Judy Wicks is a woman who loves to build local living economies – she formed the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia as an outgrowth of her work building a sustainable local food economy around her restaurant, Philadelphia's White Dog Café. Laury Hammel is a man who loves to start socially responsible business organizations – he founded New England Businesses for Social Responsibility in 1988 and co-founded the national organization Business for Social Responsibility in 1991.

After meeting through the Social Venture Network (SVN), a national community of company founders, investors, and social entrepreneurs, Judy and Laury realized that merging their interests in organizing businesses and building local economies could build a strong movement for grassroots economic change in North America and beyond.

BALLE began as a project of SVN, where Judy and Laury were serving on the board. After introducing the SVN Local Network Initiative to spread her work in building local economies, Judy convened a group of twenty SVN members to explore the concept at her Pocono Mountain retreat in the summer of 2001. The group invited author and economist Michael Shuman to add his expertise on the benefits of local business ownership. At the retreat, plans were made to integrate the theme of local economies into the SVN fall conference, and Judy nominated author David Korten as an SVN “visionary advisor” to share his vision for a more democratic, community-based alternative to corporate globalization.

At the conclusion of the SVN conference, inspired by talks on local living economies by David, Michael, and Judy, business owners interested in forming local networks met on October 14, 2001, and adopted the name Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. BALLE was officially launched with Laury and Judy as founding co-chairs and Michael and David on the first board of advisors. Under Laury’s leadership, BALLE eventually spun off from SVN to become its own non-profit organization, and held its first national conference in Portland, Oregon, in 2003.  BALLE and SVN continue as sister organizations, jointly sponsoring Social Venture Institutes.

BALLE hired Michelle and Derek Long, of Sustainable Connections in Bellingham, as the first national coordinators, followed from 2004-2007 by Don Shaffer, now president of RSF Social Finance. Over its seven-year history, BALLE has grown to include 60 local business networks encompassing more than 15,000 entrepreneurs in the US and Canada.

“The deep issue is democracy,” says David Korten, author of The Great Turning and When Corporations Rule the World. “Do we really believe that power should be rooted in people and community – decentralized – or should it be centralized either in government or in large corporations?"

Judy's story

When Judy Wicks moved onto a leafy Philadelphia street in 1972, she discovered that her new neighborhood was to be torn down to make way for a mall. “How could it be that these charming brownstone row houses and neighborhood shops would be demolished to make way for chain stores and fast-food restaurants?” she exclaimed.  This must have been her first BALLE moment!  After helping to save the block from the wrecking ball, Judy opened the White Dog Café in January 1983 as a take-out coffee and muffin shop on the first floor of her house.  Over the years the business grew into additional row houses and the menu expanded, until by 1989 the White Dog had grown to a full-service restaurant seating more than 200 customers, with a menu inspired by fresh local produce from the family farms of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Continuing to live above the shop, Judy grew deep roots in her community, providing educational programs on progressive issues and developing a mission of service in four areas: serving customers, employees, community, and nature. In serving nature, the White Dog Café became the first business in Pennsylvania to purchase 100 percent of its electricity from wind power, developed a recycling and compost project, and installed a solar hot water system for washing all those dishes.

In 1998, after reading about the cruel treatment of factory-farmed hogs, Judy told her chef to take all the pork off the menu until she could find a humane source. A farmer who was supplying the restaurant with free-range chickens and eggs knew Amish farmers who kept pigs in a meadow, with enough space to move around and live a natural piggy life. But she didn't stop there. Next she heard about the plight of the cow, a natural herbivore that had been taken off pasture and kept in barns and feedlots. Judy found local sources for grass-fed beef and dairy products.

Gradually Judy worked her way through her menu, scouting sources, visiting farms, making introductions, until the chicken, the eggs, the beef, and the dairy products all came from humane and sustainable local sources, along with the already local organic produce she had long purchased. What she couldn't source locally – coffee, sugar, chocolate – she bought from fair-trade suppliers. She grew a nice niche for the White Dog, the only restaurant in Philadelphia with a menu based on local and fair trade, with only humanely raised meat and poultry.

And then came a major decision point: Hoard or share? Keep this as her market niche alone, or throw it open to every restaurateur in Philadelphia? She realized that if she really cared about the pigs, the environment polluted by the concentration of manure, family farmers driven out by corporate factory farms, and consumers eating unhealthy meat, then she would share her knowledge with her competitors. It wasn't enough to be one sustainable business - she wanted to work cooperatively to build a sustainable system. Judy formed a non-profit, White Dog Community Enterprises, and began contributing 20 percent of her café's profits toward its mission of building a local living economy in the Philadelphia region.

She hired the nonprofit's first staff person, whose job it was to connect chefs with local farmers, building a regional network of farms, restaurants, and stores. At the same time, Judy made a loan to a farmer to buy a refrigerated truck so he could deliver pastured pork to other restaurants. Next, she asked what else could be sourced more locally, more sustainably: Clothing? Building materials? Energy?

She began meeting with other like-minded business owners in the Philadelphia area and talking up her vision of a sustainable local economy until she had built another network, the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, founded in 2001. Today SBN Philly has more than 400 members representing the areas of sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, green building, recycling, eco-friendly office and cleaning supplies, independent media, downtown retail, community capital, and the other building blocks that comprise a local living economy.

From one small restaurant, many ideas for change have come. Judy claims that her true occupation is using good food to lure innocent customers into social activism! 

For more information on Judy’s work, visit: www.judywicks.com; www.whitedog.com.