Posted on April 3, 2009

Alissa and I are excited to announce that, effective this week, the Small-Mart Initiative is joining forces with the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, or BALLE, based in San Francisco. Our offices will remain in Washington, and our efforts will continue to focus on nurturing local businesses and promoting community self-reliance. Of particular importance to those of you who regularly read our blog, our regular commentaries will continue—except that there will be even more of them, from more voices in our movement.

We'd like to take a few minutes to lay out for you our plans: some history about our work, some background on BALLE, and some information about what these changes mean about our existing resources and next projects.

Small-Mart History
As most of you know, our work has come out of advocacy around the arguments in two books I wrote: Going Local (1998) and The Small-Mart Revolution (2006). All kinds of projects spun out from this work: hundreds of public talks and debates; a dozen leakage analyses and other economic develop studies; and major in-depth studies of business subsidies and community food enterprises.

In 2002, I started to work as a half-time contractor for the Training and Development Corporation (TDC), a national not-for-profit think tank, design shop, and management company based in Bucksport, Maine. TDC was founded in 1975 to improve the performance of people and institutions in the economy, and our role was to help create its Worksphere Program. In 2004, I joined TDC full-time as vice president for enterprise development, and in early 2007, I hired Alissa Barron as a research and communications manager. Over the past year, thanks largely to Alissa's efforts, we were able to put all our research, policy and advocacy efforts into www.small-mart.org.

Before we explain our decision to move to BALLE, we should first say how grateful we've been for the home TDC has provided for our work. The folks at TDC have been terrific colleagues – smart, visionary, and downright decent. And our sincere hope is that BALLE-TDC collaborations will continue in our new capacity.

Now a few words about BALLE... — read more