Rescuing Your Local Economy Success Stories for Sustainable Communities

This book is a collection of stories about communities that have made a significant positive impact on their local economy by using easily duplicated strategies you can do in your own town. You can: -Make slight improvements to well established practices, like new business "incubators", and change their emphasis, resulting in significantly more bang for the buck. -Use new digital tools to enable groups of small local business people to band together and get large customers. -Make changes to traditional "gift cards" and increase local sales. - Increase the amount invested in local business by area residents. -Improve profitability of local companies, reduce lay-offs, and rapidly increase company size by helping companies increase the number of "worker-owners". -Repurpose abandoned or underused old factory buildings by simple alterations of the property tax code to allow their use to produce food 12 months a year, locally. - Stem the outflow of community dollars by producing more food and energy locally in ways that both lower costs to the consumer and create local jobs. -Profitably salvage waste from landfills, sewage treatment plants, and abandon buildings. -Break the local "cycle of poverty" by improving the quality of local schools, while improving the health of students and lowering crime rates.