Local Economy

Anna D’Aste makes and teaches ceramic art on 12th Street in the ""Village of the Arts" in Bradenton, FL. She  was part of the original group of artists who moved into the neighborhood 13 years ago to start the Village. When...

Bob Stilger has a forty year relationship with Japan and, in the wake of the massive destruction since March 2011, has returned to work around the country as a witness and listener. In this recent post from his blog,...

I wrote this piece for the very first issue of the new YES! and it struck me as worth revisiting. What's your take? Do you see possibilities in a time of chaos? There are times in history when two eras—with...

Government is not the biggest threat to community life, as it was thought to be when the First Amendment to the Constitution was drafted. John and Peter reflect on how today’s “imperial institutions” of the not-for-profit world and corporate...

When we hear the term “sustainable communities” in general it refers to the Triple Bottom Line of Social, Economic and Environmental interests at the “community scale.” For our purposes in discussing sustainable (or resilient) communities, the focus is on...

“I get the jitters asserting that helping can be harmful,” says Maurice Lim Miller, founder and CEO of the Family Independence Initiative, in his Huffington Post blog post When Helping Doesn’t Help. Lim Miller takes John McKnight’s well-known position that...

It’s never too early to start learning about building community. In Sarasota County, FL babies joined teenagers and younger kids in a forum called Community Data 2.0: A NeighborKID Perspective, the fourth workshop in a year-long, county-wide series that...

At the close of my first day working for Grassroots Grantmakers I found myself staring at a stack of books my supervisor, Janis, had left for me to read.  I thumbed through a couple of short packets in the...