Michelle Long, Author at Restore Commons

Michelle Long

Michelle Long is the Founding Executive Director of BALLE: Be a Localist. She is a respected thought leader in the local economy movement and committed to growing the number of businesses and investors who are committed to maximizing well-being for all. https://bealocalist.org/Michelle_Long_Speaker_Profile

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Creating an Alternative Economy: BALLE’s Michelle Long

Michelle Long, BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) executive director, shares the story of BALLE’s co-founder Judy Wick, who built the socially responsible White Dog Café in Philadelphia through sourcing based on relationships with the land and people in her community.

Founded in 2001, BALLE (pronounced “bahl-ee”) works with local businesses who want to collaborate for the good of their communities, and helps the communities share ideas in various places in North America.

BALLE formed a Community Foundation Circle for foundation leaders who want to see investments used to strengthen community economies. Traditionally, when a donor gives a community foundation gift, the money is placed as a community grant. People are waking up to using money for impact investments.

Listen to her full conversation with Peter Block and John McKnight:

Being Alive

Michelle Long, director of BALLE, Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, answers the question, if you...

Our communities are broken. For the ones that look whole, the price is being born somewhere else.

Jim Keene

I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.

Henry Miller

Though the commons is everywhere, it is nonetheless little noticed. For economists, it is a kind of inchoate mass that awaits the vivifying hand of the market to attain life. Forests are worthless until they become timber, just as quiet is worthless until it becomes advertising.

Jonathan Rowe, Our Common Wealth

Education is never neutral. It always involves a project…either keep things the same or change them.

Paolo Friere

When we meet, I am talking to myself and you are spying on me.

Leroy

If I am ever stuck on a respirator or life support system, I definitely want to be unplugged-but not until I get down to a size eight.

Henriette Mantel

Every time you add a highway lane, you slow down traffic.

Bross’s paradox

If your time hasn’t come, not even a doctor can kill you.

Meyer A Perlstein

I fear one day I’ll meet God, he’ll sneeze, and I won’t know what to say.

Ronnie Shakes

The power to call people a problem is the most injurious thing you can do.

John McKnight

Questions are fateful. They determine destinations. They are the chamber through which destiny calls.

Godwin Hlatshwayo

Revolution is not capturing institutions, it is discovering free space and enlarging it.

Paul Goodman

Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.

Italian Proverb

Most communities can be compared to a football game where 30,000 people who need the exercise turn up to watch 36 people who don’t.

Peter Kenyon

Lost luggage is an initiation ritual. It is an invitation to a simpler life.

Madeline Nold

The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.

Joseph Joubert

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Adrienne Rich

Leadership is willingness to have faith in a future we do not understand.

Clint Kemp

All consciousness begins with an act of disobedience.

Carl Jung

A part of kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

Joseph Joubert

I have tried to teach service to my husband and revolution to my son.

unknown

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Soren Kierkegaard

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