Transcribed by Munir Uddin
Janaia Donaldson: Hi, welcome to Peak Moment. I'm Janaia Donaldson. I'm in the San Francisco headquarters of BALLE- Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and I'm with Executive Director Don Shaffer. Thanks for joining me.
Don Shaffer: You are welcome, happy to be here.
Janaia Donaldson: It is really nice to be sharing in the core place that things are happening at least one level. So, what is BALLE? – Besides a fun name to say.
Don Shaffer: BALLE is a network of over 12,000 entrepreneurs and business owners across the United States and Canada, who are committed to creating healthy, diversified, local economies. So, they are all locally owned and locally operated businesses, generally tend to be small and medium size, and the vast majority of them are also committed to ecologically sustainable practices and socially responsible practices in their businesses.
Janaia Donaldson: So, I am going to go back to the name of this – Businesses alliance, Locally Owned – locally really mindful about their local practice which we can get into. Living … living – what’s that about?
Don Shaffer: Well living is the sustainability part. We weren’t sure if sustainability, or sustainable was going to be the word to describe that spirit – you know from now to the end of time and so we felt like living got away from the jargon, but yet encompassed what it is they were trying to do.
Janaia Donaldson: I love that in there because it says, “We are part of a living world”, we are not separate from that and economies and businesses recognize that, and living also is organic and in that sense sort of messy – organic being responding to what is needed at the time, what the situation or the environment is.
Don Shaffer: That’s right. So living systems. I think it is a systems thinking basis, I think David Korten came up with the term.
Janaia Donaldson: That is a good thought. How did BALLE get started, how old is it?
Don Shaffer: BALLE is, I guess just about 5 years since inception this month.
Janaia Donaldson: And we are at what? … We are at September 06.
Don Shaffer: That’s right, yes. So, fall 2001 Judy Wicks and Lori Hammel who are the co-founders and co-chairers of BALLE had a conversation that they started with David Korten and Michael Schuman, and other mainly members of Social Venture Network which is another group based here in San Francisco. They got together and said, “There’s a movement for larger businesses to reform themselves – become more sustainable” and that is happening under the rubric of Businesses for Social Responsibility, or BSR. It is a well-established group at that time. We need to have something for smaller companies and we also want to focus on local economies, and local ownership as an important cornerstone of a healthy democracy, a healthy community etc.
Janaia Donaldson: So then what happened?
Don Shaffer: So that was the conversation and by about a year later, the first 10 or 12 BALLE networks came online. So the structure of BALLE is that we have 36 local business networks that are part of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. So these local business networks are in big cities, like the Sustainable Business Network of greater Philadelphia, or other in smaller towns, like Sustainable Connections in Bellingham Washington. Or other in rural regions, like the Rogue River Valley in Southern Oregon.
And so these are collections of business owners and community leaders that were getting together to say – How can we commit ourselves to greater degree? How can we rally our community to build a healthy local economy here.
Janaia Donaldson: So, that network is sort of chapter in a way, but they have their own autonomy to approach their own community in their own way … is that how it works?
Don Shaffer: That is right – they are fully independent and autonomous organizations. They do their own fund raising, they have their own names, they have their own Boards of Directors and are affiliated with BALLE in a sense that is not a like a franchise. We don’t have too many black and white rules they need to adhere to … but they need to be committed to the living economy principles that we have on our web site, which anyone can go to.
Janaia Donaldson: Which is?
Don Shaffer: Which is – livingeconomies.org and then you click on “About Us” and then “Our Principles”.
Janaia Donaldson: Which are, living economies.
Don Shaffer: Yeah. The main thrust of it is that there is a commitment to producing, distributing, selling, and consuming as much of our basic needs as we can from local sources … so that a community should produce and consume as much as it reasonably can from what is either grown, or manufactured, or what have you from within that community. And that can be in a huge city, it could be a handful of neighborhoods, in a rural area that could be 4-5 counties. Really, the definition of local depends on what is appropriate for where you are.
Janaia Donaldson: On the locale … I mean that I can see that, because I would imagine in a city like San Francisco – a neighborhood group cooperating to produce what? … Community gardens and distribution could be one entity, whereas in a small rural county, it could be the whole county, right.
Don Shaffer: That’s right.
Janaia Donaldson: How did you, yourself get involved with BALLE.
Don Shaffer: Well, I read an article in Orion Magazine in the winter of 2004. I had known about Judy Wicks, of the White Dog Café for many years.
Janaia Donaldson: We should tell people a little bit about that … what is she?
Don Shaffer: She is an extremely inspiring entrepreneur who has owned the restaurant for 25 years called the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
She almost single handedly created a local food system based on sustainable agriculture in the greater Philadelphia area. She saw a documentary at one point, on factory farming of hogs, and upon seeing that went to her chef at the restaurant … and said, “We are taking all meat products off the menu until we can find a locally and sustainable harvested source for meat products”.
Janaia Donaldson: It is not doing the antibiotics and the pesticides … and the cruelty!
And once she had done that, she continued on her learning curve and went right down the menu, and said … “We need to find local and sustainable sources for everything that we serve”. So this was, you know, quite a long time ago and it wasn’t so in vogue as it is today … thankfully. So, she was part of, you know, with Alice Waters and others moving this trend forward and she said, - I would not have done this for my restaurant, I can either hoard this knowledge and have this be my market niche, or I can share it with all my competitors and try and get as many restaurants as possible in the Philadelphia area to adhere to these practices with some variation thereof.
So, she did that therein and several hundred restaurants in Philadelphia that are part of the network. And then she said when she did that for her industry sector… she said "what other parts of our local economy here could we localize?"
Janaia Donaldson: What a visionary!
Don Shaffer: So, energy, capital, media, clothing, building products, etc and thus was born the Sustainable Business Network of greater Philadelphia. So once she had done that in fall 2001, she said it maybe, we can do this in other places.
Janaia Donaldson: So you read about her, and something happened.
Don Shaffer: I read about her and I impulsively went to the annual conference a couple of months later in Philadelphia. I flew cross-country, went to the conference and two months later … here, I was a national coordinator.
Janaia Donaldson: Wow! That’s moving fast. Well, you just skated right into this … Yeah – tell us, you own a business?
Don Shaffer: I do, co-owner of a company called Comet Skateboards. We have the world's only solar powered skateboard factory.
Janaia Donaldson: Good.
Don Shaffer: We use only forest or chip council certified wood, water based coatings. We manufacture all of our products here in San Francisco.
Janaia Donaldson: Not overseas… they are all local?
Don Shaffer: Not overseas, right. So, there is the transportation issue – our supply chains were constantly working to make it shorter and shorter in terms of supply lines.
So, we had made a local and sustainable commitment in 1997 when the company started and so it’s partly my interest coming from that – that made BALLE intriguing to me and being able to share with other entrepreneurs and business owners all over the country … best practices etc. It was very appealing and also to work with people like right here in the Bay Area on our local economy here, and try build more companies like ours.
Janaia Donaldson: The more the better.
Don Shaffer: And I'm a lifetime reader of Wendell Berry who also had a major, major influence … he still does, on how I think about local economies.
Janaia Donaldson: He's one of our visionary elders. He's spoken to a lot of us on what true economy is … I mean his book on home economics – about home being the place where we are rooted and that we care for and that we want to continue. So you're doing that.
Don Shaffer: He is a hero of mine, and a lot of other people's, big, big motivator to us.
Janaia Donaldson: You mentioned here about sustainable businesses. Earlier we had talked about the Triple Bottom Line. So I wanted you to just tell us what you mean by that?
Don Shaffer: Triple Bottom Line essentially means that you as a business owner or stake holder in a business, employee or what have you – you are looking at profits.
Janaia Donaldson: Financial, profits?
Don Shaffer: Bottom line financial profits.
Janaia Donaldson: Right.
Don Shaffer: You are looking at the people. So, it is profits, people and planet. So the bottom line is profits, you have to have those to stay in business, as we all know.
Janaia Donaldson: Correct.
Don Shaffer: In terms of people, you are actually measuring how transparent you are being with your finances. A are you encouraging people to use public transportation? What kind of safety you are fostering, safety practices. A whole host of things that are in the social responsibility – how you treat your employees and other community stakeholders in terms of the people. So, first profits, second people, third planet.
So, planet is just widely defined as how your business – what the footprint of your business is and how much waste you are creating, in terms of inputs and outputs looking at every part of your business. We are trying to measure.
The idea of the Triple Bottom Line is you are actually measuring these things. You are not just making kind of bland pronouncements about your intention – but you are actually looking at, measuring your results and then ideally looking to improve those every year.
Janaia Donaldson: That is a pretty ambitious goal, because I realize it is always going to be moving. The new things that show up on the horizon here, planet side you are thinking about the toxicity of your chemicals. Or you know, the buildings that you are working in, and how much heating … I mean there is a huge range of things.
Don Shaffer: Yeah, yeah. So a big thing with BALLE is we are encouraging people anywhere along the path to get engaged with BALLE network.
So, we are not saying … "There is this pristine, perfect state of being that you need to be at, before you can be part of BALLE" – we are saying if you have an intention to try and build a healthy local economy and you are a locally owned business, and you have these other goals around social responsibility or ecological sustainability, that’s the whole purpose … it is to help more and more businesses move along that path.
Janaia Donaldson: So, I would imagine that part of what groups you are doing are mentoring one another in a sense, or sharing their best practices. So what’s happening if you are on a local level? What kind of projects and initiatives are people doing at that level?
Don Shaffer: Right – so let’s start with that one because that is at the core of what we are doing. So, there is a program we however have called Circle of Entrepreneurs where you have got, say 8 or 12 entrepreneurs in a given circle get together – and each month they spend a few hours with one another, they share common business problems that they are facing. They encourage each other to adopt more and more sustainable practices and more and more people friendly practices, more and more community friendly practices and it is essentially a support network that you have that allows you to be better with your business, and better with how you are contributing to your community and the environment etc.
So that’s the Circle of Entrepreneurs program that is now spreading through a lot of our networks, and there is a specific structure for it, and how it is facilitated etc. But there are lots of different ways to do it.
Janaia Donaldson: And would people in one network be from different industries perhaps?
Don Shaffer: They could be.
Janaia Donaldson: Or could they all be the same if it is a larger region?
Don Shaffer: It depends. So, some networks cross-fertilize across industries. Others like Judy pioneered the concept of building blocks of a local economy. So they do it by food, clothing, shelter, energy, and media. So, they do it within an industry. So that is one way.
Another activity that local networks are involved in, are straightforward networking events and speaker events that bring people together to inspire them. You know like David Korten or Michael Shuman will come to town and every one comes together and gets to hear them speak, and then there is a lot of Q & A and active dialog afterwards.
So they are those kinds of events. Then there is classic kind of Chamber of Commerce activity – encouraging the businesses that are part of the local network to do business with each other more, because that builds how much money is staying circulating in the local economy. So, there are various ways if that takes form. We have an online market place that encourages that.
Janaia Donaldson: For everybody within the whole BALLE network, all the businesses?
Don Shaffer: Both. So, within a local network … there is you know; for instance the sustainable business network of Philadelphia has its own market place, that encourages business there, and then it rolls up to an aggregate online market place that we have at livingeconomies.org. So that it’s just in the process of getting going but that’s another activity. We do "buy local first" campaigns.
Janaia Donaldson: Which is one of the things that we learned about through one of your chapters, I guess it would be in Ashland … a buy local campaign here this fall of ’06.
Don Shaffer: Right. So those are often focused on either retail businesses. So you have got a lot of smaller, locally owned bookstores, hardware stores, cafés etc that are going up against bigger competitors and so it’s we want to encourage people if they want to have a unique, distinctive, downtown shopping district you need to support these businesses. And food is the other area that is often included in the buy local, because intuitively people do seem to get that it is a good idea to eat local if you can.
Janaia Donaldson: Yeah, yeah. There is a lot of popularity going with this you know the local hundred mile diet, or locally produced foods in the sense that as the oil prices are rising, transportation cost are higher we are going to want more, and it'll be more cost effective as well, but similar your Triple Bottom Line it could be healthier for people and for producers, and for the planet – to have our local food, and of course goods as well.
Don Shaffer: That’s right. So lot of BALLE network’s food is really central of the origin of BALLE and so we are in many, many communities. We are actively involved in building the popularity of farmers markets and CSAs, and things that will allow small family farms to survive and thrive.
Janaia Donaldson: So you say it is community-supported agriculture. So you buy a share in what the farmer’s out put is?
Don Shaffer: That’s right.
Don Shaffer: It is becoming a lot more popular.
Janaia Donaldson: Yeah, yeah. We're seeing it everywhere – It is really exciting. So any other things on the local network level … any other kind of projects or initiatives that people are doing?
Don Shaffer: Those were some good examples. I think that green building is a really hot area right now. So you have got a lot of the networks that are bringing more awareness to their communities about the virtues of green building both on the residential and commercial side.
And then energy is an emerging, very hot area where everyone is looking at renewable, alternative energy supplies and the question is – is that going to be dominated by huge multinational corporations in the same way that the oil industry is, or are there more localized solutions that we can all work together to create? So that’s a very hot area right now.
Janaia Donaldson: Yeah, I can believe. You have got to find some of those alternatives. Of course I am cheering for the local responses, it is also far more secure when we have our local, not just more money into our local economy.
So, in addition to the regional or area network – small networks, what’s happening sort of on BALLE’s national level, North American level. What you do at headquarters?
Don Shaffer: Well one of the big things that we do is we have big an annual conference that we do every year … we go back and forth between the coasts. So, last year it was in Burlington, Vermont the year before in Vancouver, and the year before that Philly, the year before that in Portland. So we have got our 5th annual conference coming up at UC Berkeley this coming May 31 through June 2, ’07 and part of the reason I mentioned that, it is a great opportunity to convene every one from all over the US and Canada that’s involved. But also this year we are going to be adding two pre-conference workshops or seminars. One is going to be on manufacturing and supply chain issues.
So up to now the focus of a lot of BALLE programs at the local network level has been on retail businesses, food, to a certain extent, energy and building materials.
So we are looking now at how you can apply BALLE principles to manufacturing businesses, and more so, some of the supply chain issues – shortening supply lines so there is less transportation, looking at creating regional brands. So is it possible for a skateboard company or a yogurt company to build a business just selling to a certain region. As opposed to feeling like they have to distribute everywhere.
So there are lots of interesting issues involved with that. So we are going to have a whole day devoted to that. We also are pioneering a new approach to economic development here in California right now – out of this office where we are working with City and County governments to see how they can do economic development using local living economy principles.
So up to now, local governments traditionally have given big tax breaks and subsidies to large outside corporations to come – to lure them to come to town to provide jobs, you know tax based etc with mixed results - someone like Michael Shuman has a lot informed position on that, but mixed at best. So our argument is – take some of those resources and do a better job at incubating local entrepreneurs and building a base of small and medium sized locally owned businesses that are going to take advantage of some of these trends in sustainable agriculture and renewable energy, green building and zero waste manufacturing.
So we're doing a pilot project in San Benito County about 90 miles south of San Francisco, over the last 15 months it has gone really well. We are having a conference there on October 19th to showcase some of the work that we have done down there. And now at the state level in Sacramento, they would like to see us do this kind of economic development, consulting work in four other counties and if that goes well, then we're looking to roll it out statewide and would like to for other, already Washington State and Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Iowa and some other states are interested in what we were doing and how they can apply it there. It has got a lot of potential.
Janaia Donaldson: It’s happening, I mean what I hear is some wisdom about putting the energy back into our communities with organizations and businesses who are rooted, right?
Don Shaffer: That’s right. That is the whole idea.
Janaia Donaldson: So that our money isn’t just going out to the rest of the world only.
Don Shaffer: And part of our position is that businesses that are locally owned and operated by definition are able to be more rooted in the community. We are not trying to demonize big companies, or say any person – what have you … is bad. It’s not the point, but the point is that if you want to have a healthy community, we feel like there is just higher quality interaction and what not that you can have with the diversified base of locally owned businesses. So at least it’s an important part.
Janaia Donaldson: In our last 3 minutes any other things that you are doing, or dreaming – what’s up … what’s the vision, and planning?
Don Shaffer: So our vision is that we see, this is Judy’s words - A sustainable global economy as a network of local living economies.
So whereas now we have 36 local business networks – we envision hundreds and thousands, and we have our first couple of Chambers of Commerce, they are now members of BALLE. So we are kind of crossing that divide to conventional business organizations.
Janaia Donaldson: That’s wonderful!
Don Shaffer: Our mission is to catalyze strength, and connect local business networks that are committed to these principles. And so we hope that there can be many, many, and many, more in years to come.
Janaia Donaldson: Who can join BALLE?
Don Shaffer: Well, the main criteria that we have on the flipside is that we do not encourage publicly traded companies to join BALLE, because then the ownership is disseminated widely and obviously not locally.
So that’s the biggest criteria. Other than that, businesses are locally owned and that they fundamentally not only agree, but also are enthusiastic about pursuing the local living economy principles that we have and beyond that it really depends on the network exactly how they define membership at the local level. So a Chamber of Commerce in San Benito County maybe more focused on local, whereas the Green Enterprise Alliance in Toronto is very much focused on sustainable businesses.
Janaia Donaldson: So they have different flavors – different local flavors to this.
Don Shaffer: There are different – different types and we want to function as a clearinghouse of resources to all of them that are trying to make progress.
Janaia Donaldson: It would seem to me that the delight of this – it could be endless, and stronger.
Don Shaffer: Yeah. We want to be rigorous, but we don’t want to bind people … we need to meet communities where they are.
Janaia Donaldson: Sounds like your own model here is that BALLE is also living and breathing, to be responsive to what’s here locally?
Don Shaffer: That is accurate, that is what we are trying to do. It is not always easy, but that is the idea.
Janaia Donaldson: Well as life isn't alway easy, right here you are creating an organism here.
So I wish you well. I think this a wonderful enterprise and timely for us – well actually probably for the whole world to re-invigorate our local economies, local people, our local services. It is a good time. Thank you.
Don Shaffer: Thanks.
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