The goal of this blog is to bring the reader inspiring stories of communities and leaders from around the world that are putting people first ahead of profit or power.
In this offering, we present two stories of two disparate towns with similar policies that emphasize economic self-sufficiency and promote a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them.
The following two stories were taken and condensed from yes!Magazine.
Burlington, Vermont: policies of inclusiveness and fairness
For 20 years, Burlington, Vermont, has been pursuing policies that are counter to the growth-at-any-cost trend followed by so many other medium-sized cities.
Here are some of these policies in different areas:
Groceries: When the city's last downtown grocery closed several years ago, residents realized that, as in many other communities, essential services were leaving the city center for the suburbs. The city decided to lease a city parking lot on attractive terms to a grocery store, through a competitive bid process.
The local food co-op won the bid, and opened its new 17,000-square-foot energy-efficient facility a year ago. The store now serves 1,800 customers a day and has met its sales projections from the day it opened. The co-op offers a full range of natural, organic, and traditional supermarket items at competitive prices, all with a bias toward locally grown food.
Housing and Land: With a housing shortage and a community-wide aversion to suburban sprawl, maintaining affordable housing is a challenge. The centerpiece of the city's response is the Burlington Community Land Trust (BCLT), the largest land trust in the country and the first to be created and funded by a municipality. With over 250 units—mostly single-family homes and condominiums—BCLT insulates affordable housing from market forces and land speculation, assures access to land and housing for low-income people, and preserves and improves neighborhoods.
Banking: The Burlington Ecumenical Action Ministry founded the Vermont Development Credit Union in 1990. The member-owned cooperative, which serves low-income and other underserved populations, is now self-sustaining. In the 10 years since it was founded, the credit union has provided banking services to 6,600 low-income Vermonters, made 4,900 loans with less than a 1 percent default rate, made available $35 million in capital, and provided financing for 250 new homeowners.
Democracy: In the early 1980s, then Mayor (now US Representative) Bernie Saunders, established seven Neighborhood Planning Assemblies to give citizens a vehicle for solving neighborhood problems, allocating funds for neighborhood projects, and choosing citizens to represent their neighborhoods on a variety of task forces and advisory boards. Since then, they've provided a platform for such citizen-led neighborhood improvement projects as clean-up days, home and business improvement awards, and tree plantings.
The Future: In 1992, Burlington purchased a 45-acre parcel of prime undeveloped land located along the shore of Lake Champlain and created a Waterfront Urban Reserve. According to the city's urban renewal plan, this will “reserve the right for future generations to determine what level of development should occur at this site.” For now, the reserve is open to the public for walking, fishing, biking, quiet contemplation, and periodic art events.
Belo Horizonte, Brazil: The City that Ended Hunger
To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help. The story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry.
Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.
• It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.
• In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price. There’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land. Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.
• Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.
• Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.
• The city, in partnership with a local university, is working to keep the market honest in part simply by providing information. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets and then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.
The result of these and other related innovations? In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population.
The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.
Conclusion
Our nation, Kenya, is currently beleaguered by inept rulers who are besotted with the trappings of office. Devoid of any development ideas but quick to conjure up schemes to siphon off public funds, our rulers have clearly shown us that they are not agents of progression or enlightenment. The situation is exacerbated by an uninformed subservient populace mired in an endless cycle of poverty who are only too glad to do the bidding of the ruling political class in exchange for a false hope of a better tomorrow.
So how do we proceed? In the short term we hope to implement some of the ideas we have been presenting in this blog and tweak them for the local economies where our members reside. Our programs will be people led and decisions will be made by a consensus of member votes.
We are in the process of finalizing a manifesto of our socially, politically and economically inclusive party to be known as The African Economic Democracy Movement.
Economic revolutionaries wanted, apply within.
Reader responses welcome.
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