LOCAL BUSINESS
From CFI
Contents |
Welcome to the GULP Local Business Group Page!
For more information about this group or to join, please contact: Scott Cratty at scratty@adelphia.net
Current Meeting and Group News
Current projects include: developing a support for local business including a local business directory and GULP local business certification process. The GULP diectory will appear on-line on the Ukiah Main Street Program site in 2007. At year-end 2006, we are providing shop local campaign posters and shop local holiday promotional material.
The group has a meeting scheduled for: TBD.
GULP LOCAL BUSINESS SURVEY AND CERTIFICATION
SURVEY ON-LINE
If you would like to have your business listed in the GULP Ukiah Area Independent Business Directory, PLEASE COMPLETE THE FORM AT: http://home.earthlink.net/~scratty2/GULP_Business_Survey.html (Special thanks to Web Developer - kirstenmichel.com for helping get web form operational.)
General information about the GULP local business certification and directory project (in draft form) is at Business Directory Vision
Track of business visits for GULP Business Group Members: Business Visit Tracking
BUSINESS GROUP DOCUMENTS AND INFORMATION:
Summaries of prior GULP Business Group meetings and activities are available at: GULP BUSINESS GROUP MEETING NOTES
Here is where to put links to other Internet resouces that you think may be of interest to members of the business group: BUSINESS GROUP LINKS
The notes this group produced at the February 21st GULP general meeting are available here: http://www.cloudforest.org/2-21-06_Meeting_Notes
Return to the GULP Main Page: http://www.cloudforest.org/GULP_Greater_Ukiah_Localization_Project
[Add new links above]
SUPPORTING INDEPENDENT, LOCAL BUSINESS
GULP has distributed the following notices to support sustainable, local business efforts:
- Ukiah Community Center Re-Build Thrift Store 6/17) -
The GULP Local Business & Civic Action groups wish to alert everyone to the following local business/ waste reduction/green building/community building opportunity:
In an effort to help generate its own funds and help support its Food Bank, Crisis Line, Homeless Services and Transitional Housing, the Ukiah Community Center is opening a "Re-Build Thrift Store" business operation. Re-Build will be a thrift store that specializes in used or cull lumber, flooring, plumbing, electrical, cement, bricks, fencing, cabinets and just about anything that can be reused for housing or business improvements. This project will provide many benefits to the community such as:
- Keeping items like the above out of our landfills
- Providing on the job training and employment to our homeless population.
- Providing much needed income to a vital community organization.
- Providing businesses and individuals with charitable tax receipts for their donations.
This is an excellent project that combines conservation, waste reduction, community building and exchange, increased self sufficiency, and skill development for and support of individuals in need in our community. It transforms what would have become trash into a tax benefit for the donator, an opportunity to obtain more affordable building materials for local residents and a vehicle for the Community center and the community members it supports to help themselves.
Contractors, home owners, businesses or anyone else wishing to donate items can arrange for free pick-up by calling Community Center Executive Director Kari Hackett at 707-462-8879.
Persons interested in supporting the Community Center by purchasing Re-Build materials can check out what is available at the kick-off parking lot sale at 195 E. Gobbi Street in Ukiah on July 1 from 7am to 2 pm and on July 2 from 9am to 2 pm. The Community Center expects to have the Re-Build Thrift Store open on other weekends throughout July at the same location. Please get out and support this effort.
- Live Power Community Farm (5/24) -
As you all know, a central GULP objective is to improve how our community can survive (or, better yet, thrive) using local, sustainable power. One central focus of that effort is working to develop and support robust local food sources-e.g., foods that we can rely on even if transportation costs continue to rise.
Live Power Community Farm (LPCF) in Covelo is a small-scale, local, independent, certified biodynamic/organic farm. Moreover, LPCF vegetables are primarily produced with the live, solar-based energy of draft horses, people and a 13 kw photovoltaic system for water pumping. Compost for soil fertility is generated on the farm from the farm's livestock manure and crop residues.
LPCF is also a Community Supported business. Its operating budget is met by 160 households/members, with those households receiving all of the farm's production. LPCF utilizes an associative rather than a market economic system, which creates a direct link between the farmers and their customers. If you become a member of the farm, you get a weekly share of its produce throughout the roughly 30 week season, which is dropped-off at locations in Willits and Ukiah. Members thus get to enjoy organic/biodynamic food fresh from the farm and also get to experience eating in harmony with the rhythm of our local climate. In short, LPCF is about as close to the type of business and relationship that GULP hopes to support as one can get (unless you grow it yourself or we can get them to move to the greater Ukiah area).
However, while LPCF can deliver fresh, organic/biodynamic, local produce every week (May-Nov) it depends on community support to do so. As this season gets underway the farm has room for more members to join. So, please consider making a concrete contribution to the localization effort by becoming a member. By doing so, you can help in making truly sustainable local agriculture a reality.
To get more information or subscribe, you can contact Gloria Decater at 983-8196 or livepower@igc.org. For more information about Live Power Community Farm, see: http://www.covelo.net/agriculture/farm/pages/farms_lpf.shtml. Please also watch for the upcoming website at: http://www.livepower.org.
Individual Updates
Please use the space below to post any updates, insights, individual action item reports, messages, etc. to share with the GULP Business Group. Please include the date posted and your initials at the start of your post and add your new items at the top of the list (i.e., keep the most recent posts at the top).
4/something: DS: On 4/1 Dave Smith announced that he will be creating a new Mendocino Briarpatch Network. See Mendo Briarpatch Also, please mark on your calendar the evening of Thursday, April 27th. I will be doing a presentation/book reading/book signing at Mendocino College, also featuring the First Annual Creative Action Hero Awards. We will be honoring the lives and work of four local families: the Cooperrider family of Ukiah; the Decater family of Covelo; the Martin family formerly of Comptche; the Milder family of Ukiah. They are all pioneers in local organic food and agriculture.
4/20 - The GULP Business group submitted grant requests for the directory project to the Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op and to the Ben and Jerry's Founation. Other grant applications should follow soon.
4/19 - Today's UDJ highlights a Business Funding Fair, which will be held 5/2 in Ukiah from 3:30 to 6:30 at the Conference Center. It will be hosted by West Company and will "give local business owners and thsoe interested in business ownership an opportunity to explore the commercial offerings available locally."
4/18 - SC appeared on KMEC radio and discussed GULP projects in general and the business group projects in particular.
4/17 - GULP distributed information on the business directory project at the screening of Independent America.
4/10/06 Dave Smith: I've been involved in creating and working in small businesses, cooperatives, and large corporations all my life. There are flaws and corruption in cooperativism and every other ism because we humans are not perfect. Some of the most uncooperative and destructive personalities I've ever had to work with were in the cooperative movement. I've been a member of cooperatives with top-down soul-shivering authoritarion management structures and managers, and worked in corporations with extremely enlightened cooperative management practices. My experience is that you can't get much purer and more responsive to the local community than the small LOCALLY OWNED organic farm and small local business, whether owned and run cooperatively, collectively, corporately, or as a privately owned sole/family proprietorship. I agree that the publically-owned trans-national corporation is an abomination that is killing the earth. But when you get small and local, the form becomes much less important in my opinion. The key for me is a local living participative democracy that encourages and light-handly controls business fairly for the good of the community.
Buckminster Fuller famously said: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." I think we have to do both, fight AND create, but instead of debating different economic systems and business forms, I would rather get on with the business of building a locally-owned thriving business economy that works for everyone. We progressives love talking about social and biological diversity while wanting to change from one particular "bad" economic system to another particular "ideal" system. Mono-culture bad, diversity good. We have big problems coming that can be solved in a variety of ways. We need the privately owned Brewpub. We need Adam Gaska and the Decaters up in Covelo owning and running their own organic farms. We need the food co-op and the farmer's market co-op. We need a local cooperative/collective organic farm that is within walking distance of most Ukians. We need more local family businesses and corporations that can raise money locally and manufacture renewable energy systems. We even need local venture capitalists who don't demand 30% annual profits, but rather a modest, sustainable return on their investment. We need all hands on deck, not just our little economic choirs singing the same song over and over and over.
3-27-06 Sandy Turner: In that capitalism has many unfair and environmentally horrendous aspects that make it an impractical economic system if we want our grandkids and great grandkids to have a liveble planet, I suggest that folks seriously question whether or not we want to tolerate capitalism much longer. If we had 2 or 3 centuries to play around with before capitalism pushes our bioshere over the brink, then perhaps we humans could create a benign and perhaps even beneficial style of capitalism. Since I believe that we have AT MOST 3 decades to SIGNIFICANTLY change the way humans conduct economic activity so that it is at worst nuetral in relation to its effects on the environment, I say capitalism has to be replaced with one or several other economic systems that are democratic, participatory, and take into account the big picture when economic decisions are made. This task is nothing short of MONUMENTAL, and all the more so because so few people are questioning the validity of capitalism. The longer our U.S. society waits to ask fundamental economic/environmental questions and explore alternatives, then the less time (in years) we will have to make the changes.
I have been a socialist and co-operativist all of my adult life. I believe that we have to have community discussions and decision making related to economic activity, because the way we do business has such potentially destructive effects on local and global ecosystems. A major aspect of capitalism is that corporations do their utmost to "externalize" the costs of negative consequences related to their activities. Those costs are being "paid for" by the public and by our planet. GULP has a potential to be an extremely effective force and model for positive change in the world. Part of the example I am hoping we in Mendocino County can become is a model of participatoory democratic economics in action. My experience in the last 30 years has been with a couple of collective worker-run businesses, a worker-owned producer co-operative, and two consumer co-operatives (including Ukiah Natural Foods).
Last semester, I taught a high school class at La Vida Independent Study Charter School called Ethical Economics. In my research for materials and ideas for various lessons, I learned quite a bit. Here are a few websites people may be interested in looking at:
http://www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm for info on participatory economics
http://www.urpe.org/ Union For Radical Political Economics
http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein (May 1949)
I see no great step forward if all we can do is promote staus quo, privately owned, small businesses in our area. I think we somehow need to create many cooperative businesses that have at least strong, direct and indirect ties and responsiblilty to our local community. For over a century, we in the U.S. have been drowning in media messages about individual independence and the promotion of "free" enterprise and competition in the marketplace. Hey folks, the game is rigged and as I mentioned above, we don't have 2 or 3 centuries to tinker around trying to get capitalism fixed. Still, questioning capitalism is seen by many as blasphemy. I think we need to be questioning many aspects of modern civilization.
3/21/05, DS: I highly recommend a recent exchange by a couple of bloggers about local preparedness for the coming "Great Turning"... Paula Hay writes about the need for attention to local money and economics NOW in a two part series: http://adaptationzine.com/content/fear-of-money. Dave Pollard responds here: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/03/20.html. Paula responds to Dave here: http://blog.adaptationzine.com/reply-pollard?commented=1#c000011
1/15/06, SC: The State of CA routinely posts information about state contracting opportunities. For example, on 3/14, the Department of Conservation posted notice for parties to submit for a contract with an estimated value of $5,000,000 - $9,999,999 for "a full-service communications agency that can work with Department staff to support programs aimed at increasing recycling opportunities, increasing collection of California Redemption Value (CRV)bottles and cans, facilitating recycling activity and developing/expanding infrastructure that makes recycling more convenient. In addition to providing high-quality advertising and public relations, proposers must demonstrate a proven ability to develop partnerships with public and private entities, and show how that ability will result in an actual increase in the collection and recycling of bottles and cans and an increase in the availability of recycling for consumers and employees in a variety of venues (e.g., recycling centers, homes, including multi-family dwellings, office buildings, hotels, bars, restaurants, sporting facilities, and health clubs)." This seems like something that someone in Mendocino would know how to do. Does anyone know if the County has a process in place to look county groups that might be able to meet such needs?
