Independents' Day

Susan Greco is a senior writer at Inc. Kate O'Sullivan is a reporter. Associate editor Thea Singer contributed to this report.

To learn how to collaborate on a project or in an alliance with competitors, go to www.inc.com/keyword/alliance.

Act Locally

The Alliance: Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (www.livingeconomies.org)
Founded: October 2001
Members: 18 local networks comprising companies, individuals, and nonprofits
Driver: Local economies are increasingly dealing with globalization issues

For Judy Wicks, the socially responsible business movement didn't die when Unilever -- with hundreds of brands -- bought Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., in April 2000. But the movement certainly had the breath knocked out of it. The Vermont company that had served as a model of fairness to workers and an advocate for the environment had been absorbed into the sort of entity that Wicks and her ilk had been fighting: multinational behemoths that in their view transfer wealth out of local communities. It was time, says Wicks, to reevaluate where the progressive-business movement was headed. "We needed a new vision and a new model," says the president of $5-million White Dog Enterprises Inc., a restaurant and gift-shop business in Philadelphia. "And new values, really," she adds.

To explore new alternatives, Wicks joined forces with Laury Hammel, president of the $10-million Longfellow Clubs, in Wayland, Mass.; community organizer Michael Shuman in Washington, D.C.; and development consultant David Korten in Bainbridge Island, Wash.

"The solution to globalization is not to throw rocks at big businesses like Wal-Mart but to build the alternative," says Shuman, author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, the book that essentially begat the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). The "alternative" that Shuman is talking about includes not just businesses that are planted on Main Street but entire economies that are locally based. "The more times a dollar circulates in my community, the more jobs, income, and wealth there is in my community," says Shuman. And if that well-worn dollar must go elsewhere, let it go to another locally owned business, not to a global corporation.

BALLE is basically an alliance of alliances, a collection of organizations across the country that are dedicated to supporting locally owned businesses. Some of the alliance's 18 members, like Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility and Colorado P3 (People, Planet, Profit), have been around for a while. Others, like Responsible Business Minnesota and BALLE Northwest in Seattle, are new.

As part of BALLE's organizing effort, each member group is constructing a sourcing database of sustainable local businesses to be linked on the BALLE Web site. Say, for example, that Laury Hammel wants to offer organic peanuts in the café of his fitness club and there are no peanut farmers in the area. He enters organic peanuts in the appropriate box on the BALLE site, and a list of suppliers will pop up. "The most important function of BALLE is to create the technology for being able to do business with each other," says Wicks. "Small people finding small people -- you need some structure for it."

BALLE is so new that members aren't yet sure they'll meet their ambitious goals. But some have already experienced benefits. Doug Hammond, chairman of the Pioneer Valley Social Venture Network, in Northampton, Mass., says BALLE helped pull off a community event that attracted attendees and cosponsors who had wildly divergent ideologies. "We had the suits and the farmers," says Hammond, "the pro-development and the pro-environment. People didn't have to get over the hurdle that just one vantage point would be represented, because BALLE represents a broad coalition of businesses and organizations. Local economies is a very simple unifying theme. It's big enough to cover all of us." --Thea Singer

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