillages tackle both social isolation and the ecological crisis simultaneously, providing members with a sense of belonging and positive purpose.

Take action

• Visit the website of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), the hub for the worldwide ecovillage movement:
  • Find, connect with, and visit an ecovillage through GEN's Map of ecovillages.
  • Start an ecovillage with the resources on GEN's Frequently Asked Questions page (scroll down to "How can I start my own ecovillage?")
  • Learn about the various aspects of ecovillage planning, design, practice and more with GEN's Online courses.
• Browse the Diggers & Dreamers website for resources on communal living and intentional communities in the UK.
• Find an intentional community with the Online Communities Directory maintained by the Foundation for Intentional Community. While centered in the US, the directory includes communities around the world.

Get inspired

• Read descriptions of the hundreds of ecovillages comprising the Global Ecovillage Network on their Ecovillage Projects page.
• Pejeng Village, which lies in a region of Bali, Indonesia beset by mass tourism and overdevelopment, has adopted a mission of achieving water, food, energy, and economic sovereignty.
• Qiandao Ecovillage, China, combines Taoist and Buddhist philosophy with natural farming practices and a zero-waste lifestyle. The village produces its own toothpaste, soap, shampoo, and fertilizer, in addition to growing its own food and getting drinking water from a fresh spring. And residents have a lot of leisure time, too, participating in community singing, dancing, calligraphy, and more.

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In many cultures and for many generations, human "night soil" was composted and returned to the fields on which food was grown. Modern sewage treatment facilities break that loop, using significant amounts of energy while depriving soils of much-needed nutrients. Composting toilets are a solution to these problems, though they are mainly appropriate in rural areas. Designs can range from very simple and inexpensive toilets that anyone can build, to manufactured models with off-the-shelf components.

Take action

• The authoritative guide to all things composting toilets is The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. Learn and apply the basics quickly with the 12-page condensed instruction manual.
• Find 13 different models of home-built composting toilets – from the basic to the "fancy" – at MorningChores.com.
• This short video, Compost Toilets Online Course, from Low Impact TV, will tell you what you need to know to build your own simple composting toilet.

Get inspired

• In Ladakh, India, the ancient dry composting toilet, called the dechot, has been safely and successfully recycling valuable human waste into local soil fertility while protecting scarce water for centuries - a truly sustainable technology! This system is not a relic of the past, but a beacon of hope for the future; to learn more, read Tanya Dubey's article This ingenious toilet system in Ladakh could help India reach complete sanitation by 2022.
• In Kenya, 41% of the population lacks access to basic water services and 71% lack sanitary services. Kenya Connect is working to improve this situation by constructing composting toilets, with the first at two primary schools. The compost will be used on nearby gardens and trees.
• Compost toilets are catching on in more industrialized settings too. Read about rise of the no-flush movement in the UK by Emine Saner, and about applications in the US in What We Waste When We Flush the Toilet, by Deb Habib and Ricky Baruch.

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Anxiety, despair and grief about the state of the world – in particular the ecological crisis – are completely sensible, and sensitive, signs of compassion and empathy for our beleaguered planet. Yet, these feelings can also become overwhelming, to the point of inducing burnout, paralysis and withdrawal rather than engagement. Here we share some resources for helping to acknowledge and work through our anxiety and grief by reconnecting and re-engaging.

Take action

• Join the Work That Reconnects Network, based on the work and wisdom of Joanna Macy, which "helps people discover and experience their innate connections with each other and the self-healing powers of the web of life, transforming despair and overwhelm into inspired, collaborative action." Learn about the Spiral of Practices underlying this movement.
• Find and connect with the Hubs, facilitators, and friends of the Work that Reconnects Network in many countries across the world. Become a facilitator through one of their Facilitator Development Programs, offered online and in-person.
• Read A Guide to Eco-Anxiety: How to Protect the Planet and Your Mental Health, by Anouchka Grose, offering "emotional tools and strategies to ease anxiety by taking positive action on a personal and community level."
• Find or start a group through the Good Grief Network's program 10 Steps to Personal Resilience & Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate, which "helps individuals and communities build resilience by creating spaces where people can lean into their painful feelings about the state of the world and reorient their lives toward meaningful action."
• Become a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance and join its Events, such as Climate Cafe Conversations and workshops, to learn skills to support each other emotionally through the climate emergency.

Get inspired

• In Climate Crisis as a Spiritual Path, a 21-minute segment from the film The Wisdom to Survive: Climate Change, Capitalism and Community, Joanna Macy draws on the poetry of Rilke to remind us that our eco-grief stems from our profound caring for the world that is "grounded in our interconnectedness with all life."

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Energy democracy refers to the movement to bring the energy system under local control as a public good rather than an instrument for corporate profit. As the policy think tank Demos defines it, energy democracy involves seeing energy as "a resource to be created and owned by those who utilize it, in the service of healthy, sustainable living and environmental protection." This section links to resources and examples to help you democratize the energy system in your community.

Take action

• Understand the basics of energy democracy through the Transnational Institute and Xarxa per la Sobirania Energètica's Municipalist Manifesto, which outlines dozens of actions, policies, and protocols to make sure that energy services are created by and for the people.
• Learn about policies, campaign ideas, and strategies in The Next System Project's guide Building Community Capacity for Energy Democracy: A Deck of Strategies, The Institute for Local Self Reliance's Fighting Monopoly Power - Electricity page (scroll down to "Building Local Power"), and Demos' policy brief Energy Democracy: Building a Green, Resilient Future through Public and Community Ownership.
• Check out Greg Pahl's book, Power from the People, which explores how "homeowners, co-ops, nonprofit institutions, governments, and businesses are putting power in the hands of local communities through distributed energy programs and energy-efficiency measures", and how you can "plan, organize, finance, and launch community-scale energy projects."
• Choose the best policy instruments for your goals with Matthew Burke and Jennie Stephens' research paper Energy democracy: Goals and policy instruments for sociotechnical transitions, which compares energy democracy policies and outcomes in the US.
• Connect with other people working on energy through the Energy Democracy Alliance's global Energy Democracy Map and open knowledge platform.

Get inspired

• New Energy Economy in New Mexico, US takes a multi-pronged approach to energy sovereignty including campaigning against fossil fuels, advocating for renewable energy policies, and installing community energy systems throughout the state. 
• The members of Unión de Cooperativas Tosepan in Cuetzalan, Mexico have rejected big energy projects like hydroelectric dams and high-voltage transmission lines in favor of home-scale electricity systems. 
• Residents of Hamburg, Germany decided in a 2013 campaign called Our Hamburg, Our Grid that their local electric utility should be run as a public service, rather than as a source of corporate profits. In an historic referendum, they voted to reclaim local control and ownership of their power system from the Swedish energy giant Vattenfall, enabling the City to undertake a more ambitious transition towards local renewable energy.
• See many more inspiring examples in the Local Energy section of Local Futures' Planet Local library of alternatives.

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Land reform is a global movement to reverse the growing inequality of land ownership that concentrates more and more land into fewer hands, depriving millions of people of the ability to secure livelihoods as small-scale farmers. Land reform efforts, such as those demanded by the international peasant’s movement, La Via Campesina, aim to equitably distribute land in all countries to enable and support small-scale peasant farmers.

Take action

• Explore the various toolkits to support land reform for agroecological farming and smallholders' livelihood security put together by the International Land Coalition, covering everything from diverse land tenure strategies, to indigenous peoples' and community land rights, to effective actions against land grabbing.
• Support the No Land, No Life! campaign of Pesticide Action Network Asia-Pacific, in solidarity with peasant struggles for land rights and against land grabbing and corporate land consolidation in the Asia-Pacific region.
• In Europe, get involved with the Access to Land network of grassroots organizations securing land for agroecological farming. See examples of good practices from across the continent, and find and join a member organization on their Members page.
• Join La Via Campesina, the international peasants' movement, and support campaigns in many countries pursuing equitable land reform for advancing food sovereignty.

Get inspired

• In his article, Food Sovereignty and Redistributive Land Reform, Peter Rosset chronicles many forms of land reform including "land reform from below" in which millions of landless peasant farmers have successfully occupied and reclaimed millions of hectares of land in various countries, and the many positive social and environmental outcomes of this reform.

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Giant corporations continue to amass power and wealth, further undermining community sovereignty and character, exploiting workers and the environment, and driving inequality to obscene levels. To build sustainable, equitable and just local economies, we must tackle corporate power head-on.

Take action

• Get involved and participate in the Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity, a global network of over 250 social movements, civil society organizations (CSOs), trade unions and communities affected by the activities of transnational corporations (TNCs).
• Learn why it is so crucial to resist concentration of corporate power, and how to do so – especially at the policy level in the systematic guide Fighting Monopoly Power: How States and Cities Can Beat Back Corporate Control and Build Thriving Communities, by the Institute for Local Self Reliance (US). Topics covered include banking, electricity, food and farming, and small business.
• For small businesses in the US, sign this petition urging the US Congress to break up Amazon, "America's most dangerous monopoly," by the Institute for Local Self Reliance.
• Learn why and how to stop a big box retail store from establishing itself in and dominating your local community with the Big Box Toolkit from the Institute for Local Self Reliance.
• Learn how to do research on corporations with the Investigating Companies Do-It-Yourself Handbook and the Know Your Enemy online course by Corporate Watch (UK).

Get inspired

• A coalition of activists, labor unions, and local politicians defeated a proposed headquarters in New York for the online retail behemoth Amazon that would have depended on huge public subsidies, exploited labor and harmed local businesses in this article in Vox. Also in New York City, a coalition of groups including Walmart Free NYC and the Institute for Local Self Reliance have successfully kept the retail giant out of the city.
• Tosepan in Puebla, Mexico, was instrumental in blocking a planned Walmart super center in the town of Cuetzalan. Read more about Tosepan in this article on Local Futures' blog.

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