Local Dollars, Local Sense is a guide to creating Community Resilience. Americans' long-term savings in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, pension funds, and life insurance funds total about $30 trillion. But not even 1 percent of these savings touch local small business-even though roughly half the jobs and the output in the private economy come from them. So, how can people increasingly concerned with the poor returns from Wall Street and the devastating impact of global companies on their communities invest in Main Street? In Local Dollars, Local Sense, local economy pioneer Michael Shuman shows investors, including the nearly 99% who are unaccredited, how to put their money into building local businesses and resilient regional economies-and profit in the process. A revolutionary toolbox for social change, written with compelling personal stories, the book delivers the most thorough overview available of local investment options, explains the obstacles, and profiles investors who have paved the way. Shuman demystifies the growing realm of local investment choices-from institutional lending to investment clubs and networks, local investment funds, community ownership, direct public offerings, local stock exchanges, crowdfunding, and more. He also guides readers through the lucrative opportunities to invest locally in their homes, energy efficiency, and themselves. A rich resource for both investors and the entrepreneurs they want to support, Local Dollars, Local Sense eloquently shows how to truly protect your financial future--and your community's.

RECONOMICS is the first book that shows how to boost economic growth and community resilience simultaneously. It also reveals the surprising factor that sabotages most revitalization / resilience efforts. RECONOMICS is THE guide to healing economies, societies and nature together! "RECONOMICS is a must-read for every mayor, resilience activist, planning commissioner and urban redevelopment professional who has been frustrated in their attempts to revitalize a place. It succinctly describes why most revitalization plans fail, analyzes what's missing, and provides a simple, easy-to-follow strategic process for success." - Kevin L. Maevers, D.Mgmt., AICP; President, Arivitas Strategies, LLC, La Quinta, CA; Vice Director of Policy, IES, California Chapter, American Planning Association. "Storm Cunningham is so far ahead of the community revitalization game, I'm in awe." - Sarah Sieloff, Executive Director, Center for Creative Land Recycling (September 2019) "RECONOMICS hits the nail on the head!" - Nalin Seneviratne, Director of City Centre Development, Sheffield City Council, Sheffield, England "Storm Cunningham's RECONOMICS Process raises the bar for community and regional revitalization. It's a powerful package, succinctly capturing the process that we have doggedly tried to identify over time, not always knowing the next step. The RECONOMICS Process brings a holistic dimension to redevelopment, inextricably linking vision and task." - Eric Bonham, P.Eng, Board of Partnership for Water Sustainability in British Columbia, Former Director, BC Ministry of Environment & BC Ministry of Municipal Affairs "Storm Cunningham is the world's thought leader on community revitalization and natural resource restoration." - George Ochs, Managing Director of Real Assets, JP Morgan. "RECONOMICS should be mandatory reading for all Mayors, Chief Executives and Directors of Planning in cities and regions." - Rick Finc, Principal, RFA Development Planning, Edinburgh, Scotland "RECONOMICS is very concentrated, highly sophisticated and stunningly accurate." - Merrit Drucker, Anacostia Waterfront Trust, Washington, DC "Storm Cunningham's RECONOMICS transformed our latest project, which uses his 3Re strategy." - Dumas F. Lafontant, Director, Lower Roxbury Coalition, Boston, Massachusetts Does your city or region have an actual process for reliably creating resilient, inclusive economic growth...or just the usual vision, plan and projects? The reliable production of ANYTHING requires a process. Everyone knows this...except most leaders of local renewal initiatives. Over 95% of community revitalization and resilience projects fail to achieve their goals, and a shocking percentage of them fail outright. The reason is the same in almost all cases: lack of a complete renewal process. There's always at least one crucial element of the process missing. Since most leaders don't know what the minimum viable process is, they can't fill the gap. In RECONOMICS, that complete strategic renewal process is revealed for the first time. It can be applied at the community, regional or national levels. If you have ANY role in improving your local future, you need to read this book. What it reveals can easily double the ROI (revitalization on investment) of your redevelopment, renewal and climate adaptation efforts.

A blueprint for creating sustainable businesses, emphasizing the power and potential of cooperative models "[An] important take on achieving a cleaner and safer world. . . . [Scanlan] envisions a future where green policies go hand-in-hand with worker empowerment, and provides a detailed blueprint for how to get there. . . . Her book offers essential hope that we can yet save ourselves . . . from ourselves."--Bill Lueders, The Progressive, "Favorite Books of 2021" Drawing on both her extensive experience founding and directing social enterprises and her interviews with sustainability leaders, Melissa Scanlan provides a legal blueprint for creating alternate corporate business models that mitigate climate change, pay living wages, and act as responsible community members, including Certified B Corps and benefit corporations. With an emphasis on cooperatives, this book reveals the power and potential of cooperating as a unifying concept around which to design social enterprise achieving triple bottom-line results: for society, the environment, and finance.

Community Capacity and Resilience in Latin America addresses the role of communities in building their capacity to increase resiliency and carry out rural development strategies in Latin America. Resiliency in a community sense is associated with an ability to address stress and respond to shock while obtaining participatory engagement in community assessment, planning and outcome. Although the political contexts for community development have changed dramatically in a number of Latin American countries in recent years, there are growing opportunities and examples of communities working together to address common problems and improve collective quality of life. This book links scholarship that highlights community development praxis using new frameworks to understand the potential for community capacity and resiliency. By rejecting old linear models of development, based on technology transfer and diffusion of technology, many communities in Latin America have built capacity of their capital assets to become more resilient and adapt positively to change. This book is an essential resource for academics and practitioners of rural development, demonstrating that there is much we can learn from the skills of self-diagnosis and building on existing assets to enhance community capitals. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

With escalating poverty, rising individualism, outright destruction of social security networks and diminished civil liberties across the world many professionals appear to be settling down for individual fixes rather than system overhauls . Social work has a rich history of community development, yet seems to be a semi-passive spectator to the growing listlessness in our communities. Fuelled by the elites, government and agencies the models of community development seem to perpetuate dependency. A right oriented citizen's perspective has been a long overdue in the discourse of empowerment of people. Professions with espoused commitment to human rights ought to step up their role and and rekindle the roots in community empowerment. 'Some Aspects of Community Empowerment and Resilience' addresses the above central themes and offers fresh and refined approach on aspects of coping and resilience community and building hope.

This book is a revision of the author’s original doctoral thesis on emergency preparedness through community radio in North Indian villages into a widening array of possible reapplications in other community development fields. The author expands on the process of transforming emergency preparedness education through community media in rural North India and applies this to the development of community-prosperity, defined simply as human and planetary well-being, anywhere in the world. A new theoretical framework is presented which combines the pivotal Integral Worlds Approach developed by Lessem and Schieffer with Critical Theory, thus exploring a new way to envision and implement social change, leading to innovation and social transformation. This book introduces the term "constructive resilience," which is a type of community-building that occurs alongside dominant societal structures that are either oppressive or ineffective. An evolving field of study and practice, it is emerging from the work of academics and community-builders who are members of the Bahá’í Faith. Bahá’í "consultation," a process of inquiry and decision-making, is offered as a systematic and effective method of defining problems and enacting solutions and is examined in the context of emergency preparedness education and local capacity-building. With its integral development approach, its unique combination of themes and theoretical components, and integration with the Bahá’í Faith, as well as its interdisciplinary nature, this book will be invaluable reading for researchers in many fields. It will be of particular interest in university-based training programs in disaster management and the various disciplines of international community development, as well as practitioners in the areas of micro enterprise, disaster management, community development, rural communications, rural economics and emergency preparedness education.