Building Local Power: Recent Episodes
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
You'd think a company with as many resources, employees, and facilities as AT&T or Comcast would have good customer service. Surely, with all the billions of dollars flowing through these businesses, there'd be some resources devoted to creating a really good customer experience, right? If only that were the case. The thing is, these telecom monopolies are so big, with their power so entrenched, that it doesn't matter if their customer service is good. When you control the market, you control the market whether customers are happy or not. Time and again, smaller, locally-controlled telecom companies and networks have better customer service and better products. Because they're small and connected to their communities, these small companies have greater motivation to please their customers. Plus, since they're competing against giants, they have a lot to prove to their customers. This is the crux of one of Christopher Mitchell's arguments about why community broadband matters.Christopher Mitchell, today's guest on Building Local Power, is the head of ILSR's Community Broadband Networks Initiative. Community broadband networks can take many forms, from municipal networks to co-ops and more. These networks are important, says Mitchell, not just because they're better for consumers but because Internet access is essentially a human right in the contemporary world. Reliable and affordable Internet access isn't just about social media and Netflix; everything from healthcare to education and beyond relies on a good Internet connection, all the more reason to leave broadband access in the hands of local communities. On today's episode, Christopher explains all this, as well as sharing his thoughts on his friend, ILSR's recently passed co-founder David Morris. It's a compelling conversation with a passionate advocate. For full show notes and transcript, visit https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-internet-as-a-human-right
We hear it again and again on this show: neighborhoods that are presumed less likely to fight back are taken advantage of by huge corporations and monopolies. Through predatory decisions and massive market power, a chain grocery store erodes a historically black neighborhood into a food desert. Amazon locates a massive warehouse, and its associated noise, congestion, and pollution, into an already vulnerable area of town. The Target in the BIPOC neighborhood is demonstrably worse than the Target in the rich, white part of town. Now we’re seeing the same pattern play out with the question of where to put AI data centers and their enormous environmental demands. The tech companies making these decisions seek out the neighborhoods that have the least political capital, neighborhoods that Brenda Platt calls “areas of least political resistance.” And she would know. Brenda Platt, director of ILSR’s Composting for Community Initiative, has been fighting for sustainability, recycling, reuse, and composting for a bit longer than I’ve been alive. Throughout her nearly 40 year career, Brenda has taken a leading role in shifting the waste industry away from expensive, polluting, and inefficient trash incinerators. Today she’s working tirelessly to not only encourage sustainable waste alternatives like composting, but she’s fighting to ensure that such programs remain under community control and influence. Compost, she says, has to be local by default. It’s silly to ship banana peels across the country, so it’s best to figure out local and sustainable waste alternatives. Here to catch us up on her recent work, Brenda is today’s guest. Listen in to hear the story of her influential work, her reflections on how the incinerator fight resonates today, and her memories of working with beloved ILSR co-founder David Morris.For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-why-solving-waste-has-to-be-local
When ILSR co-founder David Morris published his pamphlet The Dawning of Solar Cells in 1975, nearly the only people using solar power were those in the Apollo program at NASA. Yet David saw decades into the future as he laid out a vision for community control and local ownership of a solar power system that was better for the climate and kept much more money in local economies than utility monopolies ever would. In many ways, says ILSR co-director and leader of the Energy Democracy Initiative, John Farrell, the world is still catching up with things David Morris wrote 50 years ago. John Farrell is this week's guest. To hear him tell it, one of the most important lessons he took from David Morris was that the idea of clean energy itself isn't enough. In addition to the climate, we must also think about who owns energy and the systems that provide it. If clean energy systems are owned and controlled by energy monopolies, communities still find themselves at the mercy of huge corporations. A true energy revolution will come not only from clean energy, but community-owned clean energy. That's the path to energy self-reliance. That's the path that David Morris charted decades ago, and it's the path that John Farrell and ILSR's energy democracy team follow to this day. For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-why-clean-energy-is-not-enough
On this week's episode of Building Local Power, we continue our series honoring ILSR's co-founder David Morris, who passed away in June. One way to measure the impact of someone's work is to measure their influence on those they mentored. And if you ask Stacy Mitchell, the word "influence" isn't even sufficient for what she learned from David Morris. Hired into an entry-level position at ILSR by David Morris in 1997, Mitchell now leads the Independent Business Initiative and co-directs the entire organization. Her time working with Morris led to a long and distinguished career at ILSR and in the broader antimonopoly movement.On this episode, Mitchell shares her reflections on her time working with Morris and on the impact of his work overall. Listen for her insights about how prescient Morris's work is proving to be, as well as his demanding curiosity and tireless advocacy. Ultimately, Mitchell claims, Morris's philosophy is a blueprint for what it means to build local power, and Morris did that until the very end of his life. Don't miss this stirring conversation about one revolutionary's impact on another.For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-the-problems-you-can-solve
Here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we recently received some shocking news as we learned of the sudden passing of our beloved co-founder, David Morris. A giant in the antimonopoly field, an innovative thinker ahead of his time, and a crucial mentor to so many of us here at ILSR, David will be missed. I imagine I wasn’t alone in diving into ILSR’s archives to understand and revisit David’s work and legacy in the wake of his death. Reading David’s work from the last 50 years reminded me just how much he deeply understood about building local power, often well before political discourse arrived at the same conclusions. That’s the inspiration for this week’s episode of Building Local Power. Today, we’re revisiting episode 22 of Building Local Power, a 2017 interview between David Morris and ILSR's Community Broadband Initiative director, Chris Mitchell. What struck me about this interview was how much of it could be said today and how much David anticipated our current moment. In the interview you’re about to hear, when asked about the source of local power, David explained that the communal nature of cities has had massive power since medieval times. In doing so, David lauds the value of so-called “Sanctuary Cities,” asserting that the term really means mutual protection against a faraway federal government that doesn’t necessarily act in the city’s interest. Such thoughts are almost painfully relevant in the wake of June 14th’s “No Kings” rallies, as those in power cynically exploit tensions about the alleged dangers of cities. There are those who say cities should not be sanctuaries. One of the many pieces of wisdom we have from David Morris’s long career runs counter to that: cities have dramatic potential for their residents to protect each other, and to act in each other’s best interest. That’s how local power is built. I hope you enjoy revisiting this 2017 interview as much as I did. For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-what-cities-can-do
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act represented one of the largest ever investments in broadband infrastructure. Many in the digital equity space believed the bill would go a long way to solve the digital divide. Provisions like the Digital Equity Act promised to be powerful tools in ensuring fast and reliable Internet access for all, regardless of money, race, and the rural/urban split. Groups ILSR's Community Broadband Networks team supports got to work applying for and receiving government funds to make major progress bringing equity to the digital space. Then, on a Thursday night in May 2025, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he was cancelling the Digital Equity Act, freezing or suspending all grants awarded for it.The President's decision will likely face legal challenges because the act and the money appropriated for it represent an action that Congress has already taken. Still, the law's cancellation will have wide-ranging and devastating consequences in the digital equity space. Efforts to close the digital divide for the eight populations served by the bill are now halted in their tracks, just as they were gathering speed. On this week's Building Local Power, we are joined by Sean Gonsalves, ILSR’s associate director for communications on the Community Broadband Team. Sean brings his years of experience and expertise to explain to us the consequences and impacts of the cancellation of the Digital Equity Act.For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-increasing-internet-access-at-the-speed-of-trust
The United States government is one of the biggest purchasers in the world. Few people or entities spend more money on more goods and services. Add state and local governments to the mix, and you have a massive market with the potential for a lot of businesses to make a lot of money. The process of governments purchasing from businesses, called procurement, quietly hums with billions of dollars every single day. Yet those billions overwhelmingly end up in the pockets of huge corporations and monopolies instead of the local company in your town, which contributes to your local economy and builds local power for your community. This often happens even if that local company is perfectly poised to deliver the exact goods or services needed with top-of-the-line service, speed, and pricing. The game is just rigged. There are many reasons for this. There are also ways to fight it. Enter Paola Santana, whose company, Glass, is working to revolutionize the procurement process in favor of local businesses. Glass’s platform G-Commerce works in many ways to fill the gaps in the procurement process. G-Commerce aims to dismantle the barriers to entry facing small and local businesses. By certifying local businesses and giving them direct access to government purchasers, G-Commerce wants to level the playing field and make small government purchases more possible for local businesses. According to Paola Santana, this is a win-win: local businesses earn lucrative sales, and local governments get better service and even better prices. Paola Santana joins us today on Building Local Power to explain all this and why it’s so important.For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-the-human-side-of-government-work
One way to build local power is to catalyze change directly in your community. Another, equally important method is to catalyze the catalysts. To really make change and build sustainable local economies, we need not only entrepreneurs but also people connecting entrepreneurs to each other — someone to champion the local champions. There is solid proof that entrepreneurs fare better when connected to fellow entrepreneurs and mentors. That's where today's guest, Ilana Preuss, comes in.Ilana Preuss connects and supports entrepreneurs and local economies in many ways. Through her company, Recast City, LLC, Preuss advocates for local economic growth through what she calls small-scale manufacturing: nimble, ingenious, local creators who generate economic activity by making stuff and selling it in their communities. She also has worked hard to find solutions to the small business funding gap: BIPOC entrepreneurs, as well as women, have historically found it difficult to access traditional bank financing to start their businesses. How does this dynamic champion of champions do it? Have a listen to this inspiring episode of Building Local Power to find out.For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-champion-of-local-champions
Saturday, March 14, 2020, was even busier than the typical bustling Saturday at Ladybird Diner in Lawrence, Kansas. Bottles of handmade hand sanitizer were perched on each table. It was Pi Day, a special occasion for the homey diner famous for its pie. But Ladybird owner Meg Heriford was scared and unsure. The crowds were enough to convince her not to open the next day, instead opting to regroup in advance of the gathering COVID storm. Suddenly, she found herself with a kitchen full of food and nobody to serve it to. What happened next is a testament to the community-building power of independent businesses.We revisit Ladybird Diner's story not to tell a tale from the past, but to provide the prologue for the moment we find ourselves in today. Five years later, Meg is slinging pie amid new crises and political upheaval. But her commitment to her principles is unwavering: Treat her staff well, feed both the privileged and underprivileged of Lawrence, and build community through pie, coffee, and glittery vinyl booths. In an unforgettable Building Local Power episode that can only be described as inspiring, hear directly from Meg about how she stewards her diner through volatile times and why she calls that work noble.For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-the-diner-building-community
Ron Knox was a successful reporter covering antitrust and antimonopoly issues until he couldn't take it any more. His growing passion for the fight against corporate power didn't match a reporter's need for neutrality and objectivity. Shedding the mantle of neutrality, Knox joined ILSR to fight for what he believed in: building local power and resisting corporate power. In the years since then, Knox has become a leading voice in the antimonopoly movement, creating resources about everything from Ticketmaster to Kroger to what states can do to fight corporate monopolies.In fact, that very idea is the center of this week's episode of Building Local Power. Knox has been a leader in ILSR's effort to provide resources and tools to help states fight monopolies, and he's here on the show to outline that work. Our galvanizing conversation also covers his antimonopoly history, his soon-to-be-released debut book, and his dreams for the future of the antimonopoly movement. If you're looking to be inspired by what's happening at the state level of the antimonopoly fight, as well as the people driving that movement, this episode is a must-listen.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-ron-knox-on-the-states-of-antitrust
In late 2024, Rachel Hernandez ran a successful campaign to become mayor of Riverbank, California. A small town at the top of the state's central valley, Riverbank may not fit into what you imagine as California. There are no beaches or Hollywood signs here. The town follows the rhythm of the harvest with workers passing through following the crops. If Riverbank isn't your typical California town, Rachel Hernandez isn't your typical mayor. But she doesn't shy away from that fact.Hernandez has made her identity a central part of her governing and campaigning. She's young. She's Latina. She's the daughter of immigrants. She's a renter, not a homeowner. In this way, she represents exciting generational changes in who is claiming stewardship of American cities and towns. How does she do it? The answer is actually pretty simple: partnerships. This episode of Building Local Power features Rachel Hernandez sharing her insights on all that and more. Have a listen to what the future of local governance looks like.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-rachel-hernandez-on-governing-as-a-first-generation-mayor
In the early 2000s, a behemoth rose above Providence, Rhode Island. The massive Providence Place Mall was heralded as the solution to Providence's 1990s economic woes and cited as a catalyst for urban renewal. However, not all residents of Providence welcomed the mall. For one thing, the wave of corporate development inspired by the mall leveled working-class neighborhoods on Providence's West Side. These ethnically diverse neighborhoods were magnets for artists and other changemakers. In 2003, eight of those artists, including Adriana Valdez Young, undertook a project to reclaim some of what had been lost.The Secret Mall Apartment was their way to become developers in their own right. In the wake of corporate developers claiming every inch of available space, these artists found some space of their own to develop, hidden in plain sight within the mall. The project is the subject of the new documentary Secret Mall Apartment, and one of its stars joins us on this episode of Building Local Power. Our conversation with Adriana Valdez Young explains why the apartment was more than just a prank, how the mall forever altered Providence, and why inclusive design is essential for healthy urban development. Listen in, and never look at a mall the same way again.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-a-little-odd-but-a-little-amazing
The third episode in the Building Local Power, The New Class series finds us talking to North Carolina State Rep Dante Pittman, recently elected to represent his hometown of Wilson, NC and the surrounding Wilson County. From municipal fiber broadband to monumental folk art, Wilson has never shied away from innovative ideas. Those ideas, and the dynamic leaders who embraced them, have led to a rare thing: a small city in the rural South that is showing promising growth.Rural America has lagged far behind big cities in economically recovering from the Coronavirus Pandemic, slowing growth across the region. In a lively conversation, Pittman shares the ways Wilson has found ways to buck that trend and attract new residents, support its businesses, and create robust communities. Further, Pittman shares his strategies for encouraging that growth from his new seat in the North Carolina Statehouse.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-taking-a-risk-for-rural-economic-growth
The second episode in the Building Local Power, The New Class series finds us talking to Baltimore City Councilman Zac Blanchard, who recently won a tight race to unseat his District 11's incumbent. Blanchard, a Marine vet and father of two young children, got his political start joining and eventually leading neighborhood associations. That experience, combined with his love for Baltimore, influenced his political philosophy and will guide him during his city council tenure.In this episode's wide-ranging conversation, Blanchard and host Danny Caine discuss Baltimore's challenges while also unpacking what makes Baltimore such a uniquely beautiful place. Blanchard shares his thoughts on the city's architecture and character and his journey to calling Baltimore home and eventually representing the key 11th District, which contains significant parts of Downtown and the iconic Inner Harbor. He also weighs in on the city's worst-in-the-nation heat island problem, driven by the presence of large trash incinerators within city limits. Other topics addressed include internet connectivity, highway removal, and the importance of bringing grocery stores to Baltimore's walkable neighborhoods.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-from-neighborhood-streets-to-city-hall
This episode is the first in our new season of Building Local Power, The New Class, where we are talking to interesting changemakers among the state and local politicians newly elected in November 2024. Our first guest is Tristan Rader, representing District 13 in Ohio's House of Representatives. District 13, which is host Danny Caine's district, covers the near-West Side of Cleveland as well as the inner-ring suburb of Lakewood. Rader's experiences range from working with the Cleveland Food Bank to Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign to Lakewood City Council.On this episode, Rader weighs in on what makes Cleveland great and why organized labor is a vital part of that history. We also talk about local energy, taxation, and how exactly large corporations took such control of Ohio's economic policy. A through-line of the discussion is how Ohio's Republican supermajority shapes state politics and how Rader hopes to successfully fight for change in the district he represents.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-staying-local-at-the-statehouse
The inspiration for this season of Building Local Power is ILSR's Power Play report, written by ILSR senior editor and researcher Susan Holmberg. Sue joins us today for a wide-ranging and candid conversation about the report and its main finding: that monopolies leverage systemic racism to build and retain their power.Our conversation ties together the previous conversations in our Power Play series, from organizing an Amazon warehouse to consumer redlining to the inequitable environmental harm of AI data centers. Sue discusses the monstrous costs of monopoly power to communities of color and the interconnected ways corporate power can ensnare these communities. But it's not all doom and gloom. Sue, like her report, has much to say about legislative and community fixes to the problem of monopoly power and structural racism. If you want to know not only how monopolies damage communities of color but also how to fix it, this conversation is a must-listen.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-structural-racism-fuels-american-monopolies
AI technology and large language models are growing in popularity. Also growing is the technology's detrimental effect on the environment. Each query into ChatGPT, to use one example, requires billions of calculations. Multiply that by millions of users, and suddenly, tech companies need to greatly expand their computing power in the form of new, energy-draining data centers. Each of those centers requires staggering amounts of fresh water to keep its servers cool. By some estimates, just 10 ChatGPT queries are equivalent to evaporating a 16oz bottle of water. For context, the popularity of these queries has resulted in one of the major technology companies now having the same annual water consumption as PepsiCo.Joining us on Building Local Power to discuss what this all means is UC Riverside professor Dr. Shaolei Ren. Continuing our series exploring how monopolies exploit structural racism to gain monopoly power, Ren not only outlines the environmental effects of AI but also explains how data center location decisions by Big Tech companies exacerbate environmental inequity. Almost all of the counties most affected by AI's climate harms are low-income communities and Black communities.What can policymakers and the public do? Ren has ideas for that, too, as he pushes for what he calls "health-informed computing."For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-environmental-inequity-of-ai
ILSR co-executive directors Stacy Mitchell and John Farrell join Reggie Rucker to discuss the year in ILSR and the issues we care about. What did the media get wrong about the economy in the lead-up to the election? How can voter frustration turn into positive political change? Will we ever move past "change elections?" Will the antitrust revival last through the next four years? How can states and cities fight corporate consolidation and monopoly power? What victories did the antitrust movement see in 2024, and how can we replicate that success in the future? And how can ILSR help?All of these questions and much, much more come up in this in-depth and far-reaching conversation between ILSR's fearless leaders. Building Local Power's special year-end 2024 recap episode charts how we got to this moment, and what the path ahead can look like.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-a-rebalancing-act
AI technology and large language models are growing in popularity. Also growing is the technology's detrimental effect on the environment. Each query into ChatGPT, to use one example, requires billions of calculations. Multiply that by millions of users, and suddenly, tech companies need to greatly expand their computing power in the form of new, energy-draining data centers. Each of those centers requires staggering amounts of fresh water to keep its servers cool. By some estimates, just 10 ChatGPT queries are equivalent to evaporating a 16oz bottle of water. For context, the popularity of these queries has resulted in one of the major technology companies now having the same annual water consumption as PepsiCo.Joining us on Building Local Power to discuss what this all means is UC Riverside professor Dr. Shaolei Ren. Continuing our series exploring how monopolies exploit structural racism to gain monopoly power, Ren not only outlines the environmental effects of AI but also explains how data center location decisions by Big Tech companies exacerbate environmental inequity. Almost all of the counties most affected by AI's climate harms are low-income communities and Black communities.What can policymakers and the public do? Ren has ideas for that, too, as he pushes for what he calls "health-informed computing."For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-environmental-inequity-of-ai
In March, 2020, Amazon warehouse worker Chris Smalls led a walkout protesting a lack of Covid-19 safety measures at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. He was fired two hours later. In the following days, a leaked memo revealed that the Amazon c-suite (including Jeff Bezos) was planning to discredit Smalls by racially scapegoating him. When aspiring documentarian Mars Verrone heard the story, they sent an Instagram DM to Smalls asking about the prospect of turning his story into a movie. Now, three years later, that movie is here: the acclaimed new documentary Union, which chronicles Smalls' successful efforts to unionize JFK8.For this episode of Building Local Power, Verrone joins us to share the story of Union's creation, as well as the challenges distributing a film like this. They also provide insights into the role that race plays in the story of Chris Smalls and the labor struggle in general. This lively and memorable conversation is the second in our series of episodes about race and monopoly power.For the full transcript and related resources, visit ilsr.org:https://ilsr.org/articles/filming-the-amazon-labor-fight
For many years, Reverend Ryan Brown has been a picker at Amazon's RDU1 warehouse outside of Raleigh, NC. In 2020, he was asked to work in a part of the warehouse he knew was a dangerous COVID hot spot. He refused, calling his decision to do so a "Rosa Parks moment." In the immediate aftermath, Reverend Ryan and some comrades founded Amazon CAUSE (Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment) and began campaigning to unionize RDU1.In this episode, Reverend Ryan and fellow CAUSE organizer Adam Stromme join host Danny Caine for a lively discussion of their unionizing efforts. Running through the conversation is the truth that systemic racism is deeply intertwined with the labor struggles at Amazon's warehouses. It's the first episode in a series inspired by ILSR's Power Play report, exploring how monopolies exploit systemic racism to build and maintain their power.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-amazon-labor-and-race
The first bookstore Danny Caine fell in love with was a suburban Cleveland outpost of a mega-chain. Since then, he has not only fallen in love with independent bookstores and other local businesses but has also become a widely known advocate against Amazon and other corporate monopolies. Now, he's the new host of Building Local Power.This week's episode features Danny talking with co-host Reggie Rucker about his history, advocacy, and path to ILSR. Danny also shares his future plans for the podcast in hopes of inviting more folks into the Building Local Power conversation.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-new-host-danny-caine
The destruction of Dorr Street in Toledo, Ohio isn’t just a story of physical destruction; it's about the dismantling of crucial social infrastructure that once allowed residents to communicate, organize, and thrive. In the final episode of our Toledo season, we are joined by board president of the Lucas County Commission, Pete Gerken to discuss the legacy of Dorr Street — a once-thriving hub of Black culture, commerce, and community in Lucas County that was fractured by the construction of the interstate highway system.Today, Dorr Street struggles with another legacy of failed government policy: chain dollar stores. These dollar stores highlight a broader trend of disinvestment in communities of color. But, Gerken is committed to reinvesting in Dorr Street. He champions using local tax dollars to support small businesses and combat corporate greed, advocating for a food overlay district to address food apartheid and uplift community health. His philosophy is clear: power yields nothing without a demand, and the fight for local power must be relentless. With the support of local activists and a dedicated political class in Lucas County, Gerken believes that real, positive change is within reach. The journey to revitalize Dorr Street will be long and challenging, but as Gerken puts it, "You don't start till you start."For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/the-will-and-the-way-to-revive-the-mecca
Toledo’s Dorr Street bears the deep scars of federal policies that stripped away Black economic power and prosperity. Once a thriving center of Black business, Dorr Street was decimated by discriminatory practices that prioritized urban expressways over vibrant communities.In this episode of Building Local Power, Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz addresses this destruction and the long-overdue promises of renewal. With $22 million in federal funds now aimed at reconnecting the Dorr Street neighborhood torn apart by I-75, there's a glimmer of hope. While this investment can't undo the past, it's a crucial step toward healing.As the city undertakes transformative projects like the Uptown Innovation District, Toledo’s renewal efforts stand as a powerful testament to the resilience of its people and the strength of community-driven change.For the full transcript and related resources, visit the episode page:https://ilsr.org/articles/mending-broken-promises-on-dorr-street
In 1974, in Washington D.C., amidst a backdrop of economic turbulence and social unrest, the seeds of the Institute for Local Self-reliance were sown. David Morris, Neil Seldman, and Gil Friend, driven by a shared vision of community resilience, founded the Institute in a townhouse in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. Their goal was to demonstrate that our economies and environments can thrive when rooted in community cooperation and mutual aid. Fifty years later, in the face of prevailing national norms promoting centralization, ILSR continues to challenge the status quo through research, advocacy, and grassroots organizing, promoting a framework of decentralized production, responsibility, and authority.
Related Resources* Kilowatt Counter – A Consumers Guide to Energy Concepts, Quantities, and Use: When ILSR opened its doors, the price of oil was in the process of quadrupling over 18 months. Our first publication was a guide for people to understand the concept of energy and how all forms of energy interrelate and can be comparatively measured. * The Dawning of Solar Cells: Published in 1975, we argued for a consortium of cities to collectively drive the price of solar down by purchasing ever-greater quantities of solar cells at a guaranteed ever-declining price. * Self-Reliance Newsletter: The first issue contained an explanation of local self-reliance and analyzed why we need large companies. * Salvaging the Future: Waste-Based Production: Using a hypothetical American city of one million people, this groundbreaking study on value added to discarded material presents a detailed forecast of the costs and benefits of recycling. * Creating Wealth from Everyday Items: This report was one in a series of reuse reports, funded by the US EPA, to document product reuse as an important economic development and waste reduction strategy. * Cutting the Waste Stream in Half: Community Record-Setters Show How: ILSR report for the Environmental Protection Agency showing communities that had recycling levels above 50%. This was essential research that was the foundation of zero waste goals and planning in the years to come. Transcript
| David Morris: | We chose the term “local self-reliance” consciously, but perhaps a bit glibly. What we found out was that people couldn’t understand the term, so they would forever introduce me when I was giving a speech or introduce one of us who might’ve been on television, reading off the teleprompter as “The Institutes for Self-Reliance.” The word local was dropped, and it was dropped 95% of the time, so you realize that there was something going on here. I concluded, finally, that Americans understand the term self-reliance, self-reliance, individual reliance, but the concept of local self-reliance seems almost a oxymoron. It’s a contradiction in terms. For us, it’s not a contradiction in terms, because no human being is an island. What we emphasize, as much as anything, is cooperation and mutual aid and a sense of community. Local Self-Reliance is, in fact, the name, remains the name, but only in the last 10 years will I say that people almost always get it right now. | | Neil Seldman: | Back in the ’70s, there were very few groups that understood that the local place was the place to be, and that’s where you could make fundamental change. That’s what we proceeded to do. | | Reggie Rucker: | Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker, and this is a really special episode. Of course, every episode is special. It’s like when you have children, all of your children are special, you love all of them equally, but really you have favorites, but you love them all equally. Anyways, this one is special because we are releasing it the day after celebrating our, ILSR’s, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 50th birthday. May 1, 1974 is our birthday, and there is no one I’d rather celebrate this milestone occasion with more than my co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Aw, Reggie. I feel the same way. Now, everyone, it’s really a special here for a couple of reasons. Of course, ILSR’s 50th anniversary and y’all, Reggie just got engaged, so it is truly a year for celebration. Reggie, a huge congratulations to you and your fiance. | | Reggie Rucker: | Thank you, Luke. Definitely a happy moment for me. There’s so much to celebrate today. And of course, I’m going to bring this back to celebrating ILSR turning 50. That’s wild. We are in the middle of the city series. We started in Detroit, spotlighting folks doing great work to build local power there. As we’ve moved to DC in this part of the series, it is beyond fitting that we’re able to take this moment to look at how our organization was born in DC and born out of everything happening in the district in the late ’60s and early ’70s. And Luke, I love those clips that you selected to open the episode, especially that last bit from David Morris, where he talks about no human being is an island and this sense of cooperation, mutual aid, and community. When you build that, you build local power. I love that DC is embedded into the fabric of our organization, as an inspiration to so much of what we do. | | Luke Gannon: | Now, this episode isn’t just about ILSR’s founding. It’s a lens into how the history of DC shaped ILSR into existence, how the economy influenced the very basis of our work, and how the political landscape pushed us to keep fighting for a more sustainable and equitable present and future. Let’s dive in. | | David Morris: | The history of Washington DC is a story of the local and the national. It’s a story of top down and bottom up, and it’s a story of the quest for sovereignty. In 1963, the good citizens of the United States of America gave the citizens of the District of Columbia the right to vote for the President. Not the right to have a voting delegate in Congress, but the right to vote for President. 1967, they got the right to vote for school board. And 1973, they got home rule. Home rule meant that, for the first time since 1874, they got the right to elect their city council and their mayor. That is 1974. They got into office in 1975, and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance was born right in the middle of that, in May of 1974. | | MUSIC: | Stayed on freedom. | | David Morris: | The other aspect of Washington DC, which was the sea in which we swam, is that it was a Black city. 700,000 people, and it was two-thirds Black. And in 1968, so this is six years before the institute was founded, there were riots after Martin Luther King died, all around the country. But in Washington DC, there were a thousand businesses that were destroyed. Many of the commercial strips that were owned by Black businesses were destroyed. There was the equivalent of $2 billion in property damage, in current dollars. It was two decades, almost three decades, before those were rebuilt. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance was born in a city that was coming into its own, that was gaining a certain amount of authority, that was agitated, that was angry, that was organized. | | Luke Gannon: | That’s David Morris, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. As DC was in economic turbulence, co-founders David Morris, Neil Seldman, and Gil Friend saw a need to fill. Here’s how Neil recalls the origin story. | | Neil Seldman: | When Gil Friend, David Morris, and myself founded the Institute, we were all neighbors. We all lived in Adams Morgan, and we were all working on community projects. We realized that there were three areas of the community that no one was focusing on. Food production, recycling of raw materials, and energy, sunlight falling on rooftops and so forth. I don’t even know if I chose recycling or I was assigned it. I was assigned recycling because we wanted to start a business in recycling, and I had a good deal of business background. I helped run my father’s retail store, and I worked in factories all my life. | | David Morris: | Neil Seldman was the most rooted, probably, of the three of us. A very tight-knit family, raised in Brooklyn. His father owned a retail mattress shop, and his aunt owned a factory. So the three of us joined together and started the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in a three-story townhouse on 18th Street in Washington DC. | | Luke Gannon: | The Institute was set up in a residential neighborhood to demonstrate that our energies and our economies can blossom when rooted in community. | | David Morris: | It was an expression of our thesis and a demonstration that urban areas could be producers as well as consumers, that we could produce basic wealth at the local level. In our townhouse, one thing we did was use the roof and put solar collectors. We had just started producing solar cells for terrestrial application in the United States. They were producing heat, and then we grew food on the roof, as well. We had a Clivus Multrum composting toilet, a massive thing, in the basement. Neil Seldman oversaw the growing of hundreds of thousands of worms there. | | Neil Seldman: | We succeeded in putting a greenhouse on the roof. We experimented with raising worms, with raising fish. We raised sprouts. We built a business. We were the major supplier of sprouts to restaurants throughout the city. | | David Morris: | The Institute was very much interested in, simply as a demonstration, simply as a symbol, but it reflected our feeling that you could extract useful work from so many overlooked things, whether it happened to be human genius or the ground or the rooftop. | | Luke Gannon: | David recalls that from its inception, they wanted ILSR to accomplish two things. | | David Morris: | We wanted to develop and promote a framework. We wanted a framework of local self-reliance that could be applied throughout all the sectors of the economy, broadly. But then we also wanted to get down and dirty. We wanted to get to the point where we could see what worked and what didn’t work, and that meant choosing sectors where individuals could work in depth. We decided that we would use certain criteria to choose those sectors. One of the criteria was that working there would demonstrate the concept of local self-reliance. The second was that it would be a sector where the local authority, that is local government, would have a significant ability to establish the rules. The third is that we could achieve something. That it was doable within a certain timeframe to have an impact. One of those was solid waste. And it’s sort of an obvious thing, because solid waste is one of those things that cities, at that time, had almost complete control over and still have primary control over. They set the rules not only for pickup, but what you can throw away, where it goes, who hauls it. | | Luke Gannon: | The Institute was established with the capacity to promptly react and adapt to economic dynamics. As David exemplifies, one of the Institute’s primary focuses at its inception was energy, prompted by the city and national focus on oil. | | David Morris: | We chose energy because when we set up in 1974, we had just gone through an oil embargo, a quadrupling in oil prices, and the country was desperately trying to move toward what they called Project Independence. We did an investigation to say, what is the possibility… The nation chose nuclear. They wanted a thousand nuclear plants by the year 2000. And we looked and we looked and we looked, and we decided that there was this technology called a solar cell, which could generate electricity when struck by sunlight and had only been used, until very recently, for space satellites. We chose that because it was clear that you had enough space and enough sunlight to generate sufficient electricity to really make yourself a producer to the point where if you couldn’t decentralize the entire electricity system, you could certainly participate in it as an active generator, as an active producer. | | In the late 1970s when there was another quadrupling of oil prices, suddenly, the concept of waste-to-energy was born. The national environmental movements embraced it. We were going to take our garbage, we were going to generate energy, and it was going to reduce our dependence on imported oil. We didn’t believe that. We believed that the embodied energy in solid waste was more important, that we should recycle, recover, reuse that waste, and not burn it simply for the BTU value. Neil Seldman, as the man in charge of that, was to oppose the incinerators and work with coalitions all around the country. Local people who didn’t want an incinerator in their backyard. They didn’t want a garbage transfer station in their backyard. They didn’t want a landfill in their backyard. | | We worked with them to stop the incinerators and then worked with them to promote recycling. That was our first success in the 1980s. When I say our, it wasn’t the Institute’s first success. We always worked in coalitions, so these were coalitions usually led by… Well, not always led by locals, but usually minorities because that’s where the powers that be installed incinerators and installed garbage transfer stations. Those were the front lines in fighting them. In the 1980s, there were several plans that were canceled, and by the late ’80s, the majority of those that were planned had been canceled. | | Luke Gannon: | From the beginning, ILSR recognized the potential of converting waste into energy. Neil dedicated significant attention to solid waste policy. | | Neil Seldman: | When it came to solid waste management policy, I attached myself to people who had expertise. These were the recyclers in California. From there, we developed not only the expertise for the institute, but also a network of technicians to work with. That is when we started fighting incinerators, because we were promoting recycling, economic development, and recovering the materials so that cities could be productive cities. Cities could be producing things instead of importing everything that the cities needed, both energy, raw materials, food. | | Luke Gannon: | In the mid-1970s, cities and federal agencies were promoting incineration. That’s when ILSR entered the anti-incineration movement, led largely by Neil. | | Neil Seldman: | The move to incineration started in the mid-1970s. EPA was promoting it. The Department of Energy was promoting it. EPA gave out planning grants, and the Department of Energy gave out what they called commercialization grants. Meaning, “Here’s 50,000 to plan it from the EPA, and here’s 10 million to start construction.” There were, in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, there were about 400 incinerator planned for the country. Every major population center in the country, someone wanted to build an incinerator. Only about 90 were built. The remainder were killed. We helped directly cancel 35, then we started writing manuals on how to do it. We distributed those very widely, and other communities started knocking out incinerators left and right. | | For many years, I would say from ’76 to ’86, we were the only national organization fighting incinerators. In fact, the national environmental organizations thought incinerators were a good thing, until we were part of the effort to build this grassroots movement nationwide against incineration. We were incredibly effective. We were involved in 35 successful fights across the country to defeat incinerators. We lost two. It developed our reputation as the go-to organization, not only to stop incineration, but what to do after you stop the incinerator. | | Luke Gannon: | In one instance, Neil recounts, there was a garbage incinerator under construction in Austin, Texas. Many believed it would be impossible to halt the project, but local organizers mobilized, and ILSR came in with technical support, and they successfully halted the construction. | | Neil Seldman: | The orchestration was we showed that if the city were to cancel the incinerator, they would lose $22 million. But if they invested in recycling, composting, and reuse, they would save $120 million over the twenty-year life of the planned incinerator. We explained that the incinerator is going to be very costly not only to build but to operate, therefore taxes are going to have to be increased. The business community deserted the incinerator and came over to our side. | | Luke Gannon: | By 1986, national environmental groups had embraced the message of local organizers and began opposing incineration, as well. | | Neil Seldman: | You can times 300 canceled incinerators by their cost of maybe $500 million, $600 million each, and you could see that we’ve saved the country billions in money that would’ve been spent adding to pollution and making people’s health much worse than it is. By 1985, more incinerators were canceled than were planned. The legacy of our work has equipped people with the information they need to stop a planned incinerator. What we’re working on now is shutting down existing incinerators, which is much more difficult, as you can imagine, than stopping a planned one. | | Luke Gannon: | Now here, we’re going to take a brief detour to explain how we expanded our work from our home base of DC. In the 1980s, David authored a book highlighting cities as the focal points of local economies, emphasizing their potential to foster economic sustainability through strategic empowerment. Impressed by David’s insights, the Mayor of St. Paul extended an invitation for him to visit the Twin Cities. | | David Morris: | And Mayor Latimer invited me to St. Paul and sat me in a room next to the mayor’s office with three of his senior officials, and they grilled me on how local self-reliance could be applied to the city of St. Paul. They essentially contracted with the Institute to help to design and implement what they call the homegrown economy in St. Paul. I was there, on contract through the Institute, for about a year and fell in love with the city of St. Paul and fell in love with Minnesota. | | Luke Gannon: | David chose to stay in St. Paul, due to the accessibility of political leaders compared to Washington DC. Here, elected officials considered the needs of local residents, including children attending nearby schools, hospital staff, and business owners, which fostered this strong sense of community. At that time, the city was deeply entrenched in its local roots, so ILSR expanded its ideas and research into the Twin Cities, | | David Morris: | Among the things that we were doing were studies that tracked dollars as they flowed through neighborhoods. The District of Columbia had had an announcement, when a new McDonald’s opened, that it was a job generator. We put out a little booklet and said, no, you lose jobs every time a McDonald’s opened up. Which is not intuitive, because, after all, there weren’t jobs there yesterday and there are today. But what we said is, if people were going to eat anyway, and if they weren’t going to go to McDonald’s to eat, then they were going to go to the grocery store and buy it, or they were going to go to a sit-down restaurant. However else they spent their food dollar, more of it was going to remain in the local community. That had a very large impact. | | Luke Gannon: | In the late-1980s, the Institute, led by Neil’s work in waste, published Salvaging the Future, a seminal work that synthesized ILSR’s perspectives on economy and sustainability. | | Neil Seldman: | We published Salvaging the Future to show that a city of 1 million people can create 1,000 jobs and create economic value of $2 billion a year if you go from wasting to recycling and composting. That’s the state of the art. That’s what circularity, sustainability, and environmental justice… All of those three concepts were all tied into our initial work | | Luke Gannon: | After half a century, the Institute remains steadfast in its foundational principles, advocating for the strength of community, the significance of local economies, and the decentralization of production, responsibility, and authority. This embodies the very essence of local self-reliance. | | Neil Seldman: | People are predisposed to do the right thing. They just need the encouragement and the public policy. If we want to live better, we have to change the rules to reflect the way we want to live our values and our pocketbooks. We feel that decentralizing decision-making is perhaps the only way to save the world. We wanted to change the way people thought about resources, about energy. We wanted the Institute to become a household word, and we’re pretty close to that right now. | | Local self-reliance is the ability of a community to produce its basic needs without having to rely on outside sources. Not to become completely independent, but to be able to produce enough that a city has leverage on the outside world. If you don’t like a certain product, you can design and build what you want in your city with the resources of the city, the financial resources, the material resources, like sunlight and newspaper, and of course, the labor power to be productive, and use your capital efficiently and your labor power efficiently. There’s an expression. We want an environmental policy as if every molecule mattered. To use a molecule as efficiently as you can to eliminate waste and enhance the way you live. While you’re doing it, make friends and neighbors. | | David Morris: | We work on national policymaking more than we did. We focused, the first 30 years, almost entirely on local and state. We went from local to state to national, but at the same time, we’re forever grounded. Whatever you do at the international level, the rubber meets the road at the local level. We’re always focused on the decentralization of production, the decentralization of authority, and the decentralization of responsibility. Those three things, we sometimes call it the arc of community. Authority, responsibility, and capacity. That’s what local self-reliance means. | | Luke Gannon: | To David, Neil, and Gil, your contributions have led me to host this podcast today, a role for which I am deeply, deeply grateful. But beyond that, I’m thankful for the opportunity to broaden my understanding of and perspectives on what an economy ought to resemble to make it equitable and inspiring for everyone participating in it. Your lifelong dedication to enhancing our world is truly commendable. Thank you, and of course, a special thanks to my star co-host for making this show what it is. Reggie, over to you. | | Reggie Rucker: | Thank you. Thank you, Luke. Thank you for that episode and really for grounding our work and community and in DC. David and Neil and Gil, thank you for your work in founding this institution we are grateful to be a part of. To you, our listeners, thank you for being on this journey with us. Whatever part of the last 50 years you’ve been with us, thank you for your partnership, your allyship on this journey. You are part of our community now, and we thank you. | | We’re going to continue this celebration, but we will be back again in two weeks with another story out of DC. In the meantime, check out the very special show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into ILSR’s history and our relationship with DC. As always, you can visit ILSR.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. And we love getting your emails, so keep sending those to BuildingLocalPower@ILSR.org to let us know what’s on your mind. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Taya Noel. The music for the season is also composed by Taya Noel. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
If you want your city to be a focus in an upcoming season, send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org.
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Apps | RSS
Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
Born and raised in DC, Kehmari Norman established her flower shop to bridge culture and floristry. The visionary behind Black Flower Market drew from her background as a stage designer at Temple University, transforming her skills into landscape design, and intertwining environmentalism with entrepreneurship. Throughout the episode, Kehmari highlights the significance of authenticity and cultivating connections rooted in one’s identity. She recognizes that “relationships are our best currency,” evident in her efforts to unite people through floristry workshops, farmers markets, and community events.
Related ResourcesBlack Flower Market
Instagram: @blkflwrmrkt
First-ever BLK Market event showcases variety of Black-owned businesses in Richmond
This Washingtonian florist is giving bouquets to families of homicide victims
Book:
- Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker, back with my co-host Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Hey, Reggie. Oh my God, it is great to be back and even greater to be spending this season in your neck of the woods. | | Reggie Rucker: | So it’s funny that you say that because I actually still don’t feel quite right about calling DC home. I’ve been here for a few years now, but still I very much feel like a gentrifier. I just put it out there and actually, as you know, I just wrapped up my thesis on gentrification as looking at how small business lending is associated with gentrification. But that’s another topic for another day. Point is, I don’t think I can call it like my neck of the woods. I can’t call this place mine. | | Luke Gannon: | Yeah, okay. I mean, that’s fair. When I usually ask you about home, you go straight to talking about Modesto, so I get that you feel that way, but I really need to read your thesis and we definitely got to have another conversation on this. | | Reggie Rucker: | The good news is we do have an amazing lineup of shows ahead where we are getting to talk to folks from DC who have been doing work in this community for years to make it the special place that it is. It’s the community leaders, the advocates, activists, entrepreneurs, social and otherwise who have these really powerful stories about the drive to write DC’s next chapter. We think these stories will be illuminating in their own right, but as always, we hope that they also inspire you on your journey to build local power wherever you’re listening from. And with this episode, it was such a privilege to start this series with Kehmari Norman. She’s the founder of Black Flower Market, and if you’re in DC or the DC area, even if you’re not, follow her on Instagram immediately and we’ll put the links in the show notes. But this was special. | | Luke Gannon: | As Reggie mentioned in our very first DC episode, we are talking about flowers, Black culture, and of course, DC. Today on the show, we are welcoming Kehmari Norman, who owns and operates the Black Flower Market, which is a flower shop in Washington DC that hosts pop-up shops and workshops, exploring medicinal and cultural context of florals. Here’s Kehmari. | | Kehmari Norman: | My name is Kehmari. I’m the owner and founder of Black Flower Market, and I started my business in 2018. I’m born and raised in Washington DC and I started my career in environmentalism as a student at Temple University. Graduated from DC Public Schools in 2011, I’ve always been a scholar and an excellent student Since daycare. I’m the first college graduate in my immediate family. I wasn’t interested in taking an easy route for my life. I’m a fourth generation Washingtonian, and so DC is very near to my identity and my family’s identity. I didn’t need to create a reason to want to give back or come back or to love the city. | | The city is very much a part of me and my upbringing. I graduated from Temple University in 2015 with a degree in theater and concentration in set design, and most of my experience as a college student was not in theaters or in stage arenas, but predominantly in green spaces where I’d activate my design skills and place them into gardens or cityscapes, for example. And that trajectory led me to an internship with the Smithsonian’s Horticulture division, and that was my reintroduction back home in 2016. | | Luke Gannon: | Kehmari developed her relationship with flowers through environmentalism while attending Temple University in Philadelphia. | | Kehmari Norman: | As a sophomore at Temple University, a friend of mine had introduced to me his non-profit concepts and ideas. He started a profit called Philly Urban Creators, which is still in existence today. And at that sound stage of the organization, the goal was to communicate and react to or respond to gentrification and demolition in Philadelphia and North Philadelphia primarily. And we offered a space for me to manage. We were pretty much strangers at that point, but the energy was felt. I was a part of a Black philosophy club as a student at Temple, and we were relatively organized, so much so that we caught the attention of Alex, and initially he offered all of us, the Black philosophy group, a garden space for us to collectively manage. | | I was the only one of the group that took him up on the invitation, and at that point, I didn’t have any gardening, floristry or farming skills, but I have been a designer for quite some time, and so I took on the project to design the space through a landscaping and agricultural perspective. Philadelphia, North Philly is a town of row homes, and so the image throughout North Philly was like these gaps in neighborhoods where a house would be demolished due to renovation or gentrification or something. So our goal was to transform those gaps that ultimately became landfill spaces and transformed them into green oases and just practicing design skills and activating this space ultimately had to learn how to take care of it after designing it and activating it with community events and festivals and people. | | So I initially grew and I still do grow produce primarily, and through the act of cultivating crops and land stewardship, I gained mentors and a world of perspective about careers in environmentalism and floristry found me with my internship at the Smithsonian. One of my mentors, he created and curated the flowers for the Freer Gallery and other Smithsonian museums. And so as a mentee, I would go with him almost every day, 4:00 A.M., 5:00 AM in the floral home shops and just learning the basics through shadowing. Through that like revelation and that experience, I decided to start my own floral design business. | | Luke Gannon: | Floristry found Kehmari and her passion had a ripple effect where she built relationships with people who were following their dreams, creating health and wellness by and for Black people. | | Kehmari Norman: | Relationships are everyone’s strongest currency. For me personally, it was about staying true to myself and what I want, not necessarily aiming to do it all or be everything to everyone. So for example, I know my strengths, and I know coming back to DC that one of my strengths was the community that I’ve developed in Philadelphia as a Black gardener, as a Black land steward. Just going back to Philadelphia, I just knew what I wanted and I know what I was extremely passionate about. So even before Alex Epstein, the founder of Philly Urban Creators, before he offered the opportunity to manage a space, a garden space, or a lot rather, at that point, I was already in a space of health and wellness from an African perspective and the Pan African perspective. So all my life, I’ve been an avid reader, and at that point in time, I was incredibly inspired by herbalists and activists like Dr. Sabie, a friend of mine, his older sister, was studying under Dr. Sabie in Miami, and just the powerful influence of herbs, policy and culture, I was enamored in it all. | | And so I knew even as a student studying theater and not necessarily knowing where my life would turn out, I knew what I liked and so when an opportunity was brought to me to start a garden, I just found it a blessing and yeah, a true blessing for me to act on some of my interests. So while I was reading and researching herbalists, I could actually put the things that I was researching into play and do it myself. I knew my strengths, I knew what I wanted to do, and that helped me to identify other people who also knew their own strengths and know what they wanted to do. So we’re not aiming to do it all, but we’re just doing what we like in this space together. | | Luke Gannon: | One of Kehmari’s missions is to bridge the gap between culture and flora culture. One of the ways she actualizes this is in the Smudge Stick Workshops she holds. | | Kehmari Norman: | Bridging the gap between people’s culture and flora culture is actualized in the business through experiences and engagements, but ultimately what I mean by that saying by bridging people’s culture and flora culture is to allow us to see ourselves as a community through the things that we use and the things that we do. So for example, in the Smudge Stick lab, which is a offering that I host, there’s a space where we just talk with one another and folks get to understand and learn that while they may seem like polar opposites, whether it’s via age or the way they look or income or whatever, different binaries, no matter how seemingly opposite they can be, they’ll tell a story about how their grandmothers used basil for something in particular, or their parents used a certain herb or flower for specific ailments, and it allows a cultural immersion and a meeting of the minds and essentially for folks to let their shoulders down and see more commonalities than differences. | | I grew up in a space where Black success was really normalized. It wasn’t like the exception or something outstanding. It was really the culture. So growing up, my orthodontists, my dentists, my doctors, policymakers, all of these people were Black. And so I guess when I came back home in 2016 to DC, it was like this phenomenon of Black Lives Matter and all of this social stuff happening that platform Black people. And it was just like, “Oh, okay. Now the world is catching up”, because this is just our life or the life of those who lived in DC in the nineties and prior. There’s lots of culture in the District of Columbia and my role and my colleague’s role, what we want to do is just maintain a sense of chocolate city. So everything that I do has a race-first perspective. | | Luke Gannon: | Kehmari has been cultivating spaces with a focus on horticulture and floristry for over 10 years. She’s faced some personal challenges in the process. | | Kehmari Norman: | My personal challenges has been just learning the ropes, honestly. Again, I’m a first generation college graduate and first-time entrepreneur in my family, and so a lot of things that I just don’t know and learning as I go and lending, like loans and things from financial institutions, honestly, just the basics of financial entrepreneurship, well, the basics in finances within entrepreneurship and time management. Again, I just can’t emphasize enough the nuances of being a first-time college graduate, and a lot of spaces, a rare high school graduate in my family. And so that has been a personal challenge for me. | | Luke Gannon: | Every day, Kehmari is reminded of why she loves the work she is doing. | | Kehmari Norman: | I’m a servant to my community. I have a full-time job where I create environmental events throughout the district. So I may be teaching young people how to grow their own food or just simply holding a conversation with a peer of mine, holding a safe space to not code switch or to just simply be. Those are the moments where I can identify with that sentiment. | | True self-reliance is being a servant to your community, having a conversation with your communities of a super grassroots perspective and energy, how can you be of service? And that doesn’t mean how can you give money or give anything outside of who you are. Maybe tapping into your strengths. I know what I’m good at. | | Luke Gannon: | Here’s Kehmari’s incredible book recommendation. | | Kehmari Norman: | I would suggest Octavia Butler’s Blood Child. It’s an anthology of short stories, and it’s essentially a great book of advice. | | Luke Gannon: | Thank you, Kehmari, for being on the show and for sharing your work, knowledge and love with DC and beyond. Please do check out Kehmari’s Instagram located in the show notes. | | Reggie Rucker: | Luke, thank you and great job bringing us this story. As always, Kehmari, I was trying to avoid this all episode, but it is really fitting. You are so beautifully rooted and grounded in who you are and what you want for yourself and your community. I really just want to thank you for sharing that presence with us. And thanks to all of you, our listeners for tuning in. We’ll be back again in two weeks with another episode out of DC, the 51st State. | | But in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into what we discussed today. And as always, you can visit ilsr.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. And our emails are always open, buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Let us know what’s on your mind. Maybe it’s a future city we should consider going to, who else we should talk to in DC or elsewhere. We’d love to hear from you. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Taya Noel. The music for the season is also composed by Taya Noel. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
If you want your city to be a focus in an upcoming season, send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org.
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Apps | RSS
Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
In the heart of Detroit, a movement is underway to rebuild democracy and economic power from the ground up. The Detroit Community Wealth Fund sits at the epicenter of this movement, providing non-extractive capital and technical assistance that empowers local businesses and cooperatives. Co-founder Margo Dalal and director of community programming Rosie DeSantis joined Building Local Power to discuss their approach to fostering solidarity, building community wealth, and reshaping their economy by starting with what’s best for the people of Detroit rather than corporate shareholders.
Related ResourcesDetroit Community Wealth Fund
Cooperative Economic Network of Detroit
Detroit Community Wealth Fund on Non-Extractive Financing
Books (these are free, you can read them today):
- The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy by Kali Akuno
- Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond by John Michael Colón, Mason Herson-Hord, Katie S. Horvath,
Dayton Martindale, & Matthew Porges Transcript
| Rosie DeSantis: | So when I say deep democracy, we’re not talking about representational democracy, we’re not talking about a thousand people needing to reach one person in order for a single thing to maybe kind of change eventually. I’m talking about democratic modality, where the resources and the things that affect the life of a community they have direct control over. | | Reggie Rucker: | Hello and welcome back to the final installment of Building Local Power: Detroit, our first stop in a multi-city series where we explore how to build local power from the experiences of people who are doing just that on the ground in their respective cities. I’m here as always with my co-host, Luke Gannon, and as all of you know by now, Luke is the real star of the show, I’m just the supporting talent. But Luke, I got to say, after spending the last couple of months getting to talk to these community leaders and advocates, activists and social entrepreneurs, all who have these really powerful stories about the drive to write Detroit’s next chapter, I feel bonded to Detroit in a way, and really, it makes me a little emotional. I’m kind of sad to leave. | | Luke Gannon: | Reggie, yep, I’m playing it for you. | | Reggie Rucker: | Luke, you are the best. But seriously, I know you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about my hometown, Modesto. We built this whole glorious Modesto campaign around, but talking to all of these really passionate, dedicated, smart folks in Detroit, it really gives me all of those glorious vibes. | | Luke Gannon: | Oh, yes, truly. I am with you, Reggie. I am seriously a little sad to leave, but before we do, we have a fabulous final Detroit episode lined up for you. Today on the show, we are joined by two phenomenal people from the Detroit Community Wealth Fund, co-founder and senior fellow Margo Dalal, and Rosie DeSantis, the director of community programming. The Detroit Community Wealth Fund fosters, educates and finances democratic and cooperative businesses by providing technical assistance, trainings and implementing resource networks to put power in the hands of the workers and communities. | | Reggie Rucker: | That’s great, Luke. And we think these stories will, as always, be illuminating in their own right, but I hope that they also inspire you on your journey to build local power wherever you’re listening from. | | Luke Gannon: | Let’s dive in. Here’s Margo. | | Margo Dalal: | I live in Detroit and I’ve lived here for just over 10 years now. And I moved to Detroit from Massachusetts where I was in school, and I was really interested in entrepreneurship and worker ownership and what was happening in Detroit in 2013 when the city filed for bankruptcy. So I ended up moving here while I was in school and then staying. I grew up in Northern Virginia and went to high school in DC and love that part of the country. My dad is an immigrant from India and he started a business. I was in maybe sixth grade when he started his business. My uncle started a business and they’ve always been quite entrepreneurial and kind of financially focused. And then my mom is kind of like a renaissance woman and she can do just about anything and then will start a business doing that. So whether it’s sewing or baking or crafting of any kind, she has a pretty successful ceramics business now. | | So just that was a huge part of my childhood of playing business and seeing my parents do that. I also grew up in a part of Virginia that had a lot of small businesses. I was lucky to see that, and my friends’ parents own small businesses, so that’s always been part of my life. And when I was in school, you get awakened to the problems of capitalism and also alternatives like worker-owned businesses. Those things, I think, resonated with me a lot. I have lots of other interests of course, but to me, it made a lot of sense to think about alternative forms of financing that included community in the decision-making process, and then ultimately serves community-owned businesses. | | Luke Gannon: | While Margot eventually found her way to Detroit and called it home, Rosie was born and raised there. Here’s Rosie. | | Rosie DeSantis: | I was born and raised on the east side. I’ve been here my whole life except for college. Essentially, the east side in contrast to the west side, a particular area where I’m from, there’s just these swabs and swaths of vacant land. But at times, you walk down a certain block and it feels like you’re growing up in the countryside. On the other hand, it’s just normal to have an entire block of burnt down bungalows, and I don’t like painting that picture because of the way that it feeds into ruin porn or whatever. It was facts. And so that’s really what it looks like. | | What folks are very good at in Detroit is making things by and for themselves with whatever tools that they have and making it special and making it meaningful to them and their neighbors. So I think very early on, what I witnessed in terms of that reclamation of agency is squatting on land, and just creating these little corners of the world that really mean something to people. These little almost handmade parks or little movie screening places or assembled gyms outside. Using their houses as little community centers and block clubs, folks in Detroit love a block club more than anywhere I’ve ever seen. And so I witnessed a lot growing up with people finding ways to prioritize their own vision for their neighborhood, whether or not they were given the power to actually enact it, but they used the tools that they had to enact that with the space that they were surrounded by. The land that we were surrounded by provided a particular opportunity for that. | | I was raised around a lot of community planning, community visioning happenings, processes, and my mom founded a nonprofit. And what she kind of hammered into me with the way that she wanted this thing to move was a very simple idea that people deserve to be and are the experts of their own experience and deserve to have control over the resources and the situations that affect their neighborhoods and their lives and communities, which unfortunately, is kind of a radical idea. And so I was really raised seeing how these community planning processes facilitated this kind of agency that I got really obsessed with as I became an adult. And also having had some experiences of witnessing that agency being ignored or limited and also seeing how Detroiters are able to take it back in certain ways or build it for themselves has always really inspired me. Yeah, that’s kind of been really the theme of my life and my organizing and what brought me into the Wealth Fund. | | Luke Gannon: | In 2016, Margo met the three other co-founders of what would become the Detroit Community Wealth Fund. At the same time, there was an emerging network of organizations that formed the Seed Commons, which, as Margo details, is now a national organization that finances cooperatives all over the US. | | Margo Dalal: | Detroit Community Wealth Fund was started to become a member of the Seed Commons and do the type of place-based lending and cooperative development that all organizations with Seed Commons do. So we started to do that type of lending and work in Detroit, and since 2016, we’ve grown our organization. It was a really perfect fit for me. I was interested in doing work with businesses, but not in the typical kind of capitalist way. And I saw that having actual real consequences for Detroit. And so thinking about how we can do economics differently in a way that’s actually serving Detroiters and as built by Detroiters who are primarily black and primarily low income, that felt important to me. So it was really a gift to be able to do the work of the Detroit Community Wealth Fund. And now to see where that’s gone and share it others is really exciting. | | Luke Gannon: | Detroit has always epitomized the spirit of people power. Detroiters recognize that they must create solutions for the people and by the people. | | Margo Dalal: | There’s a culture of getting things done in Detroit by Detroiters for a long time, and that has often been because there weren’t services, there weren’t resources that were available. And so there is this culture of cooperation, of working together, of meeting the need. 2013, when the city filed for bankruptcy, prior and after that, there was a long period of assessing how that was going to play out in the city. Since 2013, there’s so much that has changed and some that hasn’t changed. I think it really became obvious what parts of the city were going to be benefiting from further investment and from attention, what parts were not. There were entire city plans that decided on which neighborhoods were going to exist and which might not exist. I guarantee you that was not necessarily a conversation that included those residents. | | And so I think for something like the Detroit Community Wealth Fund, and again, what the Wealth Fund is doing, the role that this organization is playing, I say it’s helping to add economic value to the skills that Detroiters already have. Detroiters already have skills, they already have resources, but how can we add economic value to those? And that means how can we create living wages? How can we create profit that the community owns, and then how can we do it in a way that is not extractive? Which if you know anything about Detroit in the last 10 years, you know that there has been one out of four homes has been foreclosed on and tax foreclosure. This was illegal. This was an illegal thing that should never have happened. And why did that happen, right? Because there was a financial system that benefited from it in many different ways. | | And so we can’t use that same financial system to build back businesses, especially businesses that we want to be owned and controlled by the community who would’ve never let this happen in the first place. And so those are, I think, the two roles that DCWF is playing. How can we do financing in an ethical and non-extractive way that doesn’t ever leave community worse off? And also, how can we build back businesses that are owned by the community and have the community’s interests first and foremost? How are we building businesses that are rooted in specific neighborhoods and communities in Detroit? | | Luke Gannon: | The Detroit Community Wealth Fund provides non-extractive capital to finance worker cooperatives. Banks provide loans with the condition of minimizing their risk, essentially, meaning that one needs existing wealth to acquire more. | | Margo Dalal: | So if you wanted to start a business, you would go to the bank, you say, “I want $100,000.” And they’d say, “Okay, cool. What is the collateral? What are you putting up that if we can’t get our $100,000 back, what are you going to give us?” And that means that you have to have some kind of asset to begin with. You might need to have a home. It’s often property. You might need to have cash in your bank account. That’s the first thing that you have to do. If you fail or even before you fail, if you’re not making money in the first few months, or maybe the first year, you still owe on that loan, you have to pay every month, regardless of if you’re making money, regardless of if you can feed yourself. If you fail, now, whatever you owe, the bank is going to come and take assets from you in order to make good on the loan that they gave you. | | That’s extractive, right? We’ve seen that play out in all sorts of ways. That’s damaging, right? And there’s a whole bunch of complicated ways that that has been played out. Another way that capital is extractive is if you can’t get a loan from your bank, you might go and take out a few credit cards that allow you to rack up tens of thousands of dollars of debt. And if you’re not paying every month, you’re probably paying 15%, 20%, 25%, sometimes even 50% or more on your interest. Same thing with a payday loan, right? You cannot afford something. The payday advance. You are sometimes paying 100% or more of that amount of money just to get it for a week or a few days. That is how capital maintains itself, and that’s how normal people are totally exploited for essentially not having resources. We all know that that is incredibly problematic on so many levels, and this gets even more complicated when you think about the housing crisis and all these other larger systems. | | Non-extractive capital is doing, and Seed Commons coined this, it is fortunately increasing in popularity, and I think there are different ways that you might be able to do this, but the way that the Seed Commons and the way that the Detroit Community Wealth Fund does it is there’s a few things that contribute towards non-extractive. One is that we’re not taking collateral. So immediately, our capital is accessible to people that don’t have historical wealth. The second is that we only require repayment when profit is made after living wages are made. So it’s sustainable. You don’t owe money the first month. You might not owe money the first year unless you’re breaking even. The repayment is a percentage of profit. So that means the business needs to be doing well and needs to be sustainable before we, as the lender, are even successful ourselves. And then the third part is that we understand that it is really hard to run businesses, and that requires a tremendous amount of technical assistance. | | It’s impossible for one person or even a group of people to run a business on their own. So we provide ongoing assistance for the businesses that we work with. If pivots are necessary, if changes to the business plan are necessary, often if there are interpersonal issues, it’s just a really hard thing to do, and we provide free ongoing technical assistance until a loan is repaid. So those are the three I think big things. If a loan fails, no one is personally responsible for that loan. If a business closes, and that happens, that does happen, we’re not ever going after assets that aren’t secured as part of the loan that we have provided. | | Luke Gannon: | Rosie facilitates the Cooperative Economic Network of Detroit, which is a platform for co-ops to come together and share resources and create community and economic partnerships. | | Rosie DeSantis: | It’s just a platform for them to support one another as well as build up these solid tangible partnerships towards the creation of a larger cooperative ecosystem. One of the main aspects of this program is they pay member dues, and those dues go into a large fund that we have that’s also supported by outside funding. But these dues go into that fund, and folks can ask to withdraw from that pooled money for anything that they need, up to $800 twice a year. And essentially, it’s all democratic, so any withdrawal that’s requested has to be voted on by the rest of the membership. We call it the Member Solidarity Fund. And yeah, there are a lot of different aspects of this program, but essentially, it was created to try to build up an insular cooperative economy that right now, is less the focus. So much is the relationships that need to be built between these folks, between the membership in order to do this sort of deep work, this deep organizing. | | So right now, particularly in this phase of it, we’re really focused on getting them to connect with one another and fleshing out what types of partnerships, how can they meet each other’s needs in this solid way? Who’s sourcing what from who? Who’s taking on what project with who, for what? There are 11 members right now, and a lot of these folks come to us. A lot of folks become members in order to get support with their transition into becoming a co-op. We also don’t just accept co-ops. Basically, requirement for membership is that there is some sort of pooling of resources, sharing of resources within your organization, and you run democratically, or if you need support with your democratic processes and structure, that’s why you’re getting into the network. And so there are a lot of smaller projects that aren’t so much like businesses, but are more focused on building out democracy within their respective community, some piece of sharing of resources, which might be as small as a tool library. We offer workshops that are exclusive to our membership. | | Luke Gannon: | While Rosie has built the Cooperative Economic Network, they have faced one big challenge. | | Rosie DeSantis: | The biggest thing is just folks’ capacity. Asking folks to get together to do anything is a challenge when these folks are really dealing with limited resources in many ways. And so it’s like we’re trying to support them connecting, and then our capacity, because I run this program by myself, we’re trying to both facilitate these connections while also offering this ongoing technical assistance towards their transition while also doing these workshops. So it’s just a lot, but I would say that and because we’re stressing the relationship building so much, almost all of our events and stuff are in person, and that’s deliberate and that’s a challenge. And otherwise, it’s really just supporting people through the earliest phases of them building out their governance and democratic processes and making sure that they stay on track with a work plan for that because it’s like if you’re not committed to that, then membership might not make sense to you. | | So we’re really trying to think through what is it going to take to get folks aware of what’s being built right now? One thing that we’re doing is free neighborhood workshops, essentially like food and childcare provided, and we’re going to talk to you about what a co-op is at the most essential level, and what is our vision for what a local self-reliant cooperative economy looks like. In terms of the members’ response, the biggest thing that I perceive is they’re just very excited to be with each other, just very excited about the connections that they are building, and I feel like it’s many times rarer than we think. Just people coming together based on shared values. Explicitly, that is why we’re here to fundamentally support each other because of that. | | Luke Gannon: | Rosie has had multiple highlights throughout their experience working with cooperatives. | | Rosie DeSantis: | The first one was when we did a version of our incubator program where essentially, a local nonprofit approached us after surveying their neighbors about what businesses they wanted to see, and a co-op was created out of that based on that, from folks involved in that area or living in that area. Challenges with that co-op, and they’re still developing, but just to know that this model is possible gave me just a lot of hope in terms of just how our programming and this model can be used to facilitate deep democracy and prioritizing the visions of Detroiters for themselves. So when I say deep democracy, we’re not talking about representation of democracy, we’re not talking about 1,000 people needing to reach one person in order for a single thing to maybe kind of change eventually. I’m talking about a democratic modality or whatever where the resources and the things that affect the life of a community they have direct control over. |
If you want your city to be a focus in an upcoming season, send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org.
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Apps | RSS
Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
Mama Shu’s journey began with a profound commitment: healing her community. Despite the challenges faced by her hometown of Highland Park, Mama Shu felt a deep connection to the area. Determined to make a difference, she embarked on a mission to reclaim neglected spaces, tirelessly working to steward the land, organize the community, and secure resources for revitalization.
Today, Avalon Village owns 45 lots that have been transformed into vibrant community spaces, including gardens, parks, a homework house, markets, a cafe, an entrepreneurial hub, a healing space, and more. Yet, Mama Shu’s impact extends beyond physical infrastructure. Her holistic approach to community development embraces spiritual and cultural revitalization, honoring and celebrating her departed loved ones while nurturing a loving space for future generations.
Avalon Village stands as a testament to the resilience of communities and the transformative power of collective action.
Related ResourcesCheck out: Avalon Village
- If you live in Detroit, they have lots of upcoming events!
From Blight to Beauty | Shamayim Harris | TEDxDetroit
CNN Heroes Tribute: Mama Shu
Highland Park’s ‘Mama Shu’ is among USA Today’s 2024 Women of the Year
Ellen Meets The Amazing Mama Shu
Mama Shu Interview with Roadtrip Nation
Mama Shu’s Book Recommendation:
- Sacred Woman: A Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind, and Spirit by Queen Afua Transcript
| Mama Shu: | My job as a feminine entity on this planet is going to help to heal it, help to bring it back into balance, I would say. And so that is what my work is about, is about to helping to bring things back into balance. Sometimes it’s the feminine touch or whatever sometimes that’s missing in things and that right there. And so I believe that Highland Park, I believe that Avalon Village is a place that is being healed. | | Reggie Rucker: | Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power Detroit, our first stop in a multi-city series where we explore how to build local power from the experiences of people who are doing just that on the ground in their respective cities. | | If you’re just jumping into the series midway, these are the people who are proving what’s possible when a community comes together to shape its future. We talk to community leaders, advocates, activists, entrepreneurs, and elected officials, all who have powerful stories about the drive to write Detroit’s next chapter. We think these stories will be illuminating in their own right, but we also hope they inspire you on your journey to build local power wherever you’re listening from. So excited as always to do this tour with my co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Hey, Reggie. I am so excited to be here. We have quite a special guest today. Shamayim Harris, or Mama Shu, was named USA Today’s 2024 Women of the Year. Mama Shu was also on The Ellen Show and was given a house from Ellen. Yep, you heard me. More on that later. And was named CNN Hero in 2023, and was introduced at their 17th year Heroes event by Sterling K. Brown. Yeah, it’s crazy. And now she’s talking on our podcast. | | Reggie Rucker: | I know, right? When I saw the Sterling K. Brown clip, that just blew me away. I immediately went into fanboy territory. And it’s funny, because she talked about Avalon Village being infectious, like those ideas and that vision being infectious, but honestly, I’m going to take it a step further and talk like, it’s her, like she’s infectious. Sitting here listening to her, and I was thinking, like, “Mama Shu, what are you doing this weekend?” Or, “Where are you going to be?” Because that’s what I’m doing. That’s where I want to be. Right? | | Luke Gannon: | I know, seriously. I’m practically ready to head over to Avalon Village to meet Mama Shu in person. | | Reggie Rucker: | It’s just really incredible. I took away so much from Mama Shu’s story, but one certainly is this idea that we all want the same thing. So when she was building her vision, she knew it wasn’t hers alone. We all want and deserve beautiful spaces and safe spaces and healing spaces, spaces we can learn and find joy and all of these things. We are one in that regard. And that’s what creates the shared humanity, which is the foundation that we can build anything on, including this beautiful village. | | Luke Gannon: | So after decades of stewarding the land, keeping it clean, organizing community, buying property, designing lots, Mama Shu has literally built a village. Let’s hear how she did it. | | Mama Shu: | My name is Mama Shu. I’m the founder and CEO of Avalon Village, and I’m just over here building a eco village. We’re transforming blight to beauty, and we’re in the city of Highland Park, which is 2.9 miles, and it’s a small suburb inside of Detroit, Michigan. The population is close to 10,000. We’re just basically making things better and better here in the community out of distress or something that was distressed before, because we believe that we deserve to live in a beautiful environment and grow up in a beautiful environment, and grow our families up and prosper in a clean, healthy, and safe environment. | | My relationship to Detroit was, well, I was born in Highland Park, actually, and as a little girl, we moved on, a baby, actually. My family, we moved to Detroit, which is almost right across the street, because it’s just so close and everything. So grew up on the east side of Detroit, actually Field Street between Palmer and Medbury. And grew up over there and went to Rose Elementary School, graduated from Kettering High School in Detroit. And just grew up on Field Street as a young person, and just loved my neighborhood. I was always fascinated by the neighborhood and would walk my block and visit the elders and just do stuff, and sell Avon and Tupperware and everything. I hustled on that block in my neighborhood. All of the most beautiful comfortable things happen on that block. | | So yeah, I love building neighborhoods, because I believe that neighborhoods are foundations for family and for growth, for spiritual growth, mental growth, all of that. That’s like the beginnings to me. And if the neighborhoods are not together, if they’re neglected and full of blight and just all kinds of things going on, it’s hard to grow. | | And I see other beautiful spaces like downtown, it’s just looking real beautiful. But I think that the neighborhoods, to bring these neighborhoods up to be able to create a community that we want. So that’s like my mission, is to basically transform blight to beauty just on this block here in Highland Park, Michigan. I felt that I could just take that little chunk and try to do what I can. And sometimes I think that’s crazy or whatever, and they’re like, “What the heck are you doing?” But it’s turning out good. | | Luke Gannon: | In 2007 and 2008, Mama Shu would drive past what is now Avalon Street and see the neglected streets, mattresses strewn about, dumpsters and homes, boarded homes and broken down cars. Yet Highland Park was Mama Shu’s home, so she embarked on a journey to turn blight into beauty. | | Mama Shu: | I’m a minister too of 21 plus years as well, and I was like, “I’m going to go over there on that block and fix up my ministry and put my ministry in the house that I’m in right now.” And I said, “And then I’m going to go ahead and clean up the block and I’m going to build the village.” It’s because I wanted a beautiful space to live in, but I didn’t want to move. I wanted to stay where I was. And I felt that this is something that we can do. We can clean it up and we can get it in order. | | And so I would just drive past the street every day. And then six months after my Jakobi, he was two years, one month and six-days-old, he got killed in a hit-and-run accident. And then I’m driving to my school job, okay, driving to my school job, and something said, “Just go down the block.” And I saw a dumpster in the driveway of this house that I’m sitting in right now, and I saw a dumpster. I said, “Wow.” I said, “Okay, this house is for sale.” I saw a For Sale sign in the window. And then I just decided to let me just call and get on this block, get over here, put my ministry on this block and get to work. And ended up buying this house for 3,000 bucks and started fixing it up and stayed in it when it was boarded up. | | And I always say that some people look for a beautiful place, and I just want to create. We can create a place and make it beautiful. That’s basically what it is. We don’t have to run away. A lot of people leave and they go to other towns and everything, but I wanted to stay. I really did. I’m like, “You know what? This is cool. This is a block. It’s only 2.9 miles. We can really do and grow and make things better in this city as a whole.” And my goal was to fix this house up and also to build Jakobi Ra Park, which is the very first entities, the name of my nonprofit. The first one is the Moon Ministry, and then we built the park simultaneously. | | I was born here in Highland Park, so I’m really proud of where I was born. This is my city. Hey, we fall down on hard times. There is places like this everywhere in all different kinds of states. And so I just wanted to begin to just initiate some beauty, and how we can transform and how we can revive the space, in hopes that it will spread and be infectious and catch on and actually help the rest of the city grow and maybe see possibilities, different possibilities. | | Luke Gannon: | In 2010 and 2011, Highland Park was grappling with challenging economic circumstances. Schools were shuttering, financial hardships loomed large, and essential infrastructure was being neglected. But Mama Shu recognized the potential for change. She decided to bridge the gaps. | | Mama Shu: | So I just wanted to make this place a better and more desirable to live in, and so I figured the very first entity was The Homework House. Why? Because when you move into a new city or a new town or a new village, people look for a place to raise their children, to be able to nurture their children, and you got to have spaces where you have children being taken care of. It’s just a natural thing. And so when you got a place where the schools are being torn down, I just have a problem with that. And so I just like, okay, so that to me, made the most sense. | | Luke Gannon: | Jakobi Ra Park and The Homework House were two of the first entities Mama Shu brought to fruition. Today, Avalon Village makes up 95% of the entire block, but it took years of hard work, dedication, and community organizing to get to this point. | | Mama Shu: | A lot of my visions comes from what I envision for myself, what’s going to make myself what I feel that I deserve in the neighborhood. I believe that I should have eclectic coffee shops and a nice park to sit in and a space to put my dog in a dog park and get training lessons in there, and a spot where you can have ice cream, and somewhere where you can party at and the children can learn. So I just envisioned those things for myself first, and then I knew that other people wanted the same thing. | | And so I’m no urban planner as far as like I don’t have a degree or anything in that. Most of it came intuitively and organically. You just know what to put, you know what’s missing, and I know what used to be here, and I just had to do it in a way that was economically feasible and that I could actually do it. | | So how I even started buying the lots, I sold fish sandwiches for $5. Yep, I sold fish sandwiches. I used my own work money from my school job, my income tax check. That’s how I bought this house. My sister friend gave me $1,500. I used… My income tax check had came in the mail. I was so excited about that. And then I used my work check and I patched it together. So this process takes a little more time, because if you don’t have the whole big giant funding to do it, but at the same time, I really love this process too. So it was just started off of selling fish sandwiches, just chipping my own money together. | | I did get a donation from the Big Sun Foundation. That was where the big chunk of the seed money came, to like, okay, I’m getting ready to build the village. Let’s get this started so we can get the Kickstarter started to actually initiate the build. It was all of that. Just gathering up a bunch of activists and folks that I know, construction workers and my civil engineer friends, and like, “Okay, y’all, we going to do this.” | | There was eight years or so that I just basically cleaned up the block first. So really, I just took stewardship of the land, and I didn’t own it yet. We just helped, did our part as citizens. Well, I don’t want to sit in the trash. I don’t want to look at it, and so I cleaned up a lot almost every year. The guys from over here at the shelter across the street here off of Woodward Avenue, and then I was in the school system, so a lot of my students and stuff, “Hey, you want to earn community service hours? Come on over here, help Mama Shu clean up, because we building a village over here. We’re going to make it better.” So it was little things. | | What I did was embedded our energy into it, in the soil, and cleaned it up and all the glass, and it was just, well, the houses were torn down, but sometimes some of the debris was still stuck in this. It was like that took actually some years to do that. And then started buying the property, I’m going to say, in like 2016, 2017, really like, okay, now here’s the deeds to it. | | So we own about 95% of this block now, about 45 properties over here, so we have space. We’re able to build what it is that we want to. The block that I’m on is slated as mixed use as it relates to the master plan in the city of Highland Park. And I didn’t know that either. That was like an organic thing too. I know I want to put a playground, I want to do this. I want to put The Homework House and the school and this and all of that, but didn’t know that that was possible. Because sometimes you just can’t sit and just build something on a residential, but it just so happens that all of my vision actually fit. I was in alignment with that just intuitively. | | Luke Gannon: | After years of stewarding the land, Mama Shu started implementing her vision to give residents and neighbors the types of businesses, spaces, and education they deserved. | | Mama Shu: | The Goddess Marketplace is… Yeah, it’s a beautiful thing. Actually, we’re working on the expansion this year. The Goddess Marketplace is an economic initiative for women entrepreneurs. And so what we’ve done is that it started off as pop-ups, a collective of pop-ups for women back in 2001. And I said, “Okay, we’re building a village. We’re going to start that and we’re going to put it in the shipping container.” And so we have two shipping containers, a 40-foot and a 20-foot that house the Goddess Marketplace. And it’s an open season marketplace. It starts in May and it ends in October. And women entrepreneurs are able to put out their tables, pop their tents and stuff around that time. And so that’s what the Goddess Marketplace is about, basically nurturing and supporting women businesses. And so we have that. | | And we also have another shop called the Whine and Tea Shop. It’s W-H-I-N-E. It was our 20-footer that we just got remodeled and everything. So that is just different wine tastings and wine swag, gifts and different things like that. So those are made out of shipping containers. Those are also ran by solar, so those are lit by solar, so there is nothing on the grid. So that’s one space. | | Also, we have the Imhotep STEM Lab or STEAM Lab, and it is another shipping container that was remodeled for the children to learn science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics in. And it’s beautiful. It has a beautiful mural on it. We like to use a lot of local artists to paint and put vibrant colors on a lot of the things that we do. We were fortunate enough to be on The Ellen Show, and she donated a house that we have. And I had an option to live in it or use it as retail, but I’m like, “You know what? This is going to be The Village Hall.” Because every city has a city hall, village hall or a place of business. So I’m like, this is where we have our security offices on one side of it, and the other part is multipurpose for meetings and everything. So we have that. The Moon Ministry, the spiritual base is also the admin building as well. | | And we have Invincible Gardens, the My 3 Sunz Basketball Court, Jakobi Ra Park. Those are spaces that are dedicated to my ancestor sons, my sons that are ancestors now. The Invincible Garden is in memory of my Chinyelu. He was murdered in 2021, so it’s been three years. And so we built a beautiful garden with a gazebo. It’s a sign and it’s just Garden Diva here at the village. Yesterday she was in there getting everything ready, because there’s getting ready to be some beautiful flowers. So Chinyelu’s Garden is total flowers in his. | | Jakobi, we built the park. There’s a Starlight Amphitheater. His name is Jakobi Ra. The Egyptian god of the Sun, Ra, and Jakobi means stars. So we did something like a Starlight Amphitheater. So we have our concerts there. I marry people on that. It’s just a platform. It’s really nice. And so it’s all lit with solar lighting. So we have just so many parties and gatherings and stuff in the summer, in the spring, in the summer. So those are some of the entities that we had. | | We even changed our street sign too. We went and there was a resolution passed to change our street to Avalon Village. So when you roll up on us, whenever y’all come and just take a trip, you’ll see that we actually have the street sign changed. So that was just kind of cool to get that done. | | We have our own security team, what’s called the Avalon Village Peace Team. Police officers back in the day were called peace officers. And so our logo is basically we take our peace seriously, and we do. It’s just a village. And so we have all of those departments and everything economical. | | We even have a space called the Avalon Village Healing House, which is under construction now. And it is a space for holistic practitioners, Reiki therapists, doulas, all of that where you can come right in the neighborhood and receive holistic care. | | We’re going to build a cafe, the Blue Moon Cafe, with attached greenhouse and some holistic businesses. So that is our health and wellness phase that’s down there on the corner. So that’s how we got things kind of blocked off around here. | | Luke Gannon: | Every part of Avalon Village is envisioned and built from love. Mama Shu’s departed sons are ancestral guardians who oversee the village. Over the years, most people embraced Mama Shu’s vision because of her consistency and commitment to bring positive change to the whole neighborhood. | | Mama Shu: | If someone doesn’t understand or even just seek to understand what’s going on and how it’s happening and everything, that can be a limiting thing to them. I think that some people just openly embrace because they know they want change and they want to see something different, and they understand that somebody’s actually doing it. And usually it’s the ones that’s not really doing this that’s thinking the other. | | One of the things is that I stayed consistent and I was very serious and I didn’t change up, and that’s one thing that people need. They need consistency and they don’t need folks to change up and actually do. So those that actually see what’s going on, like, “Wow. Okay, okay.” | | This block right here, what you got to understand is this was one of the most notorious blocks in Highland Park, and so people are just really shocked. And I was actually spiritually drawn to it to actually do something. I didn’t know that it was this horrible block, but I’m over here, “Do-da-do, let me just… Oh, we going to plant flowers here. I’m going to do this and that.” Man, I learned the history of the block, and there was a lot of murders over here of young men, and my son was actually shot here. This place was a Phoenix coming from the ashes, and I know that, from what it used to be. And so I have a lot of guys that tell me, “You know what used to go on Avalon Street?” | | So there’s a lot of people who love and enjoy watching what actually happens, and are very supportive, are very consistent in their support. And some just kind of look by the wayside, and then they’ll come a little closer and everything. And if it’s for you, it’s for you. | | Luke Gannon: | If you persist and follow the moral arc of the universe, others will follow your lead. Mama Shu’s unwavering self-belief inspired others to join the journey. | | Mama Shu: | That’s all I did, really, just stuck to it and just kept going no matter what. I done buried children and everything, but this was important to me. I don’t even care what the obstacles are. The things that have happened in the journey throughout that, it’s like… You know, after losing the kids and stuff, it’s like, okay, then somebody going to say no? I don’t even worry about nothing like that because I don’t care. I just keep it moving. If somebody want to nay-say, or they want to sit up there and try to block and all of that? None of that, it just don’t work with me, that’s all. | | You’re going to draw the people who are really digging what you’re doing. Those are the ones that you want. You want the ones that’s going to dig in. And those other ones help to strengthen things too, because sometimes they can keep you on your toes. You’re not in alignment, you always get the folks that are in alignment what you’re doing, always. They always come, so you’re good. | | Luke Gannon: | On the anniversary of Jakobi Ra’s passing, Mama Shu opened The Homework House. | | Mama Shu: | One of the moments that really stands out to me, I’m going to say that it took me about five years plus to finish The Homework House. And so when I got that all finished, and I didn’t get that totally finished, y’all, until September 23rd when I did the ribbon cutting in 2022. And even though I still had lower hanging fruit projects to work, that was my main entity, so in my heart, that was really a big thing. Some beautiful magical moments and different things that just let me know, just indications that say you’re on the right track and I’m connecting and everything, and that’s important to me to accomplish and to get done, and like, “Wow, okay.” | | But I’m going to tell you one that’s kind of made me proud. The CNN Heroes did. But the USA Today Woman of the Year, that really kind of… I’m like, “Okay. I’m Woman of the Year.” Sometimes when I get awards and different things like that, it’s like, “Man, I’m just doing my work.” | | Local self-reliance means really being a solutionist, being able to solve the problems within an area that you think that you can actually do something about. When you make a commitment to a space, to a place, and you take charge and you start putting that in order. And somebody has to be the one that’s in charge or the one that they’re going to throw the tomatoes at, build you a nice team. You know how that goes and all of that. But I say take charge and do things consistently. | | Consistency is the key. Keep doing it over and over again and show people that you are actually there for the long haul, and be real intentional. And I think that once you do that, and really it all boils down to you just got to do the work to make sure that that happens, to be able to be empowered locally. Do the work. Do what it is that you say you’re going to do, and just keep doing it, and keep growing and organize, organize, organize. | | Luke Gannon: | Developing solutions that are both by and for the community embodies the very essence of local self-reliance. Mama Shu has spearheaded the creation of a village complete with parks, businesses, organizations, and communal spaces that foster peace and prosperity for its residents. She has transformed blight into beauty. | | Mama Shu: | There’s this sister, her name is Queen Afua, and she has a book called The Sacred Woman. But basically it was a process in this book to really help to build that I was able to use. It was a tool to be able to help to build myself spiritually, physically, how to eat right. To be able to, I guess, arm myself with what I needed and what I need for my work and to live a beautiful life. It’s some practical things. Different teas, exercise and everything. And I went through this book, it’s like nine sections of it, and I’ve went through it several times, just going through it and just getting tighter. | | So I really love it, because I know and I believe that my job as a feminine entity on this planet is going to help to heal it and help to bring it back into balance, I would say. And so that is what my work is about, is about to helping to things back into balance. Sometimes it’s the feminine touch or whatever sometimes that’s missing in things, and that right there. And so I believe that Highland Park, I believe that Avalon Village is a place that is being healed. | | Luke Gannon: | Mama Shu, thank you so much for sharing your story with us on the show today. | | Reggie Rucker: | Luke, great job. Thank you for bringing us this story. And Mama Shu, look. I have a trip to Paris coming up in a couple of months, and for as excited as I am for that real talk, I cannot wait to get to Highland Park and to come visit Avalon Village. Thank you for your infectious optimism and joy and persistence and vision. This was truly, truly, truly a blessing. | | And thanks to all of you, our listeners, for tuning in. We’ll be back again in two weeks with another story out of Detroit. But in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into today’s discussion. And as always, you can visit ilsr.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. And we always welcome emails to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Let us know what’s on your mind. | | This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Tea Noelle. The music for this season is also composed by Tea Noelle. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
If you want your city to be a focus in an upcoming season, send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org.
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Apps | RSS
Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
Reneé’s journey began with a simple idea: composting isn’t just about reducing waste — it’s about building communities. Reneé V. Wallace, executive director at FoodPLUS Detroit, empowers Detroiters to drive systemic change within themselves, their homes, and throughout their community. Through innovative pilot projects like banding neighbors together to utilize alleys for community projects, partnering with farmers’ markets to pick up wasted food, and creating compost systems at universities to build bridges between farmers and students, Reneé is revolutionizing how we think about sustainability. By fostering collaboration and community engagement, Reneé is not only transforming Detroit’s economy but also nurturing a more resilient and sustainable future for all.
Related ResourcesFoodPLUS Detroit
Compost Pilot Program at Wayne State University
Detroit City Council Green Task Force Organics Recycling Program
The Stewardship Network: Reneé V. Wallace
Georgia Street Community Collective Farm
Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power Detroit, our first stop in a multi-city series where we explore how to build local power from the experiences of people who are doing just that on the ground in their respective cities. These are the people who are proving what’s possible when a community comes together to shape its future. We’ll talk to community leaders, advocates, activists, entrepreneurs, and elected officials, all who have powerful stories about the drive to write Detroit’s next chapter. We think these stories will be illuminating in their own right, but we hope they’ll also inspire you on your journey to build local power wherever you’re listening from. I’m so excited to do this tour with my co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Hey, Reggie. I am doing pretty well. It’s been super sunny in Minneapolis this week, which has really lifted my spirits, so that’s been lovely. How are you doing? | | Reggie Rucker: | I’m doing well, Luke. I’m doing well. But first I need to apologize. I’m sorry I don’t have any throwback jams for you today, so I’m truly sorry. But I’m excited about this episode nonetheless. And the reason why I’m excited is we’ve done composting episodes before and they’re always really great, always learn something new. But what I think is really special about what you’re going to hear from Renee, our guest today, is that this isn’t so much a composting story as it is a community story. It’s a story about building networks and coalitions and partnerships to join forces with people who share a common cause with you. Even if they may not know it initially, but you help them find it, you help them see it. It takes a certain type of creativity and really brilliance in the truest sense of the word to make certain projects come together. And Renee is that creative and brilliant in spades. So, Luke, I’ll let you go ahead and take the story from here. | | Luke Gannon: | So today on the show, Renee V. Wallace from FoodPLUS Detroit shares how she has built a strong network of organizations piloting programs that focus on community sustainability. Through her efforts, she has united people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to create sustainable change. Here’s Renee. | | Reneé Wallace: | I am Renee V. Wallace, and I lead a nonprofit called FoodPLUS Detroit. And we have a composting initiative called the People’s Compost Initiative, and it was one of our first inaugural programs when we started FoodPLUS back in 2014. I tell people I’m part contagion and part evangelist, so I’m out really looking at composting from a systems perspective in terms of how we do this work. And so last year I moved from just… not just, but talking with others about the whats, whys, hows, and all of that, to actually entering into a partnership to actually start a composting business. So I tell people, you get close to this, be careful. Because we really are looking for everyone to find their place in it. I firmly believe that. | | And so FoodPLUS Detroit, when we started the organization, originally it was an idea of Michigan State University. They were looking to develop this network of innovation coalitions across the world, and they selected seven cities, and one US city was in Detroit, all the others were at other places. And so myself and Kathryn Lynch Underwood, we explored that. And we were like, “Okay, so one more non-profit for what?” Detroit is just very, very well known for urban agricultural work, and so the start of this was from a food systems perspective, close the loop, right? And when we were looking at the landscape of what was being done at that time, now mind you, this was 2012, 13 when we were making these decisions, there was a big, big gap in composting. | | Back then even if you Googled food waste, you would be back on page 15 on Google at that time. Well, fast-forward, it’s in our faces now. But that wasn’t true then. People who were using compost were finding that they had to… We had to always bring it in. We had to bring it in. And it was like, no, we can do this. And so I didn’t know anything about composting. I tell people, to all the folks that say I don’t know anything. I’m like, “Good, that’s a great place to start.” But you can make it accessible at so many different levels. That’s my belief. I’m a systems person. System process change is what I do. | | Luke Gannon: | Renee has been involved in composting since its earliest murmurs, while always conscious of the significance of food systems. It wasn’t until she immersed herself in composting that she truly grasped its profound importance in both the community and the environment. | | Reneé Wallace: | When it first started out, it was about the food system. Let’s close the loop. It makes sense. It was food. As I often say to people, everybody eats, we ate, but we don’t eat everything. So what happens to the food that we didn’t eat? So what’s going to happen to that food? And along the way, it evolved from being just about the system closing the loop because you can rescue food and feed more people. You can take the food and feed the animals. For me, the conversation started to shift from not just about the food system, but when I learned about compost, compost has superpowers. It’s more of a city’s systems solution. It’s a soil-based solution because once you get away from composting, the act itself, you start to look at compost, the product. And what does compost in soil do? It not only improves the quality of the soil for growing the food, it’s going to improve the quality of the soil to have the plant sequester even carbon. It’s going to improve the quality of the soil so that water can infiltrate and you stop flooding my dog on basement. | | Luke Gannon: | Compost forms a vital network connecting a multitude of organisms. It nourishes humans with food, provides essential nutrients for plant growth and vitality, and contributes to the development of resilient infrastructure, ensuring strong foundations for our environment. | | Reneé Wallace: | As I started to have a deeper understanding of the power of compost, it started to shift the conversation about it. I talk about it in terms of what do we have a need for. I’m not talking to you about just composting or compost itself, I’m talking to you about what is happening in the quality of our life. If our basements are flooding, if people are dying from heat, okay, let’s plant some trees. How about we plant some dog on trees? How about we make the soil good so the trees have a good start? Because oftentimes the trees don’t do well because the soil is not well. So if we can build healthy soil, then we can build solutions. | | Luke Gannon: | Every single day we make a choice. The majority of people want at least some of the same things, clean air, clean water, and healthy food. We have the power to contribute in having that. If we make the choice to compost our food, instead of putting it in the landfill. | | Reneé Wallace: | Accessible first in people’s minds, I tell people, listen, in kindergarten, I’m going to take you all the way back. What’s the first thing they taught us in kindergarten? Where everything goes. Everything had a place in kindergarten, did it not? Now, you need to hang your coat right here. Put your shoes right here. Sit your little body part right here. This is where you put the books back. It’s the same thing. You are already making decisions, but help people shift the decision they make based on something they want. | | Luke Gannon: | Change is made in participatory democracies. Renee sees a clear pathway for sharing knowledge and creating participation. | | Reneé Wallace: | I frame it and I talk about it as the three EPs. The first EP is enabled policy. Second EP is enable public, and the third EP is enable practice. So enabled policy, you have to have an environment that allows for a thing to happen. The stewards of our cities and our counties and our states have to create a policy environment that enables us to do these things at whatever scale we want to do it. That’s the first EP. The second EP is we have to have enable public, we have to be people who are informed and understand why this is important to do and what our part is in doing it. One, do I want to participate in it, and will I lend my voice to the conversation that allows the stewards that are passing the policies to say yes? And then you have to have enable practice. You have to have people that know what the heck they’re doing. | | Luke Gannon: | The beautiful thing about composting is its accessibility, the potential to do it at every scale. | | Reneé Wallace: | We need to work out models that are going to allow us to put it in everybody’s reach. And when you have diverse scales, then you can build models that look different in different places so that you can make it accessible. A process I put in place a few years ago, I started doing pilots because I believe in demonstrating. We wanted to inform the policy. So how do you inform the policy? You inform the policy by demonstrating how to do it. | | One of my pilots, I paired… Wayne State University, they had been trying to do a compost program on their campus and had not been able to really get that going. I helped them design a program. So we built out programs on both sides. It’s like, okay, the university has the materials. We created a program, compost warrior student-led program. The students are collecting the materials. We get the services to let them use the trucks to bring the materials. We worked with the grounds department, which brought leaves over. We built this thing up and we built a community. We built a program, and we built a program in such a way that it was about integrating two communities, a city, and a campus community. | | Luke Gannon: | Renee is involved in multiple pilot projects, partnering with other organizations to create a cross-communal network that is driving collaboration and shared interest and making a sustainable difference across Detroit. | | Reneé Wallace: | So my third pilot, which is in the neighborhood where I live, are people who live in a really nice neighborhood and they decided to activate the alleys. So we started doing work in the alleys to activate the alleys. So we’ve been a part of the alley activation program. And we started to talk about, well, what are we going to do in these alleys and what are we going to do in the neighborhood? So people are growing food. It’s like, well, yeah, we got a few people interested in composting. So they’re backyard composters. And what we’re working toward is we’re going to build a shared system in the alley. We’ve networked, it’s either 12 or 18 alleys now. | | And so first it was, let’s go from green way to dream way. First of all, let’s just get them cleaned up where we can use them, they’re green, they’re beautiful. And now let’s dream what do we want to do in the alleys. So there’s a lot of different things going on, murals and other kinds of things. And so we’re going to build a system, a shared system, and drop-offs throughout the alley system. | | Luke Gannon: | Renee actively contributes to the Detroit City Council Green Task Force and played a pivotal role in establishing the Organics Recycling Committee within the Sustainability Advisory Group. In every initiative she undertakes, Renee prioritizes meeting people where they are, approaching each situation with understanding rather than coercion. | | Reneé Wallace: | If we want to be successful, it’s not about making it cookie-cutter per se. Now the process is a process, how you come to it is diverse. Look at what people want. Look at what people are doing. Look at where their heart is. What’s going to motivate them to come do this process, that’s what’s going to be different as you go from community to community. And here I am in Detroit, and if you’ve brought four other people here in Detroit, you’re going to get four different versions of what this looks and feels like. | | Detroit has been doing urban ag forever, and we chose strategically certain things that were not happening in the food system to say, hey, y’all, we can grow. We have a next. Let’s go. We’ve been doing it this way, now let’s do something else. And we picked composting as one of those what is next. This was back in the time, early on when the vertical gardening wasn’t popular, the new ways of growing food. So back in 2012, 13, 14, we were just really starting to innovate some of these ways. | | Luke Gannon: | Community organizing around farming has long been a staple in Detroit. Now the city is finally catching up, leveraging community input to drive policies that actively support farmers and composters alike. | | Reneé Wallace: | Presently, we’re working on the policy. In Michigan, landmark policy just passed Part 115, which has very, very significant compost standards and regulation. The whole state is moving away from disposal approaches to sustainable materials management. The policy is going to help drive the entire state. And so we had very limited policy at a local level. We had some language in our urban ag ordinance. And the language beyond that was the solid waste policy plan, advocating for policy that is tiered, so that depending on what I’m doing should dictate what the requirements are. And the state is such that we were able to raise the ceiling a bit on the state level, which gave us a little more room at a local level on what it is that we could put in place. And two of the bills in the package addressed composting in particular. | | Luke Gannon: | FoodPLUS Detroit is expanding its partnerships with farmer’s markets across the city to ensure that the food utilized at these markets is returned to the soil completing the cycle of sustainability. | | Reneé Wallace: | The vast majority of the composting right now is happening with people who are farming, people who are growing food. We have a network of community markets. We have like 20 community markets of farms and some farm stands around the city. So one of the pilots that I’m involved in now is we’re going to do drop-offs at three farmer’s markets to pilot it so that we can start to look at collecting materials first from behind the counter with the farmers and things that the food that doesn’t get eaten or sold, or it’s just scrapped and collecting that. And it goes back to the farms that are composting. And then hopefully, we’ll be able to expand that across all the markets. So then we can begin to educate and engage the people who come to the market. So look at the community and what they’re interested in. And so the policy has to change. So a number of people looking at it from diverse ways that meet the needs of our diverse population to me is what’s important. One message, but it’s multiple voices. | | Luke Gannon: | Wow. Well, thank you so much for letting us share your story on the show today, Renee, and for being a part of the movement to build local self-reliance in Detroit. | | Reggie Rucker: | Luke, as always, great job. Thank you so much. And Renee, thank you for reminding us of the humanity that we find when we connect with each other and the Earth that we live on and get life from. Always a welcome reminder. And thanks to all of you, our listeners, for tuning in. We’ll be back again in two weeks with another story out of Detroit. But in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into what we discussed today. And as always, you can visit ilsr.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. Or just send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org to let us know what’s on your mind. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Tea Noelle. The music for the season is also composed by Tea Noelle. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
If you want your city to be a focus in an upcoming season, send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org.
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Apps | RSS
Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
Lanay Gilbert-Williams, born and raised in Detroit, experienced a childhood marked by both trauma and love, instilling in her a deep sense of community. On this episode of Building Local Power: The City Series, Lanay shares her journey to becoming the board president of The Detroit People’s Food Cooperative, a grocery store grounded in the principles of Black community ownership and food sovereignty. Inspired by the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, the cooperative embodies intergenerational and interracial collaboration. In sharing her story, Lanay emphasizes the importance of local self-reliance, advocating for solutions grown within the city and tailored to its residents. The Detroit People’s Food Cooperative represents a vital step towards fostering food sovereignty in a neighborhood historically affected by food apartheid, contributing to Detroit’s journey towards greater self-sufficiency and empowerment.Related ResourcesDetroit People’s Food Cooperative
Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network
Love: What Life Is All about by Leo F. Buscaglia
Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power Detroit, our first stop in a multi-city series where we explore how to build local power from the experiences of people who were doing just that on the ground in their respective cities. These are the people who are proving what’s possible when a community comes together to shape its future. We talk to community leaders, advocates, activists, entrepreneurs, elected officials, all who have powerful stories about the drive to write Detroit’s next chapter. We think these stories will be illuminating in their own right, but also hope they inspire you on your journey to build local power wherever you’re listening from. I’m so excited to do this tour with my co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | I am so excited too. What’s going on, Reggie? How are you? | | Reggie Rucker: | I’m great. And I know you’re just as excited about this episode as I am, but it takes on a special meaning for me because it’s an episode about food and I love food. I mean, everybody loves food, but I truly have this special relationship with food. And, Luke, I know I keep throwing old nostalgic music at you, do you remember this old Boyz II Men song, A Song For Mama? | | Luke Gannon: | Reggie, you taught me everything. Of course, I remember the song. | | Reggie Rucker: | Okay. Good. So Boyz II Men, although originated from Philly, they were signed to Motown Records. So there’s your Detroit connection. But there’s this line in the song about the loving you is like food for my Soul, and it was on the Soul Food movie soundtrack, but that line hits, especially today. I thought about it for this episode, the way that food has a way of stitching families together, communities together with love as the fabric. We talk today to a leader of a food co-op in Detroit. And boy, does she embody everything about that essence of love and community and the power of food to sustain it and hold it all together? I truly can’t wait for you to hear her story and message. So, Luke, why don’t you go ahead and take it away. | | Luke Gannon: | Thanks, Reggie. It’s true. You really said it all. So with that, let’s jump right into Lanay’s story. Here’s Lanay. | | Lanay Gilbert-W…: | My name is Lanay Gilbert-Williams. I am the Board President of Detroit People’s Food Co-op, a black led, community-owned grocery store that’ll open this year in Detroit. I am a native Detroiter, so born and raised here. I have birthed all my babies here. My parents are here and my family is here. So Detroit is home for me. I am probably like many Detroiters, one who had a childhood filled with the trauma and love. My mother was a single mother of my siblings and I. She had been on drugs, she’d gone through recovery. My siblings and I, my sisters, we were teen moms. I’ve gone to 13 different schools before graduating high school, right? So we’ve moved even more than that. We were moving every year, every year and a half. | | Detroit is in my bones. It’s what I know. That’s why I’m still here. It’s what I know. And it is a villagey type city, right? So it’s a big city, but we all are comfortable around each other. Like any city on the planet, all the shadows roll together, everybody in the light rolls together. So Detroit is home. I love the way we do. It’s a love-filled place. | | Well, my mom in going through Narcotics Anonymous. Growing up, as children have always seen her helping people, being around people of different ethnic backgrounds. That’s how NA goes. Everybody shows up and they’re open and they’re vulnerable and they’re supportive of each other. I’ve always seen my mom in those spaces, always. I don’t remember my mom not being the person that she is, even when she was an addict. She has literally always been her. And so she is loving and she’s helpful. I’ve gone to her house before and she say, “Hey, meet so-and-so. I met her at the dentist’s office earlier,” and invited her over for dinner. | | When we were younger, she used to stop and pick other moms and children up who were walking with groceries and say, “Kids, move over, get in the back.” We’re like, “Here she go again.” And she [inaudible 00:05:19] thing. She like 117 pounds. She like 5253, but this is just who she is. She is absolutely phenomenal and she’s still that way today. She’s a mama through and through. She’s a community mama through and through. And so all of my siblings, we are that type of people. We’re community people. Anybody who knows us know we can walk into a space and we’re going to be serving in some type of way or people will know us in a short amount of time. But that’s how my mom is. | | My dad, if you live in this neighborhood, everybody knows who Mr. Gilbert is, “You’re Mr. Gilbert’s daughter, right?” So for both of my parents to say their name to anyone who knows them, it opens the door. It automatically builds trust between you and them because, “I know your mama. I know your daddy.” They know all their neighbors here in the city of Detroit. They’re those type of people. | | Luke Gannon: | The idea for Detroit People’s Food Co-op was inspired by an allied organization called the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network. At the core of both of these organizations is community. | | Lanay Gilbert-W…: | This is an organization that has been knee-deep in the fight for black food sovereignty here in Detroit for over a decade, right? So the importance is to ensure that in this predominantly African Americans city, the people in this city have a space and opportunity to govern their food system. Detroit People’s Food Co-op has 14 plus years in the making. So it’s Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network that put together the steering committees, went out, did research, raised the money for the market studies and things like that. So this is important. This co-op is important for a number of reasons here in the city of Detroit, and even in the neighborhood in which it’s being built. The building itself is co-owned by the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network and another organization, Develop Detroit. So the co-op is an anger tenant in the building. So that organization envisioned the co-op. And then once it was created, it’s become its own entity. So in this $22 plus million building where the primary tenant on the first floor in this building was literally built to house the co-op. So it’s built to suit. | | Luke Gannon: | Food is essential to life, and it’s not just the physical nourishment. The cooperative is constructed by and for the community working hand in hand with local vendors and farmers to ensure that dollars remain within the community, circulating and fostering local economic sustainability. | | Lanay Gilbert-W…: | The city is predominantly African American, and the majority of the grocery stores, the gas stations, all of the stores period are not African American owned or run, right? In this historically black city. This is not something that our children are used to seeing. It’s important to give people in any community the right and the opportunity to govern their food system. Food should be healthy, it should be affordable, it should be culturally relevant. If you go into a Hispanic grocery store, an Italian grocery store, an African grocery store, you will see foods that are relevant to that community. That is not something that you see in the city of Detroit. That is not something that our children are used to seeing. Our children are not in the habit of seeing the adults in their community create the solutions to the most basic issues in the community. It needs to happen. So not only is this co-op Black-led, again, which is important. | | We have two smaller Black-owned grocery stores that opened up within the last two years. They’re small. Our larger grocery store, Kroger, Meijer, Walmart, those are not community-owned. Those are not Black-led. Those do not reinvest their money in the community like a co-op does, right? Detroit does not have a food co-op. Detroit People’s Food Co-op is the only co-op. We’ve had food co-ops in the past. We have no food co-ops right now. So the community is not getting to govern its food. So it’s important that it’s Black-led. It’s in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a lot of grocery stores, right? People tend to call these areas food deserts. In the Black food sovereignty space and movement, we don’t say food deserts because we acknowledge that a desert is naturally created. If you have anywhere on the planet that there is no access to food, that’s a food apartheid, that is intentionally created, that’s strategic. There’s food everywhere. This is not a food desert in which we’re building a grocery store. This is some intentional things being done. | | This is a community that used to house another community, Black Bottom, right? So as the United States of America decades ago [inaudible 00:11:37] this clearance of a lot of minority communities throughout the U.S., it was called slum clearance or something like that. There was an act to clear the slums in many communities across the United States of America. Here in Detroit, that’s in a community called Black Bottom, where you have thriving Black businesses, majority Black people lived in this area. Detroit built 75 freeway through it. This is the same area in which the co-op is being built. That’s important. So historically, that’s important. | | Black people in this city where we have 30 plus percent living at or below poverty level, the majority of our parents live at or below poverty level. I think it’s like 43, 45% of our children live at or below poverty level. Black folks need a win. Our children are watching our communities go through gentrification where people were going from the majority of our stores not being run by the adults in our children’s community, and now we have new adults moving in the community who are acquiring power that still yet our young people have not even seen the adults in their community acquire. This is absolutely necessary. | | So on top of all of that, it’s a community-owned grocery store. So Detroit has different populations. We have African populations, African American, Indian, Asian, White. We have all these different ethnicities represented in Detroit, but it’s a segregated city. We have large Arab population, we have Dearborn. For all these different populations, we don’t come together, we don’t work together. We tend not to even go into each other’s neighborhoods. This is the only opportunity that Detroit has right now in which people from all these different communities can come together and run this business together. That’s crazy. It’s an absolute heaven. | | Luke Gannon: | All revolutionary ideas stem from a pressing need in a bold vision. The executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network has long been dedicated to initiating and organizing systemic changes within the education and food spaces. | | Lanay Gilbert-W…: | The executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, his name is Malik Yakini. I met him when my 19-year-old had entered into kindergarten. I was a homeschooling parent and I said, “Either my child is going to be homeschooled by me or be in an African-centered school.” We had a few African-centered schools here, schools that teach your Black child about Black history, 365 days a year instead of only 28, 29 days in February, who teaches our children about their ancestry and their city’s history. And so I enrolled her in this school and he was the principal at the time. He was a co-founder of this African-centered school in [inaudible 00:15:05]. | | And he’d been known for doing a lot in the Black community, to assist the community in being self-determined, right? In creating solutions in the community. He has done things like, assisted with the creation of the Detroit Food Policy Council, the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. He has done a number of things to just bring us together because, again, it’s necessary. And this is how so many people got involved. When he talked about the food co-op over a decade ago, I said, “Whatever it is that he’s doing, I know he’s going to pull it off, and I know he is going to back it with a sincere heart and he’s going to bring awesome people together,” just because I knew his character. | | So I am in the habit of collecting elders in my life, I love to gain wisdom, I like to listen to it, I like to listen to the stories and the history. And he is one that I’ve gone to time and time again over the years to ask questions about serving in the community, “Where do you think I would best serve in the community? How do you think I could help out?” I would randomly send him messages and he would just randomly answer. It’s always available to give some tidbits of wisdom. So when he talked about the food co-op, it was just a thought, but I was like, “Hey, where can I pay my money?” Right? So many of us were like, “Take my money.” | | Someone asked me recently, “How did you get this many member owners to invest in something that’s not even built yet?” It’s because we knew the people involved. This board of the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, each board member has their own following. These are people who love people, right? They love people. And in loving people, they also love themselves and love their community. So just like they stand up for other people, they stand up for themselves and their community. It’s an amazing table to have a seat at. So I just wanted to get involved. I’d been a member owner for quite some time. And in the past few years I said, “You know what? Let me join a committee. Let me prioritize time. We have enough time to do everything. It just depends on how we prioritize it. Let me prioritize time to add on to the Detroit People’s Food Co-op.” | | I am a mom of six. It is important to me to live, be a living example of the principles that I teach to my children. And I say to my children, “No matter where you live on the planet, wherever you live on the planet when you’re older, I want you to pay attention to the issues in the community and determine what part of what solution you’re going to play.” They have to see me doing that in order to embody that. Me watching my mother is like, “If you’re my child, people will be able to recognize you by your works. Don’t show up and say you’re mine and you aren’t doing what you’re supposed to do, right?” | | Luke Gannon: | When election season arrived, Lanay started being mentored by another committee chair. Eventually, this chair asked Lanay if she would consider running for a board position. Lanay decided to run and was successfully elected. Following her service on a committee and learning under the guidance of her mentor, she eventually became the board president. But along the journey to bring the Detroit People’s Food Cooperative to fruition, they’ve encountered various obstacles. | | Lanay Gilbert-W…: | The majority of the co-ops across the U.S. are not Black-led. And so Black-led co-ops have the same obstacles and that is getting access to funding just like any Black-owned business. So that was probably the main obstacle is getting funding. I know that the DBCFSN had to go through a whole lot with the city, and getting the land, the back and forth. I know in being a guest speaker at an organization here in Detroit that supports people of color, I’ve been asked by people in that organization, “Are you going to continue to say that the co-op is Black-led? Aren’t you worried about that? Aren’t you concerned that you’re going to be sued? Can you legally say that? Aren’t you scared that people are going to call you racist?” I heard a whole lot of crazy stuff that day. | | I thought that was so odd because it’s an organization that supports people of color, number one. Number two, these were all elders. And I thought, “Have you never had to fight for anything in your life? Why would you attempt to make me question what I’m fighting for if it’s not wrong?” We are in a predominantly African American city. I have children who are not in the habit of seeing the adults in their community create the solutions in their community. They see the killing of unarmed Black men. We are in that whole era where not only do these things happen, but they’re widely publicized and social media makes it even bigger. | | Our babies don’t see us doing big things for us in our communities. They see us being beat down, or because of generational poverty and generational trauma, they see us beating each other down and they can easily believe that this is just who we are as a people. They’ve not seen us at our best because they aren’t old enough to know about all the thriving Black communities and businesses we’ve had, the work that we’ve done because a lot of those things got erased. | | For elders to say those things to me, for a split second, made me wonder, “Should I be the one in a space talking about Black stuff? Am I stirring the pot? Do I want to be the one that stirs the pot?” It’s my husband impressed upon me the need to speak the truth at any time and in any room. And he said, “Whatever it is that you say and however it is that you represent the co-op will be on point because they chose you to be the board president and knew who you were before becoming a board president, right? You’ve been represented up until this point. Just get up there and talk the truth.” And after I did that, some city council members came to me and said, “My goodness, you said so many things up there that we can’t say out loud.” That was weird. “You’re elected public officials, you mean you can’t speak about the elephants in the room?” It was feeling really Twilight Zone-ish. For me personally, that has been an obstacle. | | But when I get into a room with the member owners, again, Black, White, every other ethnicity you can imagine, they love it. They love being in a room with somebody who’s willing to say out loud what we all see, but we don’t talk about. I am grateful to inherit the wisdom of the generations before me, but I don’t have that fear. And if ever I do, then I need to be stepped back or put down. And I love this younger generation that’s coming up because they are willing to address the elephants in the room. | | Luke Gannon: | While the Detroit People’s Food Cooperative is becoming a reality, thanks to an intergenerational vision, one that seeks to give back to the very people who conceived it. And in America where privatization reigns supreme, it can be challenging for individuals to grasp the notion that ownership doesn’t have to be confined to the individual. It can be shared. | | Lanay Gilbert-W…: | The myth in impoverished communities is that the only way that you can own something is if you are a rich white male or if you are a millionaire of any ethnicity. It’s been really hard to get the community to understand that they own the grocery store and that they govern it through coming to committee meetings and joining all of the different processes involved, their votes, the work that’s really hard. It’s over 2,200 member owners of the grocery store and counting from all over Michigan. It’s really hard to get people to wrap their head around this business model that you can come together, pull your money together, and you can move mountains. They’re not buying that, and that’s hard. | | Luke Gannon: | Despite the challenges, Lanay continues to be motivated by what the co-op means for the Detroit community. | | Lanay Gilbert-W…: | Self-reliance in a city, it means to me that those in the city, again, are creating solutions from within the city and supporting each other. We are circulating our money in the city. That’s not something that’s happening in Detroit right now. We have many business owners who come into the city, they make money and they take it right back out of the city. A self-reliant city utilizes its resources to care for itself. Detroit needs that. It is important for a city to grow its solutions from within the city, solutions that are relevant to the residents in a city, and that’s how I see a self-reliant city. | | Now, when it comes to the co-op, we accept vendors. We’ve been accepting applications from vendors all over the state of Michigan. On our application, it states that we prioritize local vendors. We also prioritize vendors who are people of color. It is very important for people to know that when they shop in the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, they are putting money in the pockets of people in their community. And this grocery store, you will have local products. Local vendors will be feeding families in the community. We’re looking for staff members from within the community. So we’re adding to the self-reliance of the city. | | Luke Gannon: | At the heart of this vision is a simple principle, love. | | Lanay Gilbert-W…: | It’s a book that was in my mom’s bookshelf when I was younger. I think she used to go to secondhand stores and buy a gazillion books. And she’s one of those moms where if you said, “I’m bored,” she’d say, “Go read a book.” And so there was a book titled Love by an author, Leo Buscaglia, I believe an Italian author. And he actually studied love so much that he was giving college courses on it. That’s one of those elephants in a room, right? We all have experienced love, we all talk about it, we don’t talk about it, right? How it influences us, how we utilize it, how it shapes the world around us. And that was a book at 12 or 13 changed my life. And every few years, I read it again just to remind myself of how important it is to love on purpose, to prioritize loving. | | And for me, again, as a mother, I talk to my children a lot about fear. And I believe that love is an awesome solution to combating fear. So I say to my children, “Sometimes if you watch the news, you’ll see that there’s an agenda going on to make people hate each other, make us fight each other, make us fire ourselves. And I want you to know that’s strategic. You have to focus on love. You have to love yourself.” Again, you can’t fight for Black food sovereignty if you’re Black and you don’t love being Black. I love other people who are not Black and I love myself, I love my children, I love my community, right? | | And so that fuels me to be in spaces and speak about the importance of us loving each other and loving ourselves, loving the differences that each of us has, respecting that we are different. No, we are not all the same. You cannot love a person if you’re not willing to see their differences and what makes them them. So the Black community should be allowed to be Black however it defines that. And so should every other ethnic group. And then we should all bring our A game, what we love to the table, and share it with each other. That book inspired me to do that as a young child. | | Luke Gannon: | There was so much wisdom, history, knowledge, and love in this story. Thank you so much, Lanay, for sharing your story and your love with us on the show today. | | Reggie Rucker: | Great job, Luke. Thank you so much for this. And, Lanay, we see you doing big things. Thank you. And next to all of you, our listeners for tuning in. We’ll be back again in two weeks with another story out of Detroit. But in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into what we discussed today. And as always, you can visit ilsr.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. Or just send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Let us know what’s on your mind. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Téa Noelle. The music for the season is also composed by Téa Noelle. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
If you want your city to be a focus in an upcoming season, send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org.
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Apps | RSS
Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
A vibrant independent bookstore symbolizes a shared community enthusiasm for learning, discovery, heritage, and progress. Source Booksellers, nestled in Detroit, has long been a reliable hub for non-fiction literature. Janet W. Jones established the store in 1989 and nurtured her daughter, Alyson Jones Turner, amidst its shelves. Alyson recounts the origin of Source Booksellers and its vital significance in fostering self-awareness, meaningful dialogue, and shared history within the community. Alyson elaborates on how local self-reliance, to her, embodies a robust support network among individuals, businesses, and organizations—a spirit of cooperation rather than competition.Related Resources* Source Booksellers * Great Lakes Bioneers Detroit Conference * Don’t Subsidize Big Boxes at Local Shops’ Expense * Why Does Congress want me to Shun my Local Bookstore and Shop Online Instead? * Alyson’s Book Recommendations + They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib + Black Bottoms Saints by Alice Randall Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello and welcome back, back again to a brand new episode and season of Building Local Power. I’m your co-host, Reggie Rucker. Delighted to be joined once again by my favorite co-host, and that’s not just because she’s my only co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Hey, Reggie. Great to be back. Back again. Wow. Rolls off the tongue from my middle school Eminem days. I see what you’re doing, Reggie. | | (singing) | | Reggie Rucker: | Mr. Marshall Mathers himself, because as many of you probably know, Eminem represents Detroit just about as hard as anyone. So maybe you know a little bit about Detroit because of what you saw in the movie 8 Mile that you starred in, or maybe the Detroit Lions or Pistons or Tigers or Red Wings have given you a window into the city, or maybe it’s Motown or it’s the Motor City mantra you’re familiar with, or maybe you live there. Shout out to our Detroit listeners. | | In any case, what we’re going to do over the next several episodes and seasons is explore how to build local power from the experiences of people who are doing just that on the ground, starting in Detroit. These are the people who are proving what’s possible when the community comes together to shape its future. We’ll talk to community leaders, advocates, activists, entrepreneurs and elected officials, all who have powerful stories about the drive to write Detroit’s next chapter. We think these stories will be illuminating in their own right, but hope they’ll also inspire you on your journey to build local power wherever you’re listening from. So with that said, Luke, what do we have going on for this episode? | | Luke Gannon: | In this episode, we venture to Midtown Detroit, home to Source Booksellers, a local bookstore and community author event space that has had its doors open since 1989. Alyson Jones Turner shares her story, highlighting how Source Booksellers has woven a robust community fabric and network in Detroit. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | I’m Alyson Jones Turner, Source Booksellers here in Detroit, Michigan. We’re a unique niche of non-fiction books. This is a family-owned business. My mother is the founder of Source Booksellers, Janet W. Jones, and she started this book business very interested in non-fiction books and dedicated to the community here in Detroit. | | Luke Gannon: | For nearly a century, Alyson’s family has called Detroit home, cultivating a deep appreciation for education and fostering a strong connection to the community over the years. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | I think we should start with my grandmother who came to Detroit in the early ’30s, I’ll say, and she later became a librarian. So our love for books probably started with her. My mother and I are both teachers. She’s retired. She was in the Detroit Public School system for 41 years, and after that started this business and I taught for more than a decade or so in the elementary classroom. So I guess that keeps us close to the book and also to the community. | | So many of the years I was in the classroom and then after and on the weekends I was working with and working at the bookstore. Definitely around COVID, I decided we had to get online. We were never online before. And so as a point of survival at that point, we put our books online and I sort of made a home here doing co-running with my mom at that point. I don’t remember myself from, I guess my early days not being a part of the bookstore, not getting books, bringing people up, doing all of the things, but right now I do events and the online and ordering and things like that. | | Luke Gannon: | Alyson and Source Booksellers grew up together. Alyson remembers when her bookstore was a vendor in an old jazz and blues bar. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | Our bookstore started, I guess today, it may be called a popup, but it really wasn’t. There were authors in town and we would go and support with books or there would be events where there are vendors, and then we would be a book vendor. That happened for the first few years of the business. | | Around 2002, we moved into a collective of women businesses and we were the book business. So at that point we had a brick and mortar. We could invite people in, have events and expand our book collections into our category, health and wellbeing, history and culture by and about women. All of these categories grew out of having that space. So we were there for about 10 years and then we crossed the street literally, and we had customers help us bring our books across the street. And we are still on Cass Avenue today in our own brick and mortar, which we expanded a year and a half ago. It’s been about 20-some years just on this block and 33 and a half or 34 years in book selling. | | Luke Gannon: | Alyson and her mother’s shared passion for books and dedication to learning have left a lasting impact on the Detroit community. They fostered a reciprocal relationship in the Midtown neighborhood, providing books, events, conversations, and education, and in turn receiving steadfast support from the community. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | Well, I think one of our passions is with our non-fiction that we really believe that it’s important for people to know about history, know things, know about the world, and also whether it’s through memoir or through history or any other way to get to self-knowledge. | | Luke Gannon: | The people of Detroit have attained the self-knowledge Alyson refers to, thanks to their local booksellers and librarians who have introduced them to literature that broadens their perspectives. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | There’s a community member in town that remembers my grandmother finding particular books for him, like particular books she felt that he would read. And so in his later years, he totally is grateful and remembers that about her. | | I think what I remember is going to hear authors with my mother, my sister, and being in awed by them and getting… Sort of like if you’re going to a concert and you hear a concert and you get the album and you want it signed. So I do remember that, and I’m really grateful that we’re able to offer that to families today. | | Luke Gannon: | Source Booksellers has ingrained itself deeply within the community. When the bookshop relocated, neighbors, residents, customers, and supporters united to assist in walking armfuls of books across the street to the new location. Even customers from 30 years ago still make visits to the shop today. Through their event hosting, they’ve established a space where authors and locals can come together and connect. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | Hanif Abdurraqib, the podcast called the Object Of Sound, and one of his books, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us. It was one of our really good selling book. He wrote a book, a tribute to a tribe called Quest, and in that it had a Detroit connection with J Dilla, with James Yancey. And so he came to our bookstore and spoke about the book and was full of people that knew of him, but also we’ve done a lot around J Dilla. | | (singing) | | We had Dilla Time, we had Dan Charnas here in the city for that. So that was one time when it was just like everybody was just loving everything, that the people were so grateful that they could meet him and see him, and that his content was something that they were looking for, looking to eat up. | | Luke Gannon: | Source Booksellers provides a platform for authors and community members to engage in discussions about how our history shapes our present. The topics explored range from segregation to fostering harmony with the natural world. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | In the past, we’ve had conversations that means that you don’t have to have a book. We can just have a topic and everyone can come talk about it. Just yesterday, we had an author from the city that was looking for a venue to celebrate her book, and we were open to and excited about that. We go out into the community. We have been the bookseller for the Detroit Bioneers for all of the years, and sometimes they just buy calendars and books about birds, but it doesn’t matter. There’s an author series also in town that we have been a partner of. And to our delight, we are one and a half blocks to the main Detroit library. So if they need us to run some books up there for their authors, then it really works because they’re a public entity. The authors want their books sold, but it’s their job to get the public to see the author. And so we’ve been able to partner in that way. And the Arab American Museum, we do the same kind of thing. Pull up with the books. | | Luke Gannon: | Source Bookseller’s reliance on its neighborhood network of support has been invaluable, but like any business, it has also faced some obstacles. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | One obstacle is advertising or getting our word out. That has been a challenge. We’ve worked really, really hard to get bigger events, and that sort of comes with having to draw your audience and being able to draw an audience. And it’s so easy, I think, for a ticket master to draw the tickets and the things that they need, but getting… The newspapers, for example, stopped doing book reviews. So we’re relying on Oprah to pick a book or the Fiddler’s Moon or something to pick a book. And it is very hard to get buzz for particular books that we may be interested in our history and culture area. We have to sort of create the buzz. It makes us very nervous when we commit to having something big and there isn’t really a media support. | | Luke Gannon: | Alyson has resorted to utilizing Source Bookseller’s internal internal communication strategies such as reaching out to various groups and providing event discounts, initiating campaigns on their social media platforms, and leveraging the presence of the author to garner attention. Promoting on bigger platforms is simply unrealistic for many small businesses. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | We don’t want to compete with a general bookstore. We can’t hold that much stock. We don’t have that much walker. And we do a lot of work gaining interest in history and culture in Detroit and Michigan authors. We did a little NPR promotion, but we can’t do that always. It’s definitely out of budget for every season. | | Luke Gannon: | Alyson elaborates on how local self-reliance to her embodies a robust support network among individuals, businesses, and organizations, a spirit of cooperation rather than competition. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | A locally self-reliant community, I’m thinking about that may mean that us being here and serving our community. We’re also often relying on the cheese monger up the street to pour our wine at an event or the little market across the street so we could get water for our authors. And these are all things that we can walk to, but we also have community help that’s not as close, but just as important. There are organizations, Free Black Women’s Library of Detroit that would help us promote events or give us ideas because we don’t have all the ideas, but to give us some ideas that we can run with or put a asking for. | | People can come in and customers can ask us for books that they want. Maybe they don’t want to get it off Amazon, maybe they can walk back to us and pick it up. We’ll order it for them and we’ll bring it in and we’ll call them and we won’t be disappointed if they don’t want it. We’ll find something to do with it, but usually the commitment is on both sides. If you order it for me, I’ll come get it. And so there are even [inaudible 00:14:15] far from our niche, but very important to our customer, and we’ve been able to get that for them. | | Luke Gannon: | In contrast to giants like Barnes & Noble and Amazon, Source Booksellers prioritizes forging close-knit customer relationships. Alyson takes the time to understand her customers’ reading preferences, providing personalized recommendations to meet their specific needs. This commitment to relationship building goes beyond mere book sales fostering communities where individuals come together to discuss this shared history and cultivate connections that last a lifetime. | | Alyson Jones Tu…: | I think that if you would like to read about Detroit that you should pick up Alice Randall, a native Detroiter’s Black Bottom Saints. And you can see all of the people that came through Black Bottom Detroit and also that we celebrate today, but we have our own people in Detroit that are making contributions just like they did. | | Luke Gannon: | We cannot thank Alyson Turner enough for being on the show today. Next time you’re in Detroit, or if you’re in Detroit already, go say hello to Alyson and grab Black Bottom Saints or another non-fiction book of your choice. Thank you so much, Alyson. | | Reggie Rucker: | Such a great story, Luke. Thanks for bringing that to us. As always, such a great job. I swear, any episode where you get to reference J Dilla, that’s a good episode. And so thank you Alyson again for sharing your story with us and giving us that slice of life, that slice of Detroit we don’t always get to see. And thanks to you, our listeners, for tuning in. | | We’ll be back again in two weeks with another story out of Detroit. But in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into what we discussed today. And as always, you can visit ilsr.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power, or send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Let us know what’s on your mind. | | This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Tea Noelle. The music for this season is also composed by Tea Noelle. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
If you want your city to be a focus in an upcoming season, send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org.
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Apps | RSS
Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
In our new season of Building Local Power, The City Series, we take a tour of cities and towns across the U.S. and talk to guests who are working to make their communities more locally self-reliant. Independent business owners, elected city officials, and community leaders explain how their work is moving the needle toward a more just, sustainable, and democratic future.Upcoming Cities:
- Detroit
- Washington, D.C.
- Baltimore
If you want your city to be a focus in an upcoming season, send an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org.
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email blp@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Apps | RSS
Music Credit: Mattéa Overstreet
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Mattéa Overstreet
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
Over the past fifty years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Justice (DOJ), and the judiciary have consistently approved mergers and acquisitions, contributing to the consolidation of industries that have proven to be bad for competition, consumers, and communities. Despite the prevalence of these mergers and acquisitions, the stories featured this season serve as a reminder of the power of local initiatives to challenge profit-driven corporate consolidation. These efforts are combatting corporatism within their communities and states, mobilizing grassroots movements, and working towards a shared vision for a healthier and more sustainable future.
Related ResourcesCheck out this season’s episodes:
- Beer Mergers Brew Disaster
- A Rotten Waste Merger
- BlackRock v. Black Gold
- New Mexicans v. Fossil Fuel Giants
- Investment Funds v. A Democratic Future
- Consolidation in the Cord-Cutting Era
- Sparking a Community Broadband Revolution
- Cleanup on Aisle 1990
Compost (feat. DiorNoel) – A Portrait of the NYC Composting Community
Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello, and welcome to another episode of Building Local Power. I’m your co-host, Reggie Rucker. And all season long, we’ve had this theme, How to Get Away With Merger. And the one thing we wanted to do in this sort of a wrap up episode is actually talk about how do they get away with merger. These are themes that we’ve talked about throughout the season on different episodes. | | But we really want it to be really clear and highlight some of the methods and tactics that these large corporations use to merge and build their power and influence and at the expense of communities. So we’re going to have a short little discussion. Me and Luke, we’re going to chat it up a little bit and saying, Luke, I guess I should bring her in. What’s up, Luke? How you doing? | | Luke Gannon: | Hey, Reggie, doing pretty well. I mean, I think this has just been a really great season. To start off, Reggie, I mean, there have been so many incredible highlights. What have a couple of years been? | | Reggie Rucker: | Yeah, so I know first for me, I think about… Actually, it was the first episode we did for this season. It was the beer episode and it was a great discussion. Ron’s always great, but what I really appreciated, this was the first time ever since I was told I got to work on a podcast. I’ve been trying to scheme away to get somebody from Modesto, the 209, the Central Valley onto the episode. | | And so I finally got Amanda Wright from Blaker Brewing, who’s Modesto’s neighbor out in Ceres. So I was finally able to get someone from around that area on the episode. And yeah, so it was just great to have her felt like home and it was really great. I think what I knew we were going to get from that conversation was the degree to which… | | And this is I think a consistent theme throughout the episodes where it’s not just about the small business owner and the person who’s creating jobs and being an entrepreneur and creating this economic activity. But the degree to which a place like a local brewery is a community hub and it’s just a place to bring community together. | | I think that was just really one of my highlights of the season and to sort of, again, relive some of that hometown magic. That was really fun for me. How about you? | | Luke Gannon: | Yeah, I love that hometown magic. Definitely one of my highlights this season, which is kind of ironic because the season is called How to Get Away With Merger, and this is one of the episodes where the merger didn’t actually get through. I’m pretty sure still pending, but this is called New Mexicans versus Fossil Fuel Giants. | | And one of our guests on that episode, her name’s Mariel Nanasi, and this was an episode about this massive company, the Spanish company called IBERDROLA, subsidiary is Avangrid in the United States. It’s in an electric utility company and it has expanded rapidly across the US and it decided that it wanted to buy the public utility company in New Mexico, and it just had a horrible track record. | | And our guest, Mariel, that we had on knew that this was just going to be horrible for the energy grid, the energy system in New Mexico. And so decided to build this movement of organizers, this grassroots movement, legal counsel, communications team, the list goes on, to fight this. And for at least three years, a number of people spent many, many hours opposing this and ended up winning various legal battles over the course of these three years. And it’s just this really heartening story that shows you that sometimes these community power movements do win. | | Speaker 3: | If you give up, you already have lost, right? The only chance is if we fight back, and so we got to use our talents to do so, and then we have a chance. | | Luke Gannon: | One of the things that talk about a little bit is how there is a lack of government response, unfortunately right now against mergers. And this was an example of a lack of government response. And so the community having to take that on. And that’s a lot for a community to do when you have a whole job, a whole life of your own and you’re doing this whole additional thing on top of it. The power of these community members, these local businesses, these entities that really are so valuable. | | Reggie Rucker: | The theme of the season, which is How to Get Away With Merger and how some of these companies got away with it. And that part that you highlight where it’s the private sector, these individuals or these small grassroots groups really having to pick up the slack from the lack of government response. | | And that thing you say about these people have other lives to live, but somehow, they’re finding a way to make a part of their life this big fight to push back against the mergers or the power that these powerful companies, these merge companies try to exert in their communities. | | And that really, that made me think about Wanda from out in East Carroll Parish. So we did the episode about broadband and the community broadband effort in East Carroll Parish. And I just remember the story that Wanda told about one of the managers or executives from Sparklight, and they come to her and they’re like… | | Wanda: | And say, “Well, Wanda, well, I’m going to do this and that for you on your bill so it could come down and you have great service and all of this cool stuff.” I said, “Oh, really?” Said, “That’s awesome.” I said, “But are you going to do that for everybody else too?” | | Reggie Rucker: | And so it makes sense that they would say, oh, I could probably buy this person off and get into like, hey, we’re going to let you go back to your life and you’re going to be taken care of if you just kind of chill out. So yeah, so it makes sense as a tactic to try to push these mergers through and to hear Wanda’s reaction and be like, oh, that’s cool. You’re going to take care of me. You’re going to take care of my neighbor? You’re going to take care of all of us? And if not, then get out of here. So yeah, I think that’s sort of like a slimy tactic. | | Luke Gannon: | There’ve been quite a few ways that we’ve seen how companies really get away with merging. Another thing that comes to mind is, and that is really a thread throughout all of these episodes, are how a lot of these, it was hard to choose a single merger for each of these industries. Ron talks a lot about this in the first episode, but we really see it across the season. | | There have been a series of smaller mergers that ultimately lead to this really consolidated industry. And like the waste industry as an example, you have the series of smaller mergers over time. And then you have Waste Management being the largest waste company in the United States and Advanced Disposal being the fourth largest and Waste Management buying Advanced Disposal now making it the largest waste company. | | And so just looking at the history of these mergers and how they slowly gain power in that harm that eventually causes, because it does end up being these really massive mergers. | | Reggie Rucker: | So Luke, are you familiar with the rope-a-dope? Do you know what that phrase means? No. Okay. So Muhammad Ali, famous boxer, grace of all time, all the things, he had this famous fight with George Foreman referred to as the Rumble in the Jungle. So at the time, Muhammad Ali was coming back from sort of his hiatus. His forced hiatus because he didn’t want to serve in Vietnam in the Vietnam War. | | And so he was forced out of boxing and he’s kind of coming back. George Foreman has taken over this really powerful boxer, and a lot of people, most people think that George Foreman is going to crush Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali goes into this fight and he has this strategy of just standing up against the ropes and taking shot after shot from George Foreman, just taking shots, taking shots, taking shots. And eventually, George Foreman punches himself out. | | He gets tired. Muhammad Ali comes off the ropes, beats George Foreman. And so what makes me think about that in this instance is part of what I am thinking as a tactic with these major corporations trying to merge is that they have this rope-a-dope strategy. They’re out here like we’re not a threat. Small merger here, small merger there, no big deal. | | We’re not a threat. We’re not a threat as if they’re up against the ropes pretending to not be a threat. But then all of a sudden, you look up, and they’re knocking you out, right? They’re knocking this community out. They’ve accumulated so much power, they’ve weakened this community so much. Now, they’re taking over with all of their power and influence. So it feels very rope-a-dope-ish to me. | | Luke Gannon: | It’s hard when these companies have “convincing arguments”, and if you don’t look at the history of what has happened with mergers, the consequences of what has happened, it’s easy when the companies are telling you that it’s going to be good for customers. Costs are going to go down, your rates are going to be decreased, you’re going to get better customer service, the list goes on. | | It’s easy to say, “Oh, well, I want all of those things you want. Yeah, we all want that, so let’s approve it.” But as a lot of people at ILSR have talked about, and a number of people beyond ILSR and on this podcast have talked about, if you look at the effects of these mergers, really across every industry, you’ll see that none of that’s actually true. And it really, the opposite generally happens. | | Reggie Rucker: | Sometimes and you mentioned the Mariel example out in New Mexico. And sometimes we win, and I think even Jon Schwantes and you talked about this consumer reports in the coalition that they brought together when it was a Comcast and Time Warner merger, and they won that one. | | And so sometimes you win, but then what happens is these companies just have so much money. And so even if they lose the battle, they’re like, okay, we’ll just go to the next merger. We’ll just try again. Can you stop us again? Can you stop us again? | | And the ability to be able to muster up that opposition over and over and over again, that’s hard for the grassroots groups and the nonprofit groups and things like that. So yeah, these big powerful, influential companies, they know that they have this money and lobbying power and influence on their side that they can wear you down. And so that’s definitely one of the tactics that seem to come up over and over again throughout the season. | | Luke Gannon: | Yeah, these companies will use every strategy they can, even if it’s slimy. And even sometimes if it’s illegal, they will do it ultimately to reap a profit at the expense of everyone else. So we just spoke about a few reasons of how companies get away with merger, but there are so many more. | | We encourage all of our listeners to go check out episodes from this season to get a comprehensive idea of how these mergers end up getting approved. Reggie, what was one of your takeaways? | | Reggie Rucker: | I think the one thing that was consistent throughout the episode and actually made me think about the Dior St. Hillaire we did from BK Rots community composter up in Brooklyn. And she was just a great guest, and I am often thinking, she shared one of the composting songs that she made with us. | | Dior: | Consistently talking about cycles microbial your life will leave us with a brighter future that is just nurture the kids. I’m talking about macro and micro. Organisms feed on the browns and greens. Another way to say this is carbon or nitrogen. | | Reggie Rucker: | And for a month after that episode, I swear, I was like, singing this composting song. It’s so catchy. Whatever you do, go back and listen to this episode, find the song, link’s in the show notes. But it’s such a catchy song. But the thing that I think about most is the joy that she brings to her work, her advocacy work, her composting work, and the degree to which she said something in there about how composting truly is about community. | | And I think that’s one of these themes that I saw throughout all of the episodes is that the people who were doing the work win or lose, they were building this community around their work, and that community was a source of energy and a source of joy. And I don’t care what these merging companies say that their merger is going to do for you. If they’re going to save some money or they’re going to be able to serve more people. | | One, usually that’s a lie. But then even outside of that, one of the things that these companies just cannot do is bring communities together and infuse their work with this sense of community spirit and joy. And so that I think by far being able to have these conversations with these people on the ground who are building local solutions and building local power in the face of this corporate concentration, that’s always my favorite part of these episodes and definitely this season. | | Luke Gannon: | Absolutely. So on the flip side of that, one of my takeaways is this general trend that we’ve had over the past 50 years towards this acceptance of bigness, both among our governmental institutions, among political figures, and among the public. | | Although I think what we’ve talked about a lot at ILSR is that this has really been changing in the last four years. Especially since we’ve had new people in both the administration with Joe Biden and in the Federal Trade Commission with Lina Kahn, who are totally changing this framework. | | But unfortunately, because we’ve gotten so far along this path of bigness and supporting big entities, and that’s why we have this season talking about these mergers and about bigness. We’ve become so accepting of this profit motive and the money that these massive institutions continue to make and that they really are putting profit over people. | | And we have… Every person on our episode has said this. We haven’t mentioned Miguel Escoto, who is down in Texas, who talks about the oil and gas industry in Texas. And how JP Morgan, one of the biggest banks, backs this infrastructure investment firm, which has a ton of investment in the oil and gas industry. | | And so just the idea of bigness that that is, I guess, the foundation of bigness being profit and money, that if that is your value system, if that’s really your only value system, it’s wrong because you’re not putting people or community in front of that. | | And so I think it really goes to your takeaway, Reggie, which is that can’t be what we’re placing first. And if it is, there’s an issue because you’re not having those community composters. You’re not having people like Dior who are making these amazing composting songs and people like Miguel who are building these amazing grassroots coalitions. | | Reggie Rucker: | So I think we’re starting to see some of this stuff change. And there’s the Kroger Albertsons merger. And we don’t exactly know what’s going to happen there, but definitely feeling a greater sense of skepticism around that merger. Within the last year, it was the Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster merger that got blocked. | | And so I think there is a greater sense of, it’s not just about how much money can these companies make if they merge or save if they merge, or it’s not just about profit. It is about the impact to producers and the people who bring so much goodness into our life. How do we create an economy and markets that work for everyone and local producers and all producers, not just the big guys? | | Luke Gannon: | Well, thank you so much, Reggie, for rounding this season out with me. It’s always a pleasure getting to work alongside you. And I really want to thank our guests this season who made each of these episodes possible. Thank you. And if you’ve made it this far, I assume that means you enjoyed this episode and maybe even the whole season. | | If you did, at dinner tonight or over coffee tomorrow morning, tell your family and friends about How to Get Away With Merger. What did you learn? What were your takeaways? And then if you’re feeling so inclined, send us an email at buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org and share your thoughts. We are trying to make every episode better and more engaging, so we’d love to hear from you. | | This is our last episode for 2023. We need your support to keep this podcast going, so if you can give us $1, $10, $100, more or less, or anything in between, we’d sincerely appreciate it. Every dollar counts. This marks the conclusion of our season, but be sure to stay tuned for our upcoming hyper-focused short seasons starting in the new year. | | Each season will take you to a different city exploring how it is cultivating robust local economies through various lenses. This show is produced by Reggie Rucker and me, Luke Gannon. This podcast is edited by Andrew Frank and me, Luke Gannon. The music for the season is also composed by Andrew Frank. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSMusic Credit: Andrew Frank
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
Is this the end of a grocery merger era that began with 385 grocery mergers from 1996-1999 alone? As news about the impending Federal Trade Commission decision to approve or deny the Kroger/Albertsons merger looms large, ILSR’s Ron Knox delves into the dominance of major grocery chains and explores the potential consequences of the proposed merger. In the second half of the episode, ILSR’s Kennedy Smith introduces her new “Community Wins” series, which highlights stories of communities establishing grocery stores that adopt innovative approaches to ownership, access, and governance. The burgeoning trend of community-driven grocery models is fueling a broader revolution of local initiatives across the country, fostering local economic resilience in the face of expanding corporate power.
Related ResourcesCommunity Wins: How Do You Buy Groceries When There’s No Grocery Store? These Communities Figured It Out
Community Wins: In the Face of Consolidation, Communities are Opening Their Own Grocery Stores
“Americans don’t need another mega-grocer.” Stacy Mitchell Responds to Kroger’s Bid to Buy Albertsons
On Vox’s Today Explained: Ron Knox on Blocking the Kroger-Albertsons Supermerger
On Pitchfork Economics: Why We Can’t Let Kroger Buy Albertsons
Report: Walmart’s Monopolization of Local Grocery Markets
Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker, and I am so excited. You’re in for a real treat today with this episode because we have, not one, but two ILSR mates joining us to talk grocery stores, the good, the bad, and the consolidated. Keeping with this season’s theme, How to Get Away With Merger, we take a specific look at the Kroger-Albertson’s attempted merger, talk about why we hope it fails and what exists on the other side of a less consolidated grocery industry. To get into it, I’m going to toss it over to my co-host, who never fails to amaze me. Sometimes it’s a good amazement. Sometimes it’s bewilderment. Usually it’s the former. But in any case, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Aw, thank you, Reggie. I’m definitely glad to provide bewildering amazement too. But that was really a perfect introduction. I think you captured it all. So without further ado, we’re going to jump right into the interview. | | We have the pleasure of welcoming back a very familiar voice, Ron Knox. He’s a senior researcher and writer on the independent business team at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and he is very well-versed in the grocery industry. So in October of 2022, Kroger and Albertsons announced that they planned to merge. Since then, they’ve received significant opposition from advocacy organizations and the public. We will hear news from our regulatory agencies as soon as even a couple weeks, but definitely in early 2024, about whether this merger will be approved. So today, Ron is going to walk us through how our grocery sector has become so consolidated and the harms of an ever-increasing consolidated grocery sector on citizens, grocers and farmers. So thanks so much for joining us on the show today, Ron. | | Ron Knox: | Great to be here. Thank you. | | Luke Gannon: | All right. So Ron, to start us off, can you tell us a little bit about what the grocery industry looks like in the US right now? Who are the big players? And how much of the market do they control? | | Ron Knox: | Sure. So the grocery industry is one of the more consolidated industries in America, to be honest, and I think it’s one of those industries where if you’re just a regular person, you just have to shop at the supermarket for the stuff that fills up your fridge and you’re covered, you’re definitely going to feel the effects of that consolidation. So the industry right now is pretty much dominated by four or five different mega chains, like supermarkets or superstores that kind of dominate a lot of our cities and towns across the country. Number one by a good margin is Walmart. Of course, Walmart’s a kind of multi retailer superstore type model, but they are the number one grocer in America. And then Kroger, Albertsons, Publix, and then a few others. And if this merger goes through, this Kroger-Albertsons merger that we’re discussing, if it were to go through, then the top four supermarket chains would control 55%, more than half of all supermarket sales in America. So super concentrated. | | And that’s been the product of a series of mergers that have been permitted over the last 30 years or so. There was certainly a time in America in the mid-century and beyond, through the 70s and 80s where there were many, many supermarket chains, lots of regional chains, lots of local independent stores that served neighborhoods and communities, towns and cities around the country. That all began to change in the 80s, as there was a significant revamp of the enforcement of our antitrust laws that really put a lot of emphasis on so-called efficiencies, this kind of bigger is better type of attitude, both among regulatory agencies and policymakers, and the result of that was a lot of consolidation was permitted. And so you end up with these kind of mega mergers that have happened throughout the years where now you have this ultra-concentrated sector that is threatening to become even more concentrated to a very dangerous level if this Kroger-Albertsons deal is allowed to go through. | | Reggie Rucker: | Ron, actually, I want to do one quick followup, which is I’m here in DC, and I live right across the street from the Harris Teeter. And so as I hear you lay out the three, four or five big players in the industry, I don’t hear you say Harris Teeter, so I’m like, oh, I’m good. I don’t got to worry about. It’s not going to affect me. Can you talk a little bit about how these large sort of mega grocers and their brands sort of own these other brands so that it will actually affect me, even though it doesn’t sound like it when you first name off these grocers? | | Ron Knox: | Yeah. For a lot of shoppers around the country, you say Kroger, you say Albertsons, maybe some of those are familiar names to some people in some parts of the country, but I think for most folks, it’s hard to imagine that those are two of the largest grocery chains in the US because those names don’t really ring a bell. But in a lot of places you don’t think you have a Kroger, but do you have a Harris Teeter? Yes. You might not think you have Albertsons, but do you have a Safeway? Yes. So between those two like mega chains, you have Fred Meyer, Dillons, Tom Thumb, King Soopers, Vons, Jewel-Osco, ACME. The list goes on and on. I’m probably forgetting some, but through, again, the decades of consolidation, those two mega chains have come to own all of these brands, all of these various supermarket chains that probably touch every single listener wherever they are in the US. | | Reggie Rucker: | At some point, Kroger-Albertsons, they’re going to have to go before… or they’ve already submitted sort of the application. So they have to make a case beyond the, “Hey, we’re just trying to make more money. That’s why we want to merge.” They’re trying to sell to the FTC, and then likely they’re going to have to try to sell to some judge why they’re doing this, why this is good for not just them. Can you talk a little bit about what their argument is, or what you think their argument’s going to be should it get that far? What are they saying to try to make the case why this should happen? | | Ron Knox: | The companies say what a lot of merging companies say when they propose these kinds of mega mergers, right? Kroger and Albertsons have both promised millions of dollars in “cost savings” due to the merger and that these cost savings are going to allow them to do things that sound good and sound pro-competitive, like lower prices for consumers and offer better product selection and do all of those kinds of things. The truth is that those cost savings… And you can just look at the history of supermarket mergers, and you can easily see this… those cost savings, what that really means is closed stores, laid-off workers, weakened supply chains, and then those savings are routinely never passed on to customers. Those cost savings simply show up as increased profits, and those increased profits allow the companies to do things like buy back their own shares from stockholders and offer these dividends, things that increase their stock prices and make shareholders happy, but that have no real reflection of the benefits to you and me and regular shoppers around the country. | | Luke Gannon: | And then, Ron, can you just dive into that a little more? When this news was released, there has been a lot of public opposition, including from ILSR. So what has this looked like? If this merger was approved, what really are the consequences that people suspect are going to happen? | | Ron Knox: | Well, I mean, it’s funny because the consequences are also what the companies allege are the benefits, right? Now these companies say, “Look, we have to do this merger because there’s no other way for us to compete with the Walmarts of the world. We have to get bigger because they’re bigger, and only through this bigness can we survive.” A, that’s pretty obviously untrue. If you just look at the amount of money these companies make, the amount of shareholder buybacks and of dividends they already offer, they’re doing fine. So that’s not really true. But I think what is true is that they do want to be as big as Walmart. And what does that mean? Well, that means that they have the power to bully everybody else in the supply chain, everybody else in the economy. And sure, I absolutely 100% believe that they want that. They want to be able to tell their suppliers, “Sorry, we’re going to pay you what we want to pay you,” and they’re going to be able to look at small businesses who maybe supply them with produce or other dry goods that end up on the shelves of these supermarkets, and they’re going to say, “Look, you’re either going to give us the price we want, or you can take a hike because we’re dealing with the biggest suppliers, the biggest food producers on earth, and that’s who we’re going to do business with.” | | So it’s this bigness begets bigness, this kind of conspiracy between the really big suppliers and the really big supermarket chains. And that’s what Kroger-Albertsons wants. They want that power, but that power comes at the detriment and creates harm for everybody else in the economy, particularly small businesses and of course, particularly consumers, because the bigger a supermarket chain is, let’s be honest, the easier it is for them to raise prices, because they don’t have a lot of competition to keep those prices down. So that affects all of us. | | Luke Gannon: | Ron, can you just give us a timeline for our listeners of the three possible scenarios that the Federal Trade Commission is expected to make in this decision? | | Ron Knox: | Sure. So the FTC could basically do one of three things here. The first is they could say yes to this merger as it was originally proposed, one company buying the other company, lock, stock and barrel. So that’s one thing that could happen. The other thing that could happen is that the FTC could say yes, but with conditions, and those conditions include the companies they’ve proposed to sell off, I think more than 400 stores in places where there’s a lot of head-to-head competition, and they say that’s going to solve the problem. And the FTC could agree with them and could say yes to the merger based on those conditions. What I think is much more likely to happen is the third thing, and that’s the FTC looks at the deal, looks at all the competition problems and all the various ways that that competition exists and say, “No, there’s no fix, and so we are going to say no to this merger, and we’re going to file a lawsuit in federal court to enjoin the merger.” That’s the legalese for that. | | And then at that point, the federal court will go through its regular civil litigation process, sped up a little bit. It’ll probably take somewhere like nine months or a year or so to get through it, but it’ll have all of the hallmarks of a civil litigation with discovery and various motions filed by both sides and then eventually a trial to decide whether or not this deal is going to go through. But I think that is the most likely thing to happen. And indeed, if the FTC does sue these companies to block the merger, I think they’re right to do so. I mean, again, there are lots of reasons for that, right? The supermarket industry is one that touches all of our lives every single day, right? I don’t care if you’re rich or poor, you’re going to the supermarket, and you’re buying the stuff on the shelves, and the prices that you find on those shelves have an effect. What we are saying, what we’re pushing for is for the FTC to simply say no to this deal. | | And that’s something that, I mean, to be honest, in the world of antitrust merger regulation, it’s something that just hasn’t happened in like 30, 40 years. You just never saw an agency that, by the way, whose job it is to protect the public from this kind of consolidated corporate power, from these price increases, from the ability for these big companies to bully workers and suppliers and everybody else… These agencies that are charged with doing that simply didn’t do the job for about 30 or 40 years. And they said yes to all these deals. Maybe they had a few conditions, some strings attached maybe, maybe they didn’t, but they said yes, and they said yes consistently. And the American public has been dealing with the harms of that. So what we’re telling the FTC to do, or we’re hoping that the FTC indeed does, is to simply say no. And we believe that there is honestly no way to fix this merger to where it’s not going to inflict significant harms on communities, workers and small businesses around the country. | | Luke Gannon: | Sort of close us out here, I’m curious, what does the future of the grocery industry look like in both scenarios if the Kroger-Albertsons merger is approved and if it is denied? | | Ron Knox: | Let’s say that the deal gets approved. So what happens then? If the deal gets approved as the companies are proposing, the companies say, “Well, look, we’re going to sell off like 400 stores in all these cities and towns on the West Coast and elsewhere where there’s a lot of competitive overlap, basically where Kroger and Albertsons compete head to head.” They say, “We’re going to sell off a bunch of these stores to a new third party, and they’re going to run them, and everything’s going to be peachy keen. There’s just not going to be a problem at all,” right? What happens then? Two likely things. One, as we have seen before, those kinds of divestitures to some third party not accustomed to operating big supermarkets, not accustomed to operating that level, that number, that sheer quantity of stores, all of a sudden they can’t do the job. And then you end up with this kind of cascading catastrophe where you have stores that are unable to operate, and they simply close or they’re sold back to the original parent companies because these third parties just can’t do it. So you have this staggering failure, and it’s the exact kind of thing that happened when Albertsons bought Safeway. And it was this drama that resulted in lost jobs in food deserts and all these real problems in real places around the country. | | The other thing if the deal goes through is that even when you sell off stores… Let’s say that that happens, and let’s say hypothetically that that selloff is successful, which is super unlikely, but let’s say that that is what happens… you still end up with this merged conglomerate company with even more power to dictate the prices for all of the different things that it buys, whether it’s the produce in the produce section, the dry goods on the shelves or workers who are actually stocking those shelves and checking out groceries and bagging goods. Even with the divestiture, even with this supposed fix, you don’t fix that problem, and you don’t end up with a company that is competitively sized when it comes to the things that it buys. So that is essentially unsolvable, and that’s what happens if that deal goes through. | | Now, what happens if the deal is blocked? Well, I mean, a few things, right? First thing is this super important shift in the way that our regulatory agencies behave and the messages that they send to the corporate world. If the FTC blocks this deal, that’s the FTC saying, “Look, don’t bring this stuff to us. Don’t think about it.” All right? “Don’t let this stuff get out of the boardroom, because we are going to fight you tooth and nail, and you’re going to rack up hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees. And we’re going to drag you through the mud, and the public’s going to hate you, and all this other stuff is going to happen. Your shareholders aren’t going to like it because they don’t want to have to go through this stuff,” right? “Don’t even bring this stuff to us.” That’s the first thing. | | And the second thing is that, look, in any market… I don’t care whether it’s supermarkets or airlines or cell phones or whatever… when you say no to a merger, the thing you’re saying yes to is opportunity, opportunity for another company to come in and gain a foothold and compete in that market, lower prices, offer better benefits to workers, offer better prices and opportunities to suppliers, all those kinds of things. It’s this idea that when you say no to concentration, you say yes to deconcentration, you say yes to more opportunity, more things in more places, fewer food deserts, better opportunities for unions to come in and organize workers and give them better pay. All these kinds of things happen. So the benefits are multifold, as are the risks, if the FTC lets this one go through. | | Reggie Rucker: | Ron, always so great to have you. Thank you for your expertise and perspective on this. What I love most about what Ron just shared and why I want to quickly get you to the second half of this episode is the part about it’s not just being some sort of punishment for bigness because like boo, we hate bigness. It’s the bigness, the consolidation that blocks the beautiful, local, connected outcomes that we get when people in communities have the space and freedom to exist and create together with each other the solutions that will make their community stronger and healthier and more vibrant. This next half of the episode has some great stories of communities doing just this to make sure that their neighbors have access to quality, affordable food for their families. I’m going to toss it back to Luke to take us through these stories. | | Luke Gannon: | Up next, we’ll share stories from ILSR’s new Community Wins series, spotlighting how communities are combating corporate power in building local self-reliance. Kennedy Smith, a senior researcher at ILSR, an author of these articles, will guide us through some of these narratives. We’ll first take you to the tiny town in Cody, Nebraska. Here’s Kennedy. | | Kennedy Smith: | There was a high school class in Cody that jumpstarted a market there called Circle C in 2008. It’s a tiny town. It only has 167 people. And they’d lost a grocery store, and what were they going to do? That state senator for rural affairs helped the community plan the store and secure startup funding from the USDA and several foundations to get it going. It’s operated as a nonprofit organization with a board of directors. The town’s government owns the building, and there’s a full-time manager who oversees the day-to-day operations. The store is staffed mostly by high school students who are learning how to run a grocery store and how to run a business in general by the experience of it. | | Luke Gannon: | Cody is reaping the benefits of the school-run grocery store, eliminating the need for a one-hour journey to reach the next closest grocery store, which is a common challenge faced by many individuals in rural areas living in food deserts. | | Kennedy Smith: | I think that more and more local governments are realizing, especially in smaller communities and in urban neighborhoods, places that have really been starved of food options for a long time, local governments are realizing that access to healthy, affordable food is really a human right, and government has a role to play in helping make that happen. And so I’m seeing communities taking sort of little baby steps in that direction, like in this instance where the local government owned the building. There are actually a couple of bigger examples, like in Baldwin, Florida and a few communities in Kansas, where local government decided, look, we have no grocery store. We don’t see anybody coming knocking on the door wanting to open one, so we, the local government, are going to do it ourselves. And so those are completely municipally-owned grocery stores that operate. | | Luke Gannon: | There are various types of grocery stores and operation supported by diverse sources, including local governments providing funds from the federal government through the American Rescue Plan Act, contributions from community charities, for-profit institutions within the community and individual investments. A common theme in the stories Kennedy writes about is a profound commitment to addressing the specific needs of the community. Up north in Evansville, Minnesota, a small town has found a solution that works for them. | | Kennedy Smith: | Evansville had lost its only grocery store in the mid 2010s, and the closest full-service store was 20 miles away. So this local couple, with the help of some community residents who chipped in some money to help renovate this building, opened this store called Main Street Market, which is largely a self-service grocery store. It’s staffed three days a week, but on the days that it’s closed, people who are members, which is 75 bucks a year, use an app on their telephones to open the door, scan things they want to buy and pay for the order. So each customer has a unique code so the owners know who’s in the store all the time, but there hasn’t been any issue with shoplifting at all. It’s very much honor system. | | Luke Gannon: | One local resident in Evansville says that having this local grocery option in town is a game-changer. | | Speaker 6: | It’s just so handy for me. I mean, I don’t have to drive 20, 30, 40, 50 miles to buy a loaf of bread or a can of soup. I can just walk next door. | | Kennedy Smith: | Customers can even write suggestions on a chalkboard inside the store about things they’d like to see the store get in stock, and so they can then go and get those things for the store. And that idea, I mean, it sounds kind of unique, and Evansville is the first place that I know of that did it, but I’m also beginning to see that pop up in larger cities, like in Denver and San Diego, where you see some apartment buildings and condominium buildings that have self-service grocery stores popping up on their first floors. And it’s a fairly common thing also in parts of Europe and even in parts of Canada. | | Luke Gannon: | In the last 30 plus years, we’ve seen a mass exodus of locally-owned grocery stores. Black-owned grocery stores have been particularly hard hit. | | Kennedy Smith: | Now looking back 100 years or so, the historically black commercial districts were well-served by locally-owned grocery stores. And at some point along the way, that began dropping pretty dramatically. In 1969, according to the Census Bureau, there were more than 11,000 Black-owned food stores in the US, but a couple of decades later that had dropped by 28% to 8,000, and it’s continued to drop. And it obviously is part of a larger morass of factors that include the development of the interstate highway system and White flight and grocery industry consolidation. | | Luke Gannon: | In 2015, there was an article that said there were only two Black-owned grocery stores left in the US. In May of 2018, another article said that there were 10. But today there are beginning to bounce back. In 2020, an article stated that 60 Black-owned grocery stores opened. Communities are tired of not having good options, and they are taking matters into their own hands. One community is taking matters into their own hands in Chicago. | | Kennedy Smith: | There was this woman named Liz Abunaw, who actually was a relatively recent MBA grad from University of Chicago. And she was going to O’Hare Airport on a bus, and she stopped in this neighborhood on the way there, Austin, thinking that she could stop at an ATM and get some cash for her trip- | | Luke Gannon: | Here’s Liz. | | Liz Abunaw: | Immediately noticing a lack of resources. They didn’t have a grocery store. They didn’t have a bank. | | Kennedy Smith: | And was just blown away by the fact that there was nothing. And she was like how can this be that we have a city that has neighborhoods that are so thriving and then places like this that just have nothing? And so she decided to do something about it and got back from her trip and got busy putting together the financing for this store that she’s calling Forty Acres Fresh Market, obviously harking back to the unrealized reconstruction dream of giving formerly enslaved people 40 acres and a mule, which is where the name comes from. And she began on a small scale by doing pop-up markets and going to farmer’s markets and doing deliveries of food boxes that people could buy. She’d put together a box of fresh vegetables, box of fresh fruit and doing deliveries that way. So she basically operated for her first couple of years without a physical storefront, just having a warehouse to put things together in. | | But she then began raising money, and she’s been very successful in raising money. She’s gotten $185,000 from USDA’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative, $150,000 from the American Heart Association, $2.5 million dollars from the city of Chicago’s Recovery Plan Community Development Grant, and even Famous Amos, the cookie manufacturer, has chipped in 50,000 bucks. And she was finally able to buy a building, a former Salvation Army building, and just broke ground this past month in November of 2023 on doing the renovations for that building to open a full-service grocery store there in this neighborhood that’s had nothing for years. | | Luke Gannon: | In all of these examples, communities are uniting to cultivate robust local economies, resisting the economic turbulence caused by chains and monopolistic corporations seeking to extract wealth and dictate their future. In the Community Wins series, Kennedy writes about these new grocery models popping up around the country, including mobile, self-service, community-assisted, cooperative and publicly-owned grocery stores. But why now? | | Kennedy Smith: | I think that there’s something about the pandemic and the fact that people just began thinking about how to do things differently that began to spur some of this thinking. I think that the availability of money through the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan Act have made some things happen that might not have been possible a few years before. And I think that there’s just sort of a greater sense of needing to take care of each other now than there might’ve been five or 10 years ago. I think that people are just no longer hesitant to step into the arena and say I’m going to go to a city council meeting and talk about the need for this, or I’m going to get together with my neighbors or the school group, and we’re going to try to figure out some solutions. And I think the kids are doing that too. You look at the example of Cody, Nebraska and some of these other places where they really are the kids who’ve pulled this together. | | One of the examples that is not making it into my new article, but I found very inspiring, was also in Detroit. And it was this group of a dozen or so high school students who wanted a food market of some kind in their community, in their neighborhood, and thought they could do it as a popup during the summer. And they ended up talking to a Chicago Bears player, who loved the idea so much that he kicked in a half a million dollars for them to do it. And so they took over a former liquor store and turned it into a 12-week market during the summer. And again, they all got firsthand experience in that. So I think there’s something about this younger generation really feeling empowered to think outside the box and do some different things. And then of course, there’s just all the, I think, the sense of people being fed up with so much wealth in the US and in the world gravitating into the pockets of just a few people and a few big companies. And people are recognizing that there’s something going on there that they’re not happy with and therefore looking for local solutions. | | And what I think we’re seeing are solutions that, whether it’s in terms of the product mix that these stores offer or their organizational model that they’re using or how they’re funded, whatever it is, they’re finding solutions that work for that community. And it may work there and may not work anywhere else. It may in part work someplace else. But that’s great. People are experimenting not just with new models for grocery stores, but the same thought that goes into what organizational model, what funding solution, what product mix can help businesses across the horizon. And so I think that there are going to be lessons beyond those that the grocery industry can learn and those that people in communities looking for grocery stores can learn that they can apply to other business development activities in the future too. It’s moving so much now towards consolidation that these stories are really heartening because they’re so unique and they’re such a good fit for each place. | | Luke Gannon: | Kennedy showcases stories from individuals across the country who in the face of daunting challenges are wholeheartedly dedicating themselves to the cause of improving their communities. Thanks so much for joining us today, Kennedy, to highlight these. | | Now I’m going to pass it over to my co-host, who just learned why the en and em dash have their names. Fortunately, Reggie is well-versed in matters far more significant than the en and em dash. Reggie, the floor is yours. | | Reggie Rucker: | Thanks, Luke. Great job as always. And thank you, Kennedy and Ron, for being on the show today. It’s such a joy, a pleasure, a privilege to be able to work with both of you. And to all of you at home or in your cars or wherever you’re listening, thank you. If you made it this far, I assume that means you enjoyed this episode. So it’s my sworn duty to ask you to share it with even just one person you think will enjoy it too. Let’s get to that 10,000 listens so we can bring more people into these conversations about the type of society we want to live in, where the interest of us citizens is put above the interest of giant corporations and their deep-pocketed investors. And if you’re not a subscriber to the podcast yet, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you know when every new episode drops. And of course, your donations are essential to help us keep this podcast going and support the research and resources that we make available on our website for free. We truly welcome and appreciate it all. | | And last, if you just have some feedback for us, we want to share a story about how your community approaches this issue. Or if you just want to share about when you first learned why it’s called an em dash and an en dash, send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. We’d love to share these in a special mailbag episode one day. We’ll definitely keep an eye out. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. This podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank. The music for this season is also composed by Andrew Frank. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSMusic Credit: Andrew Frank
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
In many places across the country, broadband communications provider, Sparklight, has a monopoly in rural towns where they price gouge their customers and deliver poor service. It has significantly expanded its presence across the U.S. through acquisitions and investments in broadband companies in recent years, and East Carroll Parrish leaders Wanda Manning and Laura Arvin have experienced the consequences of this consolidation firsthand. The two journey through their experience fending off Sparklight in their small Southern town, building a task force to create a fiber-to-the-home network so historically marginalized populations could have fast and affordable Internet access, addressing the challenges faced by communities left out of the digital landscape.
Related ResourcesProfiles of Monopoly: Big Cable and Telecom
New Video: Coalition of Community Broadband Advocates Prevail in Louisiana
East Carroll Parish Residents in Louisiana Fend Off Sparklight Challenge
Louisiana First State to Get BEAD Planning Funds as State GUMBO Grants Get Messy
Louisiana Upholds $4 Million Grant to Expand Internet Access in East Carroll
Cable One Completes Acquisition of Fidelity Communications
Cable One buys remaining stake in Hargray in $2.2B deal
Cable ONE agrees to acquire CableAmerica assets
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry
Books:
- The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Linsey & Steven M. Teles
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I’m your co-host, Reggie Rucker, and on today’s show we have the privilege of hearing from two guests who stared down monopoly giants that basically gave them the middle finger when all they asked was for reliable, affordable internet service to connect to and take care of their community. And in keeping with this season’s theme, How to Get Away with Merger, we look at how this need to even ask monopoly giants for connectivity to community and health and opportunity is only necessary because of the concentration allowed through large mergers and acquisitions. Today we look at Cable One, which now goes by Sparklight, and how a series of acquisitions in recent years helped to make them a dominant player in the southern region with the power to pick and choose who they provide service to and how this requires communities to make heroic efforts just to get what so many are able to take for granted. To tell more of this story, I’m going to pass it over to my co-host who has not once given me the middle finger, at least not to my face, and that’s Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Reggie, I would never give you the middle finger. So before we jump into hearing from our guests today, I’m going to provide some background on Sparklight and its history. Sparklight, as Reggie mentioned, is a part of Cable One’s family of brands, and it’s a broadband communications provider that serves more than 1 million residential and business customers in 24 states. So a few years ago, Cable One changed its name to Sparklight to transition to a broadband-first strategy because they saw that so many people were turning to digital video content on their mobile devices or to social media. So as a part of this rebranding strategy and shifting their focus on broadband, they are now trying to acquire and grow. | | Reggie Rucker: | So, Luke, what did you notice as you looked at the pattern of these acquisitions? | | Luke Gannon: | To me, it seems like Sparklight has been conducting a series of smaller acquisitions over the last few years, slowly growing its footprint across the United States. In 2019, Sparklight acquired Fidelity Communications, which expanded its footprint by 190,000 homes across primarily Southern and Midwestern states. Then in 2020, Sparklight bought a 45% stake in Mega Broadband Investments’ holdings, which is a private equity firm, for $574 million. And then in 2021, Sparklight announced that it would be acquiring equity interests in Hargray Communications, which is a telecommunications provider. | | Reggie Rucker: | So, Luke, explain the equity interest. What does that look like in this case? | | Luke Gannon: | So Sparklight will represent 85% of Hargray. Its stake in Hargray will expand their footprint in the Southeastern US. So really just over the last few years we’ve seen Sparklight inching its way across the United States, becoming larger and larger and, as I’ve read oftentimes, providing poor and expensive service. | | Reggie Rucker: | So, Luke, what is Sparklight, Cable One, what are they saying as they buy up all of these telecommunications, broadband companies? What are they sort of professing is going to be sort of the positive outcome of these acquisitions? | | Luke Gannon: | In most of the articles I’ve read about these acquisitions, Sparklight has said that by acquiring X company, it will create a “superior experience for customers and increase value for shareholders.” But unfortunately, as the East Carroll Parish story that you’ll hear next so clearly illustrates, the customer experience is really bad. And that’s why all this organizing happened, to build something that actually worked for the community in East Carroll Parish. And that was led by the community, not some outside massive corporation coming in and deciding who to serve and then leaving out a huge part of the population. So in East Carroll Parish, Sparklight and AT&T were really the only two providers in town. And in many places across the country, Sparklight has a monopoly in rural towns where they are price gouging their customers, which basically means that because there is no one else to compete with, they increase their rates. And then on top of that, due to this lack of competition, they can also provide terrible service because there is really no incentive to do better. | | Reggie Rucker: | Such a great intro, Luke. Thank you so much for that. Okay, so tell us what’s coming up next on the show. | | Luke Gannon: | So on the show today, Wanda Manning and Laura Arvin are going to detail their story working with Delta Interfaith and organizing a task force around building their own fiber to the home network where everyone in East Carroll Parish could have access to affordable, fast broadband. Without further ado, we are going to start from the beginning of Wanda’s story. | | Wanda Manning: | Well, I grew up here in Lake Providence. Lake Providence is a small agricultural town. The lake, we were named after of it, it’s like a oxbow. And the town is a beautiful little plain town in northeast Louisiana, right at the tip-top of the boot, in the northeast corner, far, far northeast corner. Well, it’s always been a beautiful town to me, and yes, we have our own issues here in East Carroll Parish, like any other town. East Carroll Parish is the parish, and I live in Lake Providence, and that’s our town. So I grew up in a large family, nine of us, five sisters and three brothers, and it was always something going on in the house. We lived next door to my grandmother. We call her Mama Lena. And for many years my family pushed education. And as my grandmother taught us that old adage, “If you give a man a fish, you can feed him for one day, but if you teach him how to fish, you could feed him for a lifetime,” and was always work. | | And I chopped cotton… We’re in the south… as a child coming up. So with education being pushed all the time, I knew I didn’t want to chop cotton all my life, right? So it was hot. It was really hot. But it served its purpose, and there was a lot of life lessons in it. But although I grew up in a large family, I spent a lot of time reading books. I spent a lot of time by myself. I was always up to something, creating stuff. I wanted to be a fashion designer. I made my own fashion paper dolls. I loved watching my family and my friends get together to have fun. And my father loved sports, so we played lots of touch football, or they call it setback. And to this very day, I can throw a football better than most guys. But my daddy didn’t allow the girls to be tackled, and the boys were just furious. And although I’m a little rusty, I can still throw that football. | | So, well, with everything said about my family and stuff and education was the main thing pushed, I became a teacher, and I taught for 32 plus years. And my parents were always assisting in the community in one form or fashion. So one of the stories I recall from my childhood is what my father did. One night a family came to our house. And it was a knock on the door, and we heard the commotion. We’re all seated getting ready for supper, and all of a sudden my dad came in at the table. He took half of my food off my plate, half of my sister’s them food off of their plates, and we were just sitting around looking like… So it was years down the road that I figured out that it was a family outside of that door. They didn’t ask for money. They asked for food. So my father made a way to give them food. So I learned in life that whatever you have to share, you share because in my spiritual upbringing, in my church upbringing is if you are blessed, you are created to be a blessing. | | So sharing was a part of what we did. My mom took for funerals throughout the town of Lake Providence and all around Lake Providence, always serving somebody, so many funerals that she served at and cook for, I can’t put a number to it, not to this day. So we were always sent to somebody’s house, some elderly person’s house to clean up or run errands. And I didn’t realize just how much of my childhood was spent in the community. | | Luke Gannon: | Today Wanda remains actively engaged in the community. After dedicating 32 years to teaching in East Carroll Parish, in 2020 Wanda, like the rest of the world, experienced a profound wake-up call. | | Wanda Manning: | 2020 forced me out the classroom with underlining conditions behind COVID, right? The pandemic just ripped the bandage off of everything. So I was in the classroom teaching, and one of my former students, I thought the kid was just playing in and out of his virtual class. And I was infuriated. And so I did not know at that time dial-up was still a thing. You all, it was so frustrating to have a child not stay in that virtual class. So during that particular time, when I came out in November of 2020, I went out and I got a chance to talk to Nathan and his mother, Tabitha. So I found out in our conversation this kid was on dial-up in a virtual class. Dial-up can’t sustain a [inaudible 00:11:30] call, less long a virtual class. So I told Nathan, I said, “Baby, I apologize for fussing at you so because I didn’t know you had such poor connection.” So I said, “If I don’t do anything, I’m going to make sure you get some good internet out here.” And that’s how my journey got started, with a former student and just dirt poor connection. | | Luke Gannon: | As a teacher, when COVID struck, Wanda quickly recognized the significant lack of internet access that many of her students faced. In 2020, she became actively involved in Delta Interfaith, a broad-based coalition of congregations and organizations dedicated to addressing problems large and small. It was there that she crossed paths with Laura Arvin. Here’s Laura. | | Laura Arvin: | I got involved in Delta Interfaith because I wanted to get more involved in the community. I grew up here myself and moved back to help take care of my mother. And when she passed, I was looking for some way to get involved into the community. And so it was perfect because I was able to meet people from all walks of life. | | Luke Gannon: | Laura became a member of Delta Interfaith when the pandemic struck. Soon after, she along with a group of volunteers formed a task force dedicated to organizing initiatives aimed at bridging the digital divide. | | Laura Arvin: | The task force met with AT&T, who is the old guard incumbent here, pretending to offer internet. AT&T and Sparklight were the two entities in town that offered internet. We had those choices. And if you looked at what was needed from the pandemic, the AT&T service was not viable. So basically, we had one choice if you wanted to do online school, and that’s Sparklight, which is expensive and therefore not affordable for a lot of people. | | Luke Gannon: | As children transitioned from in-person to remote schooling, Laura and Wanda recognized that the available options for internet providers were inadequate. They embarked on a lengthy journey of research, meetings with representatives, securing funding and forming alliances with electric cooperatives. Their goal was to build a compelling case for ensuring that every individual in East Carroll Parish had access to reliable internet connectivity. | | Laura Arvin: | We met with AT&T representatives. We met with Sparklight representatives online. We met with all kinds of local industries. How were they working to get their internet? We worked with the school system, finding all these things. The task force ended up fighting off this company that came in and wanted to build a magic entity. They were going to solve all our broadband problems to the tune of $50 million in bonds that they were going to sell, that if the network failed, the town would’ve been on the hook for, the town and the parish. So by that time, we had researched and we were beginning to get our organizing chops, so to speak. So we were able to fend them off, and we identified a partner who had won the RDOF money for our parish, who was also building networks for the electric co-op next door to us and also had some customers in East Carroll. So Delta Interfaith Broadband Committee worked with them to help them gather information to submit a GUMBO grant application. | | And we worked hard. We helped them gather the information. And after a lot of waiting, the grant was awarded. And so we celebrated, but there was a protest process in place that we were aware of, but at the 11th hour, literally Sparklight comes in and says, “Nope, we serve those people already,” or, “We serve the majority of them, so you can’t give money to serve those people.” And the GUMBO grant is the granting unserved municipalities broadband opportunities. So they might have technically had AT&T, but there were some standards there that they had to reach, and so AT&T couldn’t. So basically, they were unserved, but with Sparklight’s protests, it pretty much put a halt in things. And at that point, Delta Interfaith pivoted. We started going out and doing press conferences. We’d traveled to Baton Rouge and spoke in front of the office of administration that ran the broadband grant program. We did media interviews. We chatted with Chris Mitchell on the ILSR Community Broadband bits and did a lot of print interviews and reached out to public officials. | | And then we also met with Sparklight directly. We went over to Monroe to their regional office and met on Zoom. And by the way, they had internet problems hooking into their Arizona and Florida offices, where these big wigs were. We were sitting with the regional manager, who we had spoken with way back in 2020. That was who we talked with, saying, “Can you extend your network further out into the parish?” And at that time they said, “No, it’s not a good return on investment for us. We can’t do this.” And AT&T had told us, “Be happy with what you have.” So when we met them a second time, we had a little bit of a fire in our bellies. | | Luke Gannon: | The flames of that fire were fanned out one day when a Sparklight general manager, Charlie Oaks, made Wanda an offer he hoped she wouldn’t refuse. | | Wanda Manning: | So Charlie Oaks called me and said, “Well, Wanda, well, I’m going to do this and that for you on your bill so it could come down, and you’ll have great service and all of this cool stuff.” I said, “Oh really?” I said, “That’s awesome.” I said, “But are you going to do that for everybody else too?” You don’t just do it for one person. There’s a whole community of people coming up short with poor services. And we pay big money for Sparklight for their services and get poor freaking services. | | Luke Gannon: | But because Wanda wouldn’t be bought and kept advocating for all of her community alongside Laura and the rest of Delta Interfaith, today residents of East Carroll Parish are celebrating Louisiana’s Office of Broadband Development and Connectivity’s decision to uphold a $4 million GUMBO grant to bring fiber to the home internet service to over 2,500 households in one of the most poorly connected parts of the state. Community building is power building. | | Wanda Manning: | My standpoint is that as a community-based organization built with community churches and people that are interested in the betterment of our town, we wanted change. We even had two great assemblies to gather people up to create power, because as a young person during the early 70s, late 80s, trying to organize some stuff in school, power can be one person, but you struggle so hard with it. But when you got organized people with the same mindset and growing a thing or a situation, you get great strategies and some great ideas. And that’s what has happened in Delta Interfaith. We strive for the betterment of our town. We want our children to have better, and the only way that we can have better for them is that we lay the foundation. | | Laura Arvin: | And it is about those relationships, reaching across all of these possible, probable divides, real issues that have been struggled with to learn together about how to do things. I mean, we’re learning as a group all the time. | | Wanda Manning: | This fight, it’s pertinent to me as an educator. With technology as an ongoing entity, we need to stay abreast. To stay abreast, it need to be affordable, reliable and sustainable. There’s no connection to other entities outside of East Carroll Parish if we can’t sustain a connection. This fight is so important because I know that there are homes that do remote jobs. Telehealth is very crucial in East Carroll Parish because even I myself have to drive 72 plus miles for a doctor appointment [inaudible 00:21:26]. So some of the things that we can carve out using the internet, it takes the strain off our pockets, off our time and put things back in the order that it’s supposed to be, especially concerning all children. Everybody don’t have the necessary means to travel to be educated at ULM, Grambling Southern or any other university. So with good, sustainable internet, it meets the need. And we have to have this fight and this discussion about not being left behind. | | Luke Gannon: | It’s that time of the episode for Wanda and Laura to share their book recommendations. Here’s Laura. | | Laura Arvin: | One of my most favorite poets is Wendell Berry. There’s a poem called Manifesto of the Mad Farmer. And every now and then when I get frustrated, I go back and read that poem, and it’s just awesome. | | Wanda Manning: | The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves and Slow Down Growth and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey and Steve Teles a interesting read, very interesting. You learn some stuff about the economy and big companies, how they just steady do the wrong thing. And that scripture, or part of scripture says, “The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer,” and that comes to mind. And one of them is a hard read. You can’t be faint of heart With Charles Dickens, right? The Tale of Two Cities is what I relate to. And even coming up, the first line, “It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times,” and I’ve always equated that with East Carroll Parish because of the struggles and the parallelisms between the two situations that was battling out in the book. | | Luke Gannon: | Well, thank you so much, Wanda and Laura, for joining us on the show today. You all have accomplished an amazing feat in East Carroll Parish and really shown the world what is possible for bridging the digital divide. Now passing it over to the incredible Reggie Rucker to close us out. | | Reggie Rucker: | Thank you, Luke. Again, what a great job on this episode. And, again, Laura and Wanda, thank you for telling such an inspiring and empowering story. It truly is moving to hear about all the great work that you’re doing down in East Carroll Parish. And for all of you listening, thanks for sticking with us until the end. I assume that means you like this episode, so please share with even just one person you think will enjoy it too. We have a goal of 10,000 listens for this episode, so help us get there. And if you’re not a subscriber to the podcast yet, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you know when every new episode drops. And, of course, your donations are essential to help us keep this podcast going and support the research and resources that we make available on our website for free. We truly welcome and appreciate it all. | | And last, if you have feedback for us or want to share a story about how your community approaches this issue, send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. We’d love to share these on a special mailbag episode one day. We’ll definitely keep an eye out. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. This podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank. The music for this season is also composed by Andrew Frank. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSMusic Credit: Andrew Frank
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
In 2015, Charter Spectrum bought Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, a mammoth merger in the telecommunications and cable industry that made Charter the second-largest broadband provider in the nation. Jonathan Schwantes, senior policy counsel and manager of special projects at Consumer Reports explains how the cable industry changed dramatically after the passage of the Telecom Act, why millions of consumers are cutting the cord and leaving cable, and what the telecom giants are doing to maintain their monopoly on the way people exchange information.
Related ResourcesWhy Consumer Groups Are Fighting the Charter-Time Warner Cable Merger: The concern is that the combined company and Comcast would dominate TV and broadband services.
FCC Documents Show Why Charter-Time Warner Merger Might Be Bad for Consumers: The agency’s approval of the deal carries big reservations.
3 Things Charter Promises in Its Time Warner Cable Deal: To get regulatory approval for the merger, Charter says it will abide by these terms for seven years.
What Charter’s New York Settlement Means for Cable Internet Customers: Charter settles claims that customers of its Time Warner Cable subsidiary didn’t get promised speeds or reliability.
Fighting Monopoly Power: Broadband Internet Access
Report: Most Americans Have No Real Choice in Internet Providers
Profiles of Monopoly: Big Cable and Telecom
Book:
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I’m your co-host, Reggie Rucker, and on this show we continue with our season of How to Get Away With Merger, moving from one public utility or energy system to another public good that is a public utility in reality, but most Americans are reliant on the private market to provide it. That’s our internet, broadband. | | We look at Charter Spectrum’s merger with Time Warner Cable and spotlight how consolidation in the industry is shaping the way communities stay connected and receive information. These days, so much video content. We talk Hulu, YouTube, Disney+, all the things and the internet infrastructure it depends on to get into it. | | I’m going to throw it over to my co-host who never does any of my TV references, partially because I’m getting old and partially because she apparently had better things to do with her time growing up to watch TV. Luke Gannon. | | Luke Gannon: | No, Reggie, it’s not because you’re old. I’m trying to catch up on all the TV classics that I missed as a child, but it takes time. I’ll get your references soon enough. Speaking of TV, if you’re wondering why your TV subscriptions keep getting more and more expensive, our guest on the show today will explain exactly what’s going on today. | | Jon Schwantes, a senior policy council and manager of special projects at Consumer Reports, brings us on his journey of getting into telecommunications and how the cable industry has changed drastically over the last 20 years. Let’s start from the beginning. | | Jon Schwantes: | I grew up in North Central Wisconsin and I’m very much a Gen Xer, so I grew up in the late 70s and all through the 80s. I’m one of six kids. My parents both worked, they were both nurses. We were solidly middle class, lower middle class, and all of my siblings. They had six kids in 10 years, so it was a zoo growing up, cats and dogs all under one roof. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. | | It wasn’t Leave It to Beaver. I tell folks who maybe aren’t familiar with or didn’t live during that time, it was probably more like the movie Dazed and Confused or even Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The high school was nuts, a lot of shenanigans and pranks, things that seemed completely normal in the early eighties would get you kicked out of school nowadays, I would imagine. | | As for me, I was always drawn to politics. Whether that was student council… I wanted to be on student council, I wanted to be student council president, and I was I guess a bit precocious as a child and had this feeling, this wanderlust of as much as I love my snowy winters in Wisconsin, I am going to do more. And I did. | | I think for better or worse, I would say better, I knew I wanted to do work in politics and I knew I wanted to go to law school and this would’ve been… Oh gosh, maybe fifth or sixth grade. I say for the worst because I was always on that track. I never thought I’d do anything else. | | I went to college at the University of Minnesota and then my junior year, I did a semester in Washington, D.C. working in the House of Representatives, and then I did a semester in London working in Parliament and I just ate it up. I couldn’t get enough of it. I really enjoyed it. What was funny at the time is I didn’t know how much I liked it, and that would be my future career because when you go to law school, you think well shoot, maybe I should go work at a law firm. | | I did that for one summer in Chicago and that’s all I needed. I’ve got family members and some of my best friends work at law firms, they are what I call real lawyers. It’s just not for me. After I graduated law school, I came out to Washington, D.C. without a job, begging and scraping all the contacts I made during my junior year internships saying please, please, please, I need to get a job. | | Through a great deal of luck and… Really luck, I found myself on the Senate Judiciary Committee working for my home state senator, Senator Herb Cole, who was on the Antitrust Subcommittee. It’s really funny because all of the law that I use in my career now as an advocate in the telecommunications space, I didn’t take any of those classes in law school. | | I didn’t have antitrust law, I did not have telecommunications law, I did not have administrative procedures law, nor did I have corporations, but such as Life on the Hill, you learn whatever issues are thrown at you. For me, I came into Washington, and this is a good segue at 1998, that was two years after passage of one of the landmark telecommunications laws, the 96 Telecom Act. | | The industry, and consumers, and policymakers were trying to figure out what is the future of telecom? What is the future of the video marketplace? That was the last law, coming up on 30 years anniversary, that really addressed these issues. | | Luke Gannon: | Jon worked in the Senate for nearly eight years and had an opportunity in 2007 to try his hand on K Street. Jon joined a small lobbying firm that had a variety of clients, some of which included cable clients, but this work wasn’t for Jon. | | Jon Schwantes: | My heart wasn’t in it. I think it might have been a little more interesting if I were in-house with a company so you can still work on the substantive issues, but I think for me, and one of the reasons that I led the Consumer reports and quite frankly was more than willing to take a pay cut, is I wanted to get back to the work that inspired me and made me proud of what I did. | | There’s no faking what I do at Consumer Reports. When I’m talking to you, when I’m talking to reporters, when I’m testifying before Congress, that’s the real me. Yes, I have to do it on behalf of Consumer Reports, but it’s a win-win. That’s basically how I ended up at Consumer Reports and it’s been a hell of a good time. | | Luke Gannon: | A lot has changed in the telecommunications and cable industry since 1998. What does the cable industry look like in the US currently? Who are the big players and how much of the market do they control? | | Jon Schwantes: | The short answer is it has changed dramatically. It has changed dramatically in my time in Washington and even since this merger happened, this merger being Charter, Time Warner Cable, Brighthouse Network. The FCC and the Department of Justice, DOJ approved this merger I want to say almost a year later in April of 2016, so that was more than seven years ago. The cable marketplace looked very different then than it does now. | | How has it changed? At the time this merger was approved, Charter had almost 7 million subscribers. Time Warner Cable had just over 16 million, and Brighthouse had two and a half million. Back in the napkin, what is that? Almost 25 million subscribers for video for their old school cable TV product. Broadband was obviously becoming more and more important, and Comcast had even more at 28 million. | | They’re barely Comcast and Charter, now Charter has Time Warner Cable, Brighthouse, they’re now under 15 million. Why? This marketplace has dramatically changed and I would argue for the better for consumers. In just that short seven years, millions of consumers are cutting the cord and leaving big cable. | | What do we need to look at then in respect to where are we now? It’s all about broadband and that’s why it’s still a concern that these big cable companies control the broadband connection into consumer’s homes. Why is that important? Because how are consumers consuming video these days? Some consumers, I think Comcast and Charter have about 15 million video subscribers, as we call it in the lingo. Today, that’s down from 25, 28,000,000 seven years ago. | | But a lot of people are cutting the cord and moving to streaming video, both what we call OVD, online video distributors, like Netflix where you just watch whatever Netflix serves you up whenever you want to watch it, and then… Here comes some more alphabet soup, what we call virtual multichannel video program distributors, which is like YouTube TV or Hulu Live. | | They look and feel like cable, and so that has dramatically shifted. YouTube TV has 6 million subscribers compared to Charters, 14.5 million subscribers. This marketplace has dramatically changed. When I talk to policymakers about it, you have the video marketplace and then you have broadband, and cable does both. Whereas you have video like YouTube TV, they’re only providing you that video product. They’re not providing you broadband. | | If you look on the video side, you still have DirecTV and Dish Network, the satellite companies, they’ll try to do broadband but not really in the same way that cable does. You’ve got unicorns like Verizon Fios that will give you fiber broadband to the home, and they are still doing the five Fios video product, which is about 3.5 million subscribers. | | If we were having this conversation 10 years ago, we would be talking about how cable and really just a handful of companies dominate the video marketplace. That’s no longer the case in 2023, and that’s a good thing. Really through really… Let’s not give credit to big cable, I think a lot of consumers have left cable for a lot of very good reasons. It’s more about a competitive marketplace, but we still need to be concerned about the dominance cable has over the broadband connection because consumers are really only enjoying the competition in the video marketplace because of that broadband connection and because cable to date has not thwarted that competition. | | Reggie Rucker: | Can you help me understand where Charter fits into this equation? You mentioned some concerns about cable getting into the broadband space. Can you make that connection for me in terms of Charter and the purchase of Time Warner and Brighthouse? | | Jon Schwantes: | That’s a great question. I will. We’ll back up a little bit. If you just look at cable video and broadband, Comcast is still the biggest cable company in the country. Charter’s number two. At the time of the merger Charter I think was number four, and Time Warner Cable was number two. Two and four got together and became even bigger. I think it made Charter four times as big as what they were at the time. | | What’s really fascinating about this industry is Comcast and Charter do not compete head-to-head. If you look at a map of what we call in the industry, their footprint, where are Comcast subscribers, where are charter subscribers? It’s like a crazy blotches here and there typically around the country, but they don’t overlap. Now, there are exceptions like Verizon Fios will compete head-to-head with Comcast and Charter in some markets, but they’re not huge, but they’re significant, but that’s what’s really, really interesting about this marketplace. | | Why is that important? Yes, we’re seeing competition on the video side and that’s thanks to broadband, but you have consumers way too many, on the order of millions, who when you talk about broadband, it’s only Charter, it’s only Comcast. If you are in the right neighborhood in a big city, and let’s be honest, the wealthy neighborhoods, you’ll see some competition. You’ll see an upstart like RCN, but by and large there are way too many consumers that only have one choice of broadband, and that’s typically provided by Comcast or Charter. | | I don’t want to guess, but I want to say those two cable companies alone, it is more than half the country gets their broadband from either Charter or Comcast. That’s concerning. Now, that might change. I know industry will tell you wireless competes with us now. People can just use their 5G connection and I want to be honest, yes, that is growing and exciting for consumers if someday they can wire their home with a 5G connection, but when we’re talking about 2023, we’re not there yet. | | Reggie Rucker: | Let me go ahead and follow up on that point. You laid out this footprint, was there something that Charter was seeking to accomplish? Were they trying to move into territories where they didn’t have a footprint yet? What was the incentive that they were seeking, the advantage that they were seeking to gain by making this purchase of Time Warner, Brighthouse? | | Jon Schwantes: | A little bit of context in this industry, Comcast bought NBC Universal in 2010, 2011, and that was huge because they already were the largest cable company, but now they bought a huge broadcaster with all that contact. In it, I’ll just be honest and use some colorful language, scared the shit out of people. | | They’re going to have all this NBC universal content and they’re the largest cable company in the country and all these other cable companies and video providers are going to need that NBC content. Is Comcast going to put people over a barrel? It was a moment, but that merger was approved with conditions. Different story for a different podcast. | | Time Warner Cable was spun off of Time Warner in 2009. They were always corner of odd. They were a completely separate company, they never changed the name, people were kind of confused like is Time Warner Cable, Time Warner? I’m like no, it’s this new thing called Time Warner Cable. But you kind of got the feeling like are they in this for the long haul? | | They were the number two cable company in the country. They had 16 million customers, so it was this lucrative, kind of putting on my old Wall Street hat. A lucrative prize and who’s going to buy Time Warner Cable? As this happens, and I’m not an economist, I’m not a finance guy, I’m a lawyer in DC, but their stock prices going up. This is all great for shareholders or Time Warner Cable. | | Comcast took a shot at it, they gave it a run and they were going to acquire Time Warner Cable and was focused on the positive. That merger was shot down. Department of Justice, FCC said no. Number one and number two, typically in antitrust law, that’s a hard sell even in Washington. | | That Left Time Warner Cable like are there any other suitors and Charter came up and is like we would like it. Why? The simplest way I explain this is looking at restaurants and franchises. Let’s say I own three McDonald’s and let’s say it’s profitable. At the time, 2014, 2015 cable companies were super profitable. | | They had monopolies, they didn’t compete against each other, they had this broadband business, and on the video side, those margins were huge. So why have three McDonald’s when I can have 30? I think sometimes we overthink things in Washington, and especially in this policy space. It was about this is profitable and let’s gobble them up. That’s exactly what they did. They being Charter, made themselves four times bigger. | | I also think at the time, these cable companies, they’re very savvy, they’re savvy business people. They knew which way the wind was blowing. They knew that streaming video was starting to eat their lunch. What do we need more of? Where is the new monopoly? Broadband. If I could suddenly get more than 20 million broadband subscriptions, absolutely they wanted a larger footprint of a profitable business, and they also knew ha-ha, broadband monopoly, and I can get this, especially after Comcast got rejected, we’ll probably get this merger approved. And it was. | | Luke Gannon: | Jon, as you mentioned earlier, and you have throughout this podcast, there’s not one, but two federal agencies that were regulating this merger, the Federal Communications Commission and the DOJ. They mandated that Charter agree to seven years worth of conditions. | | Can you talk a little bit about what those conditions were and how this merger actually ended up going through? What was the government’s response? Why did it end up being okay? | | Jon Schwantes: | Antitrust law can get complicated. They look at markets and they look at market shares. They did acknowledge that Charter and Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse Networks didn’t compete head-to-head with each other. At antitrust, we look at horizontal mergers and vertical cultures. | | Horizontal, the classic example is if Coke bought Pepsi. You then would have no competition, you take number one and number two, soft drink and companies and all of that competition would go away because all of a sudden, now let’s say Coke has 99% of the software business in the United States, that would be a bad merger. | | But when you look at cable, it’s like they don’t really compete against each other. Comcast was scary because they just bought NBC Universal and again, number one and number two rarely ever get approved. But this was like there’s not really an antitrust concern. The FCC can look at things in a little softer lens because it’s not exactly a pure antitrust review at the FCC, it’s more of a public interest review, so they can extract some concessions out of the merging parties. | | I can tell you, having been on all sides of these transactions, they want to get to yes. So they agreed to, let’s see, the big ones from that one, no data caps. Yay, that’s fantastic. Data caps on the fixed broadband market are consumer killers and until at least for seven years, Charter wasn’t able to inflict them upon consumers. We’ve just had the anniversary, so let’s not get too excited. Those merger conditions have since expired, but there were no data caps. | | Comcast charges data caps, Cox Communications, big broadband cable company here in the Mid-Atlantic, they charge data caps and it’s really, really anti-consumer on the broadband side, just to be clear. Also, another great merger condition was no interconnection fees. | | Let’s get down the telecom rabbit hole, but basically Charter agreed that if we’re allowed to merge with Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse that we won’t inflict interconnection fees, meaning we won’t tell Netflix and we won’t tell Google, YouTube TV that you have to pay us to connect to our networks. | | There was a big dust up, I want to say 10 years ago, between Comcast and Netflix. Basically Comcast is like you pay us an interconnection fee or this merger condition was saying look, you can’t extract these anti-consumer things because there was a feeling of we knew consumers were cutting the cord, but the fear would… Big cable that controls broadband and they importantly still had that monopoly so a lot of consumers have nowhere else to go but get broadband from Charter. | | Would they charge so many fees against Netflix and other streaming videos to make it more expensive to then make their old school cable video cost competitive, which it rarely was at the time and still isn’t. They agreed to that. | | Another one, which I love in the book of did that merger condition happen? Your guess is as good as mine. Comcast agreed to expand their broadband business to 2 million new customers, 1 million being in markets where there already was competition. Now, I wish I could tell you I looked up to see if that merger condition was satisfied. I honestly do not know, and that is a great segue to the biggest problem with these merger conditions. | | Who enforces them and how do we know? Let’s say we found out they didn’t expand, they didn’t honor that. They [inaudible 00:20:09] data caps into connection fees. Great, but did they really expand their broadband for this? If we found out they didn’t, is the government really going to go back and break up Charter and Time Warner Cable? Short answer is no, they are not. | | Reggie Rucker: | I wanted to follow up, actually precisely on that. The government found their way to yes. Were groups like yours and other community advocacy groups, were you all satisfied with the terms that they laid out or was there a fight that continued to some degree? Tell us about what the response was there. | | Jon Schwantes: | Yeah, it’s not the best analogy. It’s like the game is over and you look at we won some, we lost some, but a lot of times people move on to the next one. I know at the time when Comcast announced their proposed merger to Time Warner Cable, remember they wanted to buy them first, immediately there was a public interest and industry coalition, and I want to say it had a real unoriginal name like Stop Mega Comcast. | | Consumer Reports was part of that coalition, a few other DC groups like Public Knowledge and Common Cause, but that was fun because some of the business rivals who were scared of big cable like Dish Network [inaudible 00:21:30] Coalition, if memory serves. That’s just your classic let’s do some media buys, not really so much for the nonprofits like ourselves, but a coordinated lobbying effort. | | You can file at the FCC, you can oppose a merger, for example. I once wrote a comment opposing the Sinclair Tribune merger and you just explained how all these fantastic reasons why the commission should find it’s not in the public interest. All a bunch of lawyer gobbley gook. That was the stop [inaudible 00:22:03] Comcast. That succeeded. The government stopped that merger and Comcast withdrew. | | Shortly a few months later it was like let’s get fired up because Charter’s trying to buy Time Warn Cable. I think the same Motley crew, including Consumer Reports, renamed it the Stop Mega Cable Coalition and much the same, let’s try to stop it, let’s get people fired up. But there was color commentary, a resignation of I don’t know if lightning’s going to strike twice here. We’re going to do it, we’re going to oppose it and raise a ruckus. | | Luke Gannon: | One of the things over this season that we’ve learned, Jon, is that these merging companies often make promises that never come to fruition. I was reading that Charter specifically claimed that the acquisition would allow it to improve its broadband network throughout the country leading to faster speeds and better video products. | | It has now been almost 10 years since this merger happened. Is that true? Were Charter’s claims true? How has this looked for communities across the US? | | Jon Schwantes: | Let’s look at some facts. 2016 compared to 2023, I’m happy to say that broadband speeds have increased by a significant amount. That is a good thing. Most consumers get broadband from a private company. Video, since the merger happened, costs for that video product have gone through the roof and what they do, they charge a broadcast TV fee, that is a broken part of the video marketplace by where cable pays broadcasters for their content and it is broken. | | All cable decided to do is we’re just going to break it out into a junk fee and we’re going to charge that fee to consumers because we can’t figure out this broken marketplace broadcasters. What started off in 2009, 2010 as a dollar or two, most consumers are like what’s this broadcast TV fee? Cable being cheeky about it, not really telling folks that they’re the ones charging it. Boy, it’s got a really good name right up there with the regional sports fees. These are all junk fees charged by the cable industry. | | It’s basically like if I decided, and we did a report on this a few years ago, if a serial company said The cost of cardboard is really expensive, we’re going to do a cardboard box fee and we’re just going to keep breaking that out, even though most people thought well, I never paid for the cardboard box. Shoot, I’ll just take the bag and you can keep your stupid box. | | In broadcast TV fee, those are now well over $20 and they’re mandatory. So for those poor consumers who are either uncomfortable cutting the cord or what have you, and that is not in the advertised price, so you’re like oh wow, broadband and cable for 90 bucks, that’s not much more than YouTube TV. | | I’m like, yeah, right. Wait until you pay the fees, you’re going to be paying close $150 a month. I would say that the video side of it has not been good for consumers, especially for those consumers who are stuck with just one provider and like I said, aren’t comfortable cutting the cord and maybe going with a virtual option. They’re paying more than ever for that old school cable video product. | | Reggie Rucker: | We’re going to spin this forward now. Put your genie hat on, get your crystal ball out. What do you think the future of this industry looks like? | | Jon Schwantes: | I just testified at a hill hearing in September where we looked at the future of the video marketplace and we went through it and it has totally changed. That is a good thing and that is because of broadband. Where I get a little antsy is what’s the future of broadband? Because so much of that competition in the video space is dependent upon broadband. | | As far as [inaudible 00:26:01] of the industry, some analysts will say the old school cable TV video product is in a death spiral, and the number suggests that. When this merger happened, they had 20 million, 25 million subscribers. Now they’ve lost 10 million in seven years. I don’t think a lot of those subscribers are coming back. It’s a pain in the butt for cable to keep doing video and having to deal with broadcasters. | | What maybe isn’t in the news stories is it’s not a very profitable line of business. They want to shift to broadband, which really isn’t regulated thanks to the repeal of net neutrality and subject of another podcast, but broadband’s where it’s at, baby. It’s unregulated, they can charge whatever they want, and by and large, until wireless catches up and becomes a true competitor, and hopefully that’s me being optimistic, it will, it’s getting there. But right now they’re still enjoying monopoly rents. | | As we talk about monopolies on the podcast here, that’s still one of the best ones going. Get into broadband, do it through a cable wire, and there are many towns where you’re the only game in town and you can charge whatever you want. | | Reggie Rucker: | The thing I was just curious about is I have Hulu and get my live TV through Hulu, and it feels like at this point, and I don’t even think I’m exaggerating, it feels like every three or four months, we’re going to add extra $5, we’re going to add extra $10, we’re going to… Two to three years ago, it’s probably about a $50 package and now it’s creeping up towards $100. | | There were some comments in our chat the other day that it was like it’s basically becoming cable. It’s all the channels wrapped up and it’s $100, $150. Do you have some insights, just your own commentary on what’s happening in that Hulu versus YouTube Live, versus… What’s your take on how these bundles are playing out? | | Jon Schwantes: | I do. There’s two giant things to consider here that help inform and answer this question. Number one, whether you are a streaming service like Hulu or YouTube TV or old school cable like Charter or Comcast, it’s for a lot of reasons, so expensive to get content from the content producers. Who are the content producers? They’re Disney, they own an ESPN, all the Disney channels, ABC. They’re CBS Viacom. | | That content, and a lot of it is driven by live sports is what we call must have content. It’s a free market negotiation, but it’s increasingly expensive because the content holders know that in order for Hulu to be successful and do a live-streaming service, they’re going to need to have the NFL games on in the fall. That content is getting expensive for all video distributors. | | The second thing is something unique to the streaming industry. This is everything from Netflix to Paramount+, to I think HBO is calling itself Max now, Disney+ and it is Hulu, which has Hulu live and YouTube TV. It’s very consumer friendly. I can sign up, pay for a month, watch my Packers lose and get irritated, and then cancel my subscription. I don’t have to return a set top box, I don’t have to talk to somebody on the phone for an hour, I just do it all online and I’m done. | | I think that’s great for consumers and all of our survey data at Consumer Reports shows that consumers are high on streaming, and one of it is their customer service is very consumer friendly. But it creates churn, churn and burn, whatever you want to call it, and it’s real. For as many customers as the streaming services signs up, they could lose the same within a month. | | We’re trying to figure out how do I make this sticky? How do I make it so a consumer subscribes, they got to stick around for three months. They do that by dripping out their episodes once a week. They do that by, and they know it’s going to hurt and they might lose more subscribers, increasing their prices. They’re getting it from both ends. The content holders are jacking up their prices and streaming is trying to figure out, we had a really bad investor call, we got to make more money, we got to increase prices. | | I think it will get resolved. I think it was really the subject… It’s also another fascinating subject, but what we see consolidation in streaming services, will we see what we’re seeing that they’re going to actually license their content to each other. What do I mean by that? | | Disney told Netflix a few years ago when they launched Disney+, screw you, we’re not going to share any more Marvel, any more Star Wars movies that’s only going to be on Disney+. If consumers want to watch all nine Star Wars movies, they’re going to have to come here. | | Most consumers are like fine, I’ll get it for a month, pay you seven bucks, watch all the movies and then cancel you. They’re figuring out like we actually do make money when we license that to Netflix, we do make money when we license that to Amazon Prime, and so I think we’re going to see that in the streaming industry. | | There are also bigger questions, bigger antitrust questions about are we going to keep tolerating these big content holders bundling all of their packaging? What do I mean by that? It doesn’t mean Charter goes to Disney and said we just want ESPN, don’t want ESPN2, we don’t want the Disney channels, just want ESPN. Disney’s like no, you’ve got to take all seven of our channels, or you know where the door is. | | More cutting edge sort of policy wonks in this space saying well what about wholesale bundling? Makes my head spin. But that would have to come from the government and having worked in politics, I don’t think it’s happening anytime soon. | | That’s where we’re at. It is really two main reasons and I don’t know how that’s going to get resolved. Other than that we encourage consumers to… Well, to your question, the cable replacement looks and feels like cable, like Hulu Live and YouTube TV. Those are cost pressures that are causing those increases. I think you mentioned it, you still also have to pay for a broadband connection. | | Reggie Rucker: | I wanted to close out with the last question that we ask all of our guests, which is to recommend a book that has influenced the way you think about your work, the way you go about living and living out your purpose. What is something that you would recommend to people who enjoyed this conversation and want to get deeper into the thinking behind it? | | Jon Schwantes: | I think for me, I would pan out a little bit and think about a book that I read more than 20 years ago that informs my work and the fight in these issues. That would be Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Now, it’s much broader in sweep, going all the way back to Columbus’s arrival on this continent more than 500 years ago, and it’s a little heavy-handed in parts and a little reductive in others. | | But by and large, what I think Professors Zinn does in that work is tell the untold part of the story. I think for me, realizing corporate power and consumer power and how this country is set up, and let’s just take broadband, it truly is for a lot of consumers, take it or leave it. You either pay $120 a month for broadband, or get out of here. And you don’t have broadband, which I think we all agree is a public utility and should be treated as such and should not be priced at whatever the broadband provider who has a monopoly wants to price it at. | | I think that book helps understand of like, no, no, no, no, no. There is more to the story and at the end of the day, as my former senator told me, and it helps inform, these are private companies. It is not a crime in this country to make a profit if you do so legally, but they’re not doing things by and large out of the goodness of their heart. They’re doing things to make money and increase their stock price and make their board happy. | | It’s not to make, not in all cases, make their consumers happy. Now, where there’s competition, absolutely you want to make your consumers happy because you need them to choose you instead of the other company. But when there’s no competition, that’s a problem and what I describe as the stuck consumer. You’re stuck, you’re in a take it or leave it proposition and in that scenario, the corporation has just about all the power. That book helped me and continues to help me understand that there’s more to the story. | | Reggie Rucker: | Thanks for this, Jon. This was really great. | | Luke Gannon: | Thank you so much, Jon. This was truly an enlightening episode. Now, if you are interested in Jon’s book recommendation A People’s History of the United States, ILSR has a book library through bookshop.org. | | Bookshop.org allows you to choose a local bookstore of your choice and gives them a share of the profit. It also helps nonprofits like ours. If you buy a book from our ILSR store, we will receive 10% of the proceeds. | | That’s right. If you can’t make a donation right now, but still just really want that book, please click on the show notes for this episode and buy the book at bookshop.org. Now I’ll pass it to my co-host who always brings me energy, Reggie Rocker. | | Reggie Rucker: | Thanks, Luke. Great work as always. Jon, thank you again for sharing your story and deep insights with us today. I enjoyed that conversation so much. Side note, Jon and his wife, I’m told get some credit for this, have impeccable fashion sense. I need to go shopping. | | Anyways, I hope you all enjoyed this episode as much as we did. If you’ve made it this far, I assume that means you did, so please share it with even just one person you think will enjoy it too. | | I keep talking about our goal of 10,000 listens, but it’s not just a number to us. You sharing this episode brings more people into this conversation that we must have as communities about what type of society we want to live in. | | Do we want to live in a society dominated by big corporations that have one interest, how deep they can line the pockets of their executives and shareholders? Or do we want to live in a society where communities, neighbors who are interested in seeing each other succeed and thrive because when my neighbor is winning with good schools, and job opportunities, and thriving businesses, and culture with stable infrastructure and a circular economy that preserves our planet for the future, that’s not just them winning. I win too. We all win. | | That’s the conversation we need more people involved in, and that’s why we need you to share this episode. If you’re not a subscriber to the podcast yet, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you know when every new episode drops. Of course, your donations are essential to help us keep this podcast going and support the research and resources that we make available on our website for free. We truly welcome and appreciate it all. | | Last, if you have feedback for us or want to share a story about how your community approaches this issue, send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. We’d love to share these on a special mailbag episode one day. We’ll keep an eye out. | | This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. This podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank. The music for this season is also composed by Andrew Frank. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSMusic Credit: Andrew Frank
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
The Permian Basin, the largest producing oil field in the United States, is located in Texas. JP Morgan is a major shareholder of the Permian Basin and in 2019, through its affiliate, Infrastructure Investment Fund (IIF), successfully acquired the El Paso Electric utility company. The utility is responsible for powering the city and operates three significant gas plants that convert fracked gas into electricity, and JP Morgan saw the acquisition of El Paso Electric as a lucrative opportunity to amplify their profits from the oil and gas industry.
Amanacer People’s Project saw it differently. They saw the proposed acquisition of El Paso Electric as a direct threat to climate justice. Despite unsuccessfully blocking the acquisition, Miguel Escoto from Amanacer is optimistic about the region’s prospects for transitioning to democratic control over our energy grid.
Related ResourcesAmanacer People’s Project: Amanecer People’s Project is a community advocacy and power building organization that aims to shift decision making power away from polluting elites and place it back in the hands of the community. Our goals as an organization are clean air, clean water, and community control of our resources.
Oilfield Witness: We are methane hunters. We use optical gas imaging technology to expose the dirty secrets of oil and gas. We leverage this intelligence to educate the public and policy makers to strengthen climate movements.
“Direct Democracy Climate Radio” podcast on El Paso: Three Part Educational Podcast on the Origin and Theory Behind the “El Paso Climate Charter”
“Murdering Our Stars” podcast on Texas oilfields: The Permian Basin is one of the worst climate polluting oil and gas basins in the world. Your host Miguel Escoto and certified thermographer Sharon Wilson take you on an in-depth tour of this climate bomb. In this special 8-part series podcast — through conversations with whistleblowers, thermographers, impacted community members, former oil workers and other experts — you’ll get up close and personal with this global threat brewing in Texas. A phenomenon so powerful, it murders stars.
Fatal Vapors: How Texas Oil & Gas Regulators Cause Avoidable Deaths: Report on sour gas lack of permitting.
Texas Agency Fails to Enforce Poison Gas Laws: Report on flaring lack of permitting.
September 2023 PC Letter to the Federal Reserve on JP MorganBook:
A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Thea Riofrancos, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen
Transcript
| Reggie: | Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker, and we’re continuing this season of How to Get Away With Merger by keeping with the conversation on corporate consolidation in the energy sector. Our last episode featured the story of a coalition able to block a bid from a multinational energy firm to buy the dominant local energy provider. Today’s story might not have quite as happy of an ending, but our guests will make as hopeful as ever. So hopeful in fact, we’re going to focus the full episode on just his story and how it intersects with the merger. To get into it, let me toss it over to my co-host, who I am very excited to play cribbage with later this week for the very first time. Luke Gannon. What’s up Luke? | | Luke: | Oh man, I am so excited to play cribbage. It’s really the perfect time of year for it and it’s also a perfect time of year for this episode, which so well details one of the biggest issues we face today, environmental destruction. Our guest on the show today both lays out where we are now, but also as we head into the new year, a path forward. Our guest today, Miguel Escoto, is one of the founders of Sunrise El Paso, which is now transitioning to Amanecer People’s Project, which is a community-led climate justice organization in El Paso, Texas that advocates, organizes and builds power around clean air, clean water, and democratic control. Miguel is also the organizing director of Oil Field Witness, where alongside his colleague Sharon Wilson, visits oil and gas shales to document emissions and share with the public and elected officials to support climate justice movements. But let’s start from the beginning. Here’s Miguel. | | Miguel: | My name is Miguel Escoto. I was born and raised here in El Paso, Texas, in the Borderland, both sides of the border. This is my hometown, my home community. Like many people here in the border, like many Fronterizos, I have deep ties to both sides of the border. A lot of my family is from Mexico, still there in Ciudad Juarez. Most of my childhood was in Ciudad Juarez. My parents and I would cross the border every morning very early so I could have an education in the US. And so that’s a pretty common experience here. Very, very porous and rich interconnected cultures. | | I moved from Juarez to El Paso permanently in around 2007 because of the increased violence from the drug war. And that was very impactful for me because I understood the privilege I had in being able to cross the border to flee for safety, essentially. And that is what led me to my first organizing experience in the world of immigration justice. I helped fundraise for two local immigration advocacy organizations here in El Paso, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and migrant service clinic run by the Catholic church here. So that was my first introduction into activism and organizing was through the issue of migrant justice. | | But eventually I understood how the climate crisis was connected to the immigration justice issue because I would witness and learn and read about how a lot of what drives immigration and refugees in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, is an increased change in climate, right? Rising sea levels, hotter climates, increased floods is what is leading to a lot of climate refugees. So I sort of turned my focus to immigration to climate justice, and that led me to understand how El Paso in West Texas plays a very important factor in the global climate crisis because of the Texas oil fields, especially the Permian Basin, which is a huge, huge part of the global problem of climate change. | | Luke: | Texas is at the epicenter of the global climate crisis, but Miguel and the Amanecer People’s Project view it as a promising opportunity to demonstrate the potential of transitioning to green energy. Let’s dive into the interview. Can you tell us a little bit about what the energy industry looks like in Texas? Who are the big players? How much of the market do they control? | | Miguel: | So unfortunately, oil and gas reigns in Texas. Texas has some of the worst oil and gas shales in the world. One of them is the Permian Basin, which is in west Texas and southeast New Mexico. The Permian is the number one source of climate emissions on the planet according to data from Climate TRACE Map. It produces an extreme amount of oil and gas every day. Currently, the Permian is producing more than 5 million barrels of oil per day, and that number is expected to increase to 10 million barrels of oil per day by 2030. This is just contradictory to every scientific recommendation regarding fixing the climate crisis. The science is telling us that we need to stop production, stop drilling new wells, stop new fracking, but the exact opposite is happening in the Permian and in Texas in general. There’s also the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas, which is producing over 1 million barrels of oil per day. | | So it’s like the evil little brother of the Permian Basin is the Eagle Ford. There’s also the Barnett Shale, the Haynesville Shale. So overall there are more than 275,000 active oil and gas wells in Texas, and there is just an extreme amount of production, which is a problem because of the current era of climate crisis that we’re living in. It’s also a problem that the state government overwhelmingly protects fossil fuel profits at the expense of the health of Texans and the environment as a whole. The Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil and gas, not railroads, aim to inspect facilities once every five years, so that is woefully inadequate. That means there’s only one inspector for every 1,600 oil and gas facilities. That’s just unmanageable. It’s effectively unregulated in the Permian. There’s also flaring, which is a process related to oil and gas production, which is largely inevitable by the oil and gas industry, but this is where excess gas needs to exit the production system. | | And in the process is, the process of flaring combusts this gas so that it emits less, but generally flaring is also unpermitted and unmanaged by the Texas regulatory system. A study by Earthworks, which was done by Jack McDonald and Sharon Wilson, demonstrates that 69 to 84% of flares do not have the necessary permits in order for them to flare. So it’s going largely unregulated and unknown by the industry. There’s a big emergency here in Texas in that we have an extreme amount of production and we have a government that refuses to regulate the industry to protect its residents, its workers and the environment. | | Reggie: | Okay, so having laid that out, can you sort of provide us the context for where El Paso Electric fits into the industry and in doing so, help us to understand why Infrastructure Investment Fund, which is associated with JP Morgan Chase, why they were interested in acquiring El Paso Electric. | | Miguel: | El Paso is in far west Texas. It is a couple of hours drive from the Permian Basin, and it is economically and culturally connected to this oil field. Culturally, it’s connected because a lot of the oil and gas workers that are extracting oil and gas in the Permian are from El Paso or grew up here, are working the fields because that is what is economically available in this community. It is economically also connected because the utility that runs the El Paso service area, El Paso Electric, is physically hooked up to the Permian Basin. So El Paso is the 10th sunniest city in the entire world, and it only uses 5% renewable energy in its grid, which is a big squandered opportunity that has a very clear explanation. El Paso Electric utility is an anomaly, and even in Texas it is both a monopoly and a privatized company. So in other cities in Texas, it’s either one or the other. | | This means that El Paso Electric as a private company that has a monopoly over its customer base as a incentive to cut business deals with the fossil fuel industry right on their doorstep, including the largest and most active oil and gas well, oil and gas shale in the world, right? That is why even before infrastructure investment funder JP Morgan got involved, El Paso Electric was hooked up to the Permian. They run three major gas plants, Newman, Montana Vista and Rio Grande that power the city by receiving fracked gas from the Permian and converting it into electricity. | | This is a process that emits a lot of pollution to the climate like CO2, but also emissions that hurt and harm our respiratory health, like particulate matter, volatile organic compounds, and that’s why El Paso is the 13th worst polluted city in the country when it comes to ozone and why a lot of this community has asthma. So this horrible hellscape of fossil fuel production and pollution is what attracted JP Morgan Chase. In 2019, they started their lobbying to have the city government approve their acquisition of El Paso Electric. JP Morgan Chase is one of the largest shareholders and profiteers of the Permian base in oil and gas shale. They directly invest in drilling companies such as Diamondback Energy. JP Morgan is currently the seventh-largest investor of this company, just as an example. | | So they are profiting from the production of oil and gas, and they wanted to profit from the consumption of this gas directly in a utility scale, oil and gas and Permian Basin, not withstanding, El Paso Electric is a very profitable business. They have a revenue of around $800 million, gross profits of upwards of $353 million per year because they have a very sweet deal of being privatized and having a monopoly, which is a problem when it comes to what should be a public good, like electricity, the way roads, schools, fire departments, education should be a public good, electricity should also be a public good. But we have this very oppressive system here in El Paso where a private company has control over it. This is what really attracted JP Morgan to buy out El Paso Electric. | | Luke: | In 2019, you said that JP Morgan and Infrastructure Investment Fund started lobbying. Can you talk a little bit about what that lobbying looked like and then get into the public response to it, the opposition to it, and how that played out? | | Miguel: | JP Morgan Chase representatives and lobbyists and lobbyists from Infrastructure Investment Fund, they ran a full campaign to convince the city council, the elected representatives of the municipal government to approve the merger. It was something that was ultimately in the hands of elected officials. Their first tactic was to lie to the elected officials and to the public by saying fundamental myths, lies. One of them was that Infrastructure Investment Fund had no connection to JP Morgan Chase, that they weren’t owned by JP Morgan. This was something that has been disproven thoroughly, even at a federal level now with the research hard work of Tyson Slocum, for example. The second one was to convince the unelected bureaucrats in the municipal governments, including the city manager and the city attorney, that in fact El Paso had no say over this. They tried to convince the elected officials that this was not up to them. | | This is just something that is going to happen between two corporations, the government should not be involved. Which is, again, a lie because they needed a vote by city council in order for this to go through. So Sunrise El Paso led a organized resistance to prevent this, and this included going to city council meetings to pressure our elected officials. We would stage direct actions. We held community meetings to inform the public about what was happening, and we created a pretty powerful movement that led to this being a discussion at least. And so ultimately, unfortunately, the city council did vote in favor of this buyout five to four. So it was a very close fight. We at least pulled back the veil, pulled back the curtain to educate a lot of the public about what was happening and why our electric grid is something that belongs to us, should belong to us instead of private corporations connected to fossil fuel production and pollution in the Permian Basin. | | Reggie: | This is my first time hearing of a merger that could be stopped by a city council. Is there something that unique about the way that Texas utilities operate, where there is that local government say in whether or not this merger can happen? Can you explain that a little bit more? | | Miguel: | This is a very special case because under the franchise agreement that allowed the utility to be privatized and monopolized, there was part of that contract was to give city council some sort of say when something this big happened. And unfortunately in this incredible moment of leverage, the city refused to negotiate against the utility to give us more guaranteed rate reductions or have them commit to more renewable energy, et cetera. But that incident taught us that within the city government, there is a lot of protectionism and defending of El Paso Electric. That’s not how government should work. The government is not meant to serve the interests of a private company at the expense of the public. It should be the other way around. | | Reggie: | Absolutely. Absolutely. Acquisition only happened a few years ago, so maybe it’s too early to tell, but are there ways in which you’re already starting to see this acquisition play out, presumably to the detriment of El Paso residents and the community there? | | Miguel: | Very shortly after the buyout was approved, our nightmares and our fears were made reality. Right during the campaign, we kept warning that if JP Morgan had control over the utility, they would only further their commitment to fossil fuel production instead of renewables. And that is a thousand percent what happened. Only months after the buyout, the utility announced the permit application for the project known as Newman 6. This would be adding a massive 228 megawatt turbine to the existing Newman generating station. This gas plant is located in Northeast El Paso and very near a marginalized, largely Spanish-speaking immigration, mixed status, low income community chaparral. | | And so very shortly after the buyout, we knew that they were doubling down on their commitment to fossil fuels. This project that they wanted permits for would cost the El Paso electric rate payer $163 million. It would massively increase pollution. For example, it would bring the station’s CO2 emissions to 1.3 million tons per year, which is again unacceptable in this era of climate crisis. So Sunrise El Paso, Amanecer People’s Project strongly and passionately fought against this permit as well. We organized to pressure our state and municipal elected officials to reject this. We eventually organized alongside with the frontline community members of chaparral. We were able to challenge the permit at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, and we won enough leverage to get some concessions from El Paso Electric. The state government regulatory system is not designed to prevent fossil fuel companies from getting their permits like this, but it did. | | It was a victory in the sense that we won a lot of concessions because of our fight. We won a legal commitment to never expand that specific gas plant ever again. We won a four-year moratorium on any new fossil fuel projects. This is very important because El Paso Electric was already planning on a Newman 7 and a Newman 8. They just wanted to continue building out more gas instead of renewables, and we won a 40% reduction of CO2 emissions and ozone forming nitrous oxide pollution. So we reduced the pollution 40% than otherwise would’ve been occurring, and that was an important fight for us. But unfortunately, their own business plans demonstrate that they still want to add more megawatt production and fossil fuel capacity into the future and decades to come. For example, they’re planning a 88 megawatt gas fired generation in 2032. They want to add another gas fired unit of 52 megawatts in 2034. | | They want to add another 80 megawatt unit in 2038 and another 54 megawatt combustion turbine in 2040. So this is just unacceptable. It is unacceptable for them to do this. It is a attack on our climate. It is an attack on our lungs, and it is something that at Amanecer People’s project, we will work very hard. We will build enough power to prevent this from happening. These turbines, they are designed to last 40 years, and if we continue to build more fossil fuels, it is game over for the planet and for humanity. So we’re not going to allow that to happen. | | Luke: | I know the fighting process is so much of the battle and it can be hard spending time dreaming, but what would El Paso’s energy future look like if it was up to Amanecer People’s Project? | | Miguel: | Our main message and main goals are clean water, clean air, and democratic power over our resources, including our electric grid. Our vision is for our electricity to be something that’s run as a public good instead of a private profit. And we want to build enough power to where our electric grid works for us instead of JP Morgan shareholders. And the positive aspect, the great silver lining, is that there is wild solar potential in Texas, especially here in the southwest. Like I said, we’re the 10th sunniest city in the planet and we only have 5% renewable energy. We could turn that around in a matter of a couple of years. We could experience and win a massive boom of solar production, renewable production, and clean energy and green jobs, right? This would ultimately be a massive job creator in our region. So that’s our vision that, it’s not economic prosperity at the expense of environmental health. They’re actually the same destiny. We can win both a clean, renewable future and an economy that works for the 99% of us. | | Luke: | Before we jump into our final book question, I wanted to follow up with some additional information Miguel sent me. Just last month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission came out about the ties between Infrastructure Investment Fund and JP Morgan. A public comment letter to the Federal Reserve stated that this relationship, quote, undermines any potential for independence between the two entities. At least for El Paso, this was a little too late. Find out more about this in the show notes. All right, back to the interview. | | Reggie: | Is there a book that you would recommend to the listeners so that they could dive deeper into the issue and get a better sense of what you all are working on? | | Miguel: | One really good book that I recommend is A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff and other journalists and scholars. They provide a really good analysis for how we can transition to renewable energy in a way that supports the economy of the 99%. And they specifically talk about energy democracy. They bring up the notorious PG&E in California. But this is a great analysis that hasn’t informed a lot of what we do here in El Paso. And as of yet, we don’t have books written about what we do here in El Paso but we do have a few podcast series that we’ve produced to share our story. | | One of them is a three-part podcast series that is called, Direct Climate Democracy Radio. Direct Climate Democracy Radio, it tells the story of how we fought the JP Morgan buyout, how we fought the Newman 6 gas plant, and how that led to the creation of a ballot initiative called the El Paso Climate Charter, which was a climate action plan for the local city governments to take bold action against the utility to begin the process of transitioning the utility to public ownership. | | That podcast series as well as another eight part podcast series on Texas oil fields called, Murdering Our Stars. And that’s again, a deep dive into Texas oil fields, the situation in the Permian Basin when it comes to radioactive waste, climate pollution, oil and gas worker, dangers on the job, et cetera. Those would be my recommendations. Thank you all for covering this. | | Reggie: | What a great story. Thank you, Miguel. And thanks to all of you for listening all the way to the end. I assume that means you like this episode, so please share with even just one person you think will enjoy it too. We have a goal of 10,000 listens for this episode, so help us get there. And if you’re not a subscriber to the podcast yet, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you know when every new episode drops. And of course, your donations are essential to help us keep this podcast going and support the research and resources that we make available on our website for free. | | We truly welcome and appreciate it all. And last, if you have feedback for us or want to share a story about how your community approaches this issue, send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. We’d love to share these on a special mail back episode one day. We’ll definitely keep an eye out. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. This podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank. The music for this season is also composed by Andrew Frank. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSMusic Credit: Andrew Frank
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
In 2020, Avangrid, backed by its parent company, Iberdrola, filed their case to buy Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM). Over the next three years, Mariel Nanasi of the New Energy Economy fought alongside allies to prevent the acquisition, showcasing the company’s appalling track record and arguing that the acquisition would increase rates, escalate dysfunctional customer service, and harm the environment. Just last month, the case made it to the New Mexico Supreme Court. Krystal Curley, the Executive Director at Indigenous Lifeways, shares with us her concerns about monopoly utility companies exacerbating environmental and social injustices, emphasizing the need to protect sacred sites and natural resources.
Related ResourcesNew Energy Economy
New Report from New Mexicans Against Avangrid Details Scathing New Information About the Company
New Energy Economy’s Answer Brief
Brown University Report: Opposition to key climate legislation is concentrated in several sectors: Electric/Gas Utilities, Heating Oil and Alternative Fuels, Business Association or Economic Councils, the Auto industry, Fossil Fuels, and Real Estate. Of these, the utility, business association, and fossil fuel sectors had the most engaged individual organizations: AVANGRID/UIL Holdings, CT Business and Industry Association, CT Petroleum Council, and Eversource Energy submitted more than 10 positions each in opposition to priority climate positions, more than double any other actor.
I’m Out by Harry Gantz
Democracy Now with Naomi Klein
Bryan Stevenson: Finding the Courage for What’s Redemptive & Beyond Colonial Histories: Transatlantic Slave Trade
The American Indian Movement
What Oppenheimer Left Out on The Red Nation Podcast
Books:
Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions by Denise Fairchild
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker. And on this episode of this season we’re calling How to Get Away With Merger, we move away from mergers and acquisitions in the waste industry, but stay on the topic of how corporate consolidation hurts our ability to preserve our land and our planet for the strength of our communities today and the health of communities tomorrow. We’re going to talk energy utilities, and to get into it, let me throw it over to my co-host, who is pure sunshine and the wind in building local power sails, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Aw, thank you so much, Reggie. You are too sweet. Avangrid, backed by its parent company, Iberdrola, tried to buy Public Service Company of New Mexico, known locally as PNM. But let’s jump right into the interview. | | Mariel Nanasi is the executive director of the New Energy Economy in New Mexico. The New Energy Economy strives to build a renewable energy future for our collective health and environment. In 2021, New Mexicans said no to Avangrid buying PNM, but Avangrid didn’t take no for an answer and appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court. Just last month, Mariel argued against the merger, and today we have the pleasure of having her on the show to hear exactly what is happening. So thank you so much for joining us, Mariel. | | Mariel Nanasi: | Thank you for having me. | | Luke Gannon: | I want to start off by taking a step back and looking at what the energy industry looks like in New Mexico as a whole. So can you tell us who are the big players and how much of the market do they control? | | Mariel Nanasi: | So PNM is called Public Service Company of New Mexico. They are the largest electric monopoly in New Mexico and they have about 530,000 customers. There’s only two million people in New Mexico, and PNM serves about 72%, I think, of the entire New Mexico market. There’s a number of small electric co-ops that are mostly in the rural areas, and then there are two other electric monopolies, El Paso Electric in the southern portion of our state, and also Southwest Public Service that has an even smaller monopoly, but both the other IOUs, investor-owned utilities, are also monopoly utilities. | | Reggie Rucker: | And then so, Mariel, can you jump into what was it about the makeup of the market, the interest of the players that had Iberdrola and Avangrid interested in wanting to merge with PNM? What were they looking to accomplish? | | Mariel Nanasi: | So let me just say that Avangrid is a 30-something billion dollar company in the United States and has multiple subsidiary monopoly utilities, including gas and electric utilities. Iberdrola is its parent, and Iberdrola owns 81.5% of Avangrid, and Iberdrola is like a 136 billion dollar company, and it’s a worldwide company with most investments in gas and nuclear and then wind. Avangrid is looking to expand the market in the United States, in particular in the west. | | Basically, what happened was is there was a cap on the profits, if you can imagine that, in Spain, where Iberdrola is dominant. And so it was looking to expand its financial portfolio. They have had a history, Iberdrola has, of being kicked out of a couple of Central American and South American countries, and just sold off a big portion of their Mexican interests. And so they had a bunch of cash and they wanted to spend it and try to, what they said, literally what they were calling, to form a beachhead, which is a military term from where you land and then you further attack. And that’s what the CEO testified to when he was testifying at the merger proceedings when they attempted to merge with PNM, and New Energy Economy led the opposition to that merger. | | Luke Gannon: | I do want to get a little bit more background on this. You said Avangrid is looking to expand the market in the U.S., and they have already tried doing that on the eastern part of the United States in Maine. So can you give us a little background into some of these states that they have tried to expand in, and why that has helped guide your research and your fight against them in New Mexico? | | Mariel Nanasi: | Yeah, so just like a college admission person looks at the grades that you have when you’re in high school, or a landlord looks at a tenant’s past history, or when you’re buying a car you look under the hood, we start to dig into the past background, the track record essentially, of Avangrid in Maine, where it owns Central Maine Power; in Connecticut, where it owns United Illuminating; in New York, where it owns two electric and gas utilities. And what we found was that their history was atrocious. | | An electric utility has to do two primary things. One is provide electricity, the second is bill customers for it, and they failed on both. And so the outage record, the blackouts, the brownouts, the billing: atrocities, atrocities. They called it in New York a billing crisis. Have you ever seen 32 legislators in New York rally, actually perform a demonstration, when Avangrid asked for its latest rate increase there in New York? And then the governors of Maine and New York in particular have really spoken out against the track record of Avangrid and its subsidiary utilities, and used words like, “Their performance was abysmal,” the governor of Maine called it. | | So we had a lot to go on. And really there was this scathing audit that happened that was concluded and filed in the main docket, in the regulatory docket, about one month before our hearing. It detailed the malfeasance and incompetencies of Avangrid, and said that they were more interested in shareholder profits than they were in performing basic services. And so that was a very important and influential report, because first of all, it was 130 pages, and as I said, it gave a methodical… It was an audit. A woman in a mobile home got a $1,300 electric bill, which is crazy. And then when they tried to call customer service to complain about it, it took them three years to fix the billing problems. And people would be waiting on the phone for hours and hours and would never get their bills corrected. And anyway, there’s a class action lawsuit pending as a result of that billing debacle in Maine, let alone the billing crisis in New York. | | So this is not the kind of company that we wanted to come. We want to transition as quickly as possible from fossil fuels to renewables, which in New Mexico we have an abundance of solar and wind, and Avangrid’s track record in that department is also not good. They have a great PR firm, which has three beautiful little leaves on it as their logo. But the fact of the matter is they have 2% solar in their entire portfolio. They support hydrogen, which we’re opposed to, and they support nuclear, which we’re also opposed to, and they support gas. And then also, they have so much money that they undermine the democratic process by investing heavily in PACs, political action committees, that undermine the democratic process. | | They’ve invested in other kinds of associations like Edison Electric Institute and other gas associations that work to undermine climate legislation in Connecticut, in other places. There was a Brown University report that was done about the companies and the agencies that are hired by those companies and that deny climate or work hard to postpone climate legislation or water it down, and they found that Avangrid was one of the top offenders. | | There is basically no reason that we want Avangrid to come and merge with PNM, so that’s why we fought it. And against all odds, we won. It was a huge David and Goliath fight, but we won in front of the hearing examiner. We won in front of a bipartisan, unanimous public regulation commission in huge victory, and then they appealed, and we just defended our victory before the New Mexico Supreme Court. | | Luke Gannon: | Can you walk us through the dates of when this is all happening? | | Mariel Nanasi: | So they filed their case in November of 2020. The hearing on the merger was in August of 2021. The decision to deny the merger was in December of 2021. Avangrid and PNM and Iberdrola jointly appeal to the New Mexico Supreme Court a month later in January 2022. And last month, I argued to defend the victory on appeal in the New Mexico Supreme Court. So sometime, I imagine that somewhere in November or December, but maybe January, we will hear a decision from the New Mexico Supreme Court. | | Luke Gannon: | In this three-year span, there has been a lot of organized opposition from the public. This season is called How to Get Away With Merger. It’s about a lot of these mergers that go through. This is actually our first that hopefully doesn’t. So can you talk about what were the strategies that you all used? How did you do this? | | Mariel Nanasi: | Well, first of all, every single day I worked about 12 hours for about eight months. But I had a great team, and also we had a multi-layered strategy. So there was a political strategy, there was a legal strategy, there’s a communication strategy, and it was a sort of no stone left unturned kind of effort. There was a lot of grassroots efforts. This was, in particular, a really a bad idea because of Avangrid’s track record. | | We had a lot of material to work with. We put up a really good legal fight. I didn’t lose a single motion during the entire case, and we fought really hard. Plus there was this pending criminal case against the CEO of Iberdrola in Spain for forgery and bribery and for following environmentalists for opposing their gas plant that they were proposing. They had so much money. They gave so much money to Michelle Lujan Grisham, who’s the governor of New Mexico. They definitely spread the wealth around to try to buy their way in. And we just got lucky with a courageous administrative law judge, who wrote a spectacular 450-page recommended decision recommending against the merger. But we also, we laid out the facts, so we did a good job in that way. | | And the other thing is they wanted to consolidate the market, and they said so. They said, “We want to create a beachhead and consolidate the market.” We don’t need a consolidation of the market. That wouldn’t be a good thing for New Mexico. We want a robust renewable energy competitive market. And so we want to move away from the monopoly stranglehold and really open up the market. | | Luke Gannon: | You’ve spoken about it a little bit, but this visioning question on what would this mean for communities? What would this mean for New Mexicans across the state if it’s blocked? How would this restore a just energy future? | | Mariel Nanasi: | I’ve alluded to some of the shenanigans that Avangrid has been involved in in other places, you know, funding of PACs and big campaign political contributions, which I think that they doubled from ’20 to ’21 or ’21 to ’22. But that’s where they’re going. That’s who they are. And we know what the result of that is. That’s how we’re at this crisis of climate, which is the undermining of democracy. And we see that the United States Congress and we see that in our states. We see that in Ohio and Illinois with campaign contributions to bail out utilities for the terrible decision-making that they’ve engaged in, whether it’s nuclear or coal. | | And this would put that on steroids, because PNM, frankly, does all that stuff, but they don’t do a lot of it. They’re like minor leagues, but Avangrid and Iberdrola have so much money and so much access to cash, like they pay for their awards. You know what I mean? And then they go and say, “Oh, we’re an ethical company because we’ve actually paid for an ethical award.” You know, like crazy stuff, right? But they just do it and do and do it. And then we’re, as grassroots activists, and we’re trying to dig up the truth about all of this stuff. So it would make it much more difficult if they were here. | | But we want to move away from a monopoly, electric monopolies. We want to move towards public power, and we want to have more choices like community solar, and we want to have, and of course, get more access for low income folks to have solar on their roofs, because that’s really about building self-sufficiency, right? And so we want to move in the exact opposite direction and create more democracy, more energy democracy. That’s why we fought them, and that’s what we’re hoping to invest in, and invest in our communities, people-powered solar and locally owned solar. | | Reggie Rucker: | It’s great you exude passion and energy and a lot of strategic smarts about this work and how to succeed in this work. So the question is, is there a book that you would recommend to folks out there who are interested in this issue, who are concerned about utility monopolies and corporate control over the necessary infrastructure? | | Mariel Nanasi: | Well, I have to say that first of all, I think that all issues are connected, and so race and class and energy and democracy, all of these things are interwoven. So I’m just going to tell you my favorite people. Bryan Stevenson from Equality Justice, and sometimes when I’m down, I just listen to him because I used to be a criminal defense lawyer, and he defends people who are on death row and innocent people as well as not. And so I love him and respect him and find him motivational and just really has the North Star for justice. So that’s somebody who I love. | | Naomi Klein is another person I love. I’m going to get her new book, Doppelganger. I saw the interview on Democracy Now with her about that, and I’m fascinated. Because we are living in very dark times, and there is a growth of fascism and we have to take that extraordinarily seriously. And basically what she’s saying is you can’t look away. And so I think that that is super important right now for us. And then in terms of just energy, there’s a book called Energy Democracy, which I would say is kind of like a bible, and it’s about the liberation of people from the energy monopolies and their enormous control. | | This reporter said to me, “Why do you keep fighting Mariel? You know you’re going to lose. Money’s going to win, and they just have all the money.” I just said, “Well, if that’s what happens, it happens, but I’m going to speak the truth and I’m going to tell people like it is.” And then look, we won. If you give up, you already have lost, right? The only chance is if we fight back. And so we’ve got to use our talents to do so, and then we have a chance. We have a chance. And love and family and the Earth is worth fighting for. | | Luke Gannon: | Once again, a big thanks to Mariel Nanasi at New Energy Economy for joining us on the show today. Please find all of the resources that Mariel mentioned in the show notes. | | On the second half of today’s episode, we are hearing from Krystal Curley, the executive director of Indigenous Lifeways and a member of Public Power New Mexico. But before we jump into that, I’m going to pass it to my co-host, who lights up all of my days, Reggie Rucker. Over to you, Reggie. | | Reggie Rucker: | Thank you, Luke. So look, I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I consider myself to be optimistic about our prospects for the future, but every time I get to hear someone like Mariel share her story, and Krystal, who’s coming up next, share hers, I’m reminded why this isn’t just a naive optimism of fanciful hope. I know these corporate powers have the big money, the connections and the influence, but they don’t have Mariel, they don’t have Krystal. And that’s where my optimism comes from. And from talking with these folks, I know what they need is our optimism, our belief in them and in us. It fuels their work. It gives them the energy and the motivation to continue, which is why we need to build the army of people who believe, who have hope, to fuel the folks who are making a difference in their communities, for all communities. | | And you can help build this army by sharing this episode with some folks who care about this work and just need a bit of optimism to know we can and will win these fights. So if you’ll forget later, pause this episode, share it with the first couple of folks who come to mind, and then come right back, as Luke takes you through another powerful story. Stick around. | | Luke Gannon: | On the second half of today’s show, Krystal Curley emphasizes how Mother Earth has provided us with everything to sustain our lives. In return, we must take care of her. She underlines the harms that large utility companies have on people and the land. But let’s start from the beginning of her story. Here’s Krystal. | | Krystal Curley: | My name is Krystal Curley [Native American 00:20:58], and I’m from a place called [Native American 00:21:06]. It’s about 20 miles south of Gallup, New Mexico, and headed towards Zuni Pueblo, so I like to say I have best of both worlds living on my ancestral homelands. I think when I speak about my clans, I’m Towering House and born for the Red House clan. My [Native American 00:21:33], my paternal grandfathers, are The One Who Walks Around. And then my maternal grandparents are the Mexican People clan. And so I feel like my clans have a lot to do with my upbringing. For two of my clans, they’re one of the original four clans. And so with that, you have a lot of obligations, and I think it’s just a natural way of being in leadership. | | I really like to recognize the matriarchs that have raised me. My grandmother, she was their… I believe… Well, I know. Well, the one that I know personally, but I know my ancestors have really just paved the path for me, but my grandmother, my mom’s mom, she has just been very influential in the social justice movement. When she was about 23, she didn’t know that much English. And this was 1940s, and she went to the Bay Area and she lived majority of her life until she had Alzheimer’s, she had to move back. | | But when she started living there, she started learning English from our African American relatives, and they started figuring out and recognizing our struggles out on the reservation where my grandma’s from. And they really encouraged my grandma to speak out. We didn’t have running water or electricity, and so they really encouraged my grandma to go home and start a petition. And so my mom helped with that petition. We finally got running water. My mom also was right under the wing of my grandma. So my mom was able to be at Alcatraz takeover when Martin Luther King was assassinated. My grandmother marched along with her sisters and recognized the urgency for social justice, civil rights. And so that was very instilled into my mother. | | My father as well. He had a wild upbringing. He is a residential school survivor, boarding school survivor, and so the church really took him over. But what saved my mom and my dad’s life was the American Indian Movement. That brought my parents together, and so I like to say that I’m an AIM baby because that’s the lens and that’s the perspective that I was raised in. So I was raised going to Mother Earth gatherings, going to different gatherings just as an infant. I was at the Dilkon first gathering for indigenous environmental network gathering. I was just a baby. And so my mom tells all these stories. And so that’s how I was raised, just going to these big gatherings just as elementary school student. One of my first real intense marches was at a demonstration against the Los Alamos test site laboratories in Los Alamos. I was only eight-years-old, but I was able to see our people, like Wes Studi and other supporters, get arrested that day. And so I’ve just really have recognized and know the impacts of colonization, of capitalism. | | How we got into the environmental justice movement is when we got water, they never tested our water for any kind of contamination. So there were low level amounts of uranium inside of our water. So from that experience, there was a lot of health impacts from that in my community. And so my mom got into the uranium awareness education and really advocating against uranium mining and development extraction. And so the Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum is how Indigenous Lifeways grew out of that initiative over 30 years ago. | | And so for Indigenous Lifeways, I’m the executive director for, that’s where our work is based out of, is that work from doing uranium forums locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally with other indigenous frontline communities across the world that have been impacted against environmental racism. | | Luke Gannon: | Krystal is the executive director of Indigenous Lifeways, an organization that began its journey three decades ago with the Southwest Indigenous Uranium Forum. Over the years, Indigenous Lifeways has expanded its mission to address the global impact of environmental racism on indigenous communities. | | Krystal Curley: | Our work really stems from is really advocating and bringing awareness education to our communities about the different impacts of extraction, going beyond just uranium. But we have 140 years of extraction from coal industry first. There’s the railroad, there’s oil and gas now, there’s fracking. Now there’s hydrogen. And my community is made up of nearly 80% indigenous identifying folks. So that really paints a picture of where I’m from and the impacts of these extraction industry. My family likes to call them war criminals, the energy war criminals, these types of industry. | | And so we know the tactics that they use, how they mislead us, the propaganda that is used, the millions of dollars that’s funneled to propaganda greenwashing. So how it funnels down to us, it’s the same tactics that they use for coal. It’s economic development, it’s jobs. It’s: “We’re going to bring in all this funding and your family is going to be able to buy a house and vehicles.” And when you’re talking to a community that doesn’t have that, we really have a lot of impacts on housing, transportation issues. I mean, the list can go on. | | But yeah, what sustains us and sustains the movement of our work is ceremony and recognizing sacred sites, recognizing our traditional stories around these elements that we’re protecting of water, of our land, the plants, the animals, the microorganisms, the air, even the fire that’s within Mother Earth. That’s what we’re trying to protect. | | Luke Gannon: | Indigenous Lifeways and the New Energy Economy have had a longstanding relationship with the commitment to put electricity back into the hands of the people. Mariel helped inform ally organizations about the Avangrid and PNM merger, including Indigenous Lifeways. | | Krystal Curley: | The very sneaky ways that these utility companies are able to mislead our communities. We know PNM isn’t for the people. We know these utility companies are just in it for themselves and wanting to make money. We know PNM and a lot of these places where they get power from is in our homelands in the Four Corners. And so it’s not surprising, unfortunately, that PNM would consider doing these types of mergers with Avangrid that doesn’t have a… It just has a laundry list of crimes that they’ve done against people. Really just misled not just our communities not just in New Mexico, not just on with the Navajo Nation, but it’s across the world. These multimillion billion dollar companies that have the capacity to mislead and hire people to greenwash advertisement to they have… There’s these scientists, and they’re misleading data to prove their points. But when we’re really able to expose these data, expose their financial schemes for climate change, and what we’re trying to do is just expose the fault solutions that they’re wanting to promote in this time. | | So I’m also a PNM consumer. They don’t tell consumers about these types of mergers or tell them the effects of it, what the long-term implications are for these contracts that they’re doing. And when we’re not given the chance to choose or know where our power comes from, that really displaces our people and our opportunities to really do a good job at phasing out fossil fuels, even in our own use. | | So when our opportunities are limited from these utilities and they’re misleading us, telling us that hydrogen’s the way or clean nuclear or clean coal’s the way, then this is where it really causes a problem and misleads our tribal government, our local leaders, our organizers, and it causes a divide in our people on what’s really the truth and what are we really protecting. | | Luke Gannon: | These large utility companies like Avangrid are extracting power, natural resources, and wealth from communities. Krystal envisions a world where there is a restored connection between people and the land. | | Krystal Curley: | For me, bringing back the connection to the natural world for all people. What severed that connection is colonization and capitalism. That’s what it’s based off of for thousands of years. And so for us as just mere human beings from all over the world, we’ve had this natural connection. We know the powers of the air, the wind, the earth, the fire. We know the powers of prayer. We know the powers of sacred sites all over the world. Everybody has this connection, this universal celestial knowledge of that connection to that natural world and being a natural human being. My hopes is that we continue to be in alignment with all of the things that are around us, and that this movement continues to bring out those values of humans universal all over the world. We’re all at one point are indigenous. We just have to bring it out. We all have those roots, you know, talking about Chaco, talking about Stonehenge, the pyramids from all over the world. These are the sacred sites. These are the knowledge that we have to continue to protect because that’s our connection to the natural world and beyond. | | So that’s what I hope and envision, because once that is able to be, then we realize and we understand why we have to protect the water, why we have to protect the land and our homelands and where we come from, understand the knowledge and the stories. It goes real deep, and I think when we’re able to have that connection, we’re healing bloodlines, we’re healing our blood cells. Our blood memory is going to ignite when we start learning these ways of the natural world. | | Luke Gannon: | Krystal has a very timely book recommendation. | | Krystal Curley: | So one book that we really recommend to a lot of people, even before they said they were going to make a movie about it, is Killers of the Flower Moon. That book has been an incredible eyeopener to what this industry, the bloodshed that this industry is willing to do to gain money and resources and land. And I am really looking forward to the movie, but I am just really, if you really want to get a really good look, I highly encourage reading the book, because it has incredible testimonies at the end of bringing it to now what the Osage relatives are experiencing, even to this day for generations, but it’s just barely 100 years ago. | | And the Osage people were the richest people in the U.S. at that point. And to see that story… It’s going to be a really incredible movie, but like I said, it’s very triggering to see what has happened to our people in the past. And from it, that’s where the FBI was born, out of this type of incidences with indigenous people. So I really encourage you read the book because it’s just like… I couldn’t put it down. I couldn’t put it down. I read it within days. | | Luke Gannon: | Thank you so much, Krystal, for your stories, deep wisdom, and knowledge. It was such a pleasure having you on the show today. This episode is airing at the perfect time for Krystal’s book recommendation, because the Killers of the Flower Moon movie airs in theaters tomorrow, October 20th. Please read the book and check out the movie. | | I would like to uplift a couple of resources to learn more about what Krystal mentioned in this episode. The American Indian Movement, or AIM, was founded in Minnesota in 1968 to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against Native Peoples. Today, AIM supports indigenous movements across the country. To learn more, please see the show notes, where I will link to AIM’s website and additional resources. To learn more about the Los Alamos testing site that Krystal mentioned, check out an episode on the Red Nation podcast called What Oppenheimer Left Out, also in the show notes. And please do check out the show notes to learn more about the incredible work of Indigenous Lifeways. Thanks for staying tuned. | | Reggie Rucker: | Yes, thank you both. And thanks to all of you for listening all the way to the end. I assume that means you like this episode, so please share with even just one person you think will enjoy it too. We have a goal of 10,000 listens for this episode. Help us get there. If you’re not a subscriber to the podcast yet, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you know when every new episode drops. And of course, your donations are essential to help us keep this podcast going and support the research and resources that we make available on our website for free. We truly welcome and appreciate it all. | | And last, if you have feedback for us or want to share a story about how your community approaches this issue, send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. We’d love to share these on a special mailbag episode one day. We’ll keep an eye out. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. This podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank. The music for the season is also composed by Andrew Frank. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSMusic Credit: Andrew Frank
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
In 2022, international investment firm BlackRock acquired Vanguard Renewables, to help Vanguard drastically expand its number of large-scale anaerobic digestion facilities across the U.S. and BlackRock’s own energy portfolio. Brenda Platt, director of ILSR’s Composting for Community Initiative shares her concern that like in many industries, this trend towards concentrated dominance over the inputs and outputs of this new technology control will ultimately harm communities and starve them of the resources necessary to build thriving, sustainable local economies. Dior St. Hillaire co-director of the NYC composting service BK ROT, adds to the discussion with her vision for New York City that centers local economies, community engagement, and educational spaces fostered by community composting.
Related ResourcesHow Does Anaerobic Digestion Work?
Food Waste Depackaging Systems
Anaerobic Digestion vs. Composting: Choosing the Best Organic Waste Management Method
Compost (feat. DiorNoel) – A Portrait of the NYC Composting Community
BK Rot: We are NYC’s first bike powered food waste hauling and composting service
As organics depackager equipment market grows, so do concerns over microplastics contamination
Vanguard Renewables sold to BlackRock fund to fuel anaerobic digester expansion
Books:
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I’m your cohost, Reggie Rucker, and we continue this season, which we are calling How to Get Away With Merger, picking up on the topic of, and I have to put this in “waste.” Luke said it in the last episode, one person’s trash is another’s treasure. And while on the last episode we talked about how mergers and corporate concentration encourages bigger, dirtier, more harmful landfills and incinerators, this episode is not quite as clear cut. You talk about an acquisition that promotes a much better outcome than food scraps ending up in landfills and incinerators but as both of our guests make clear, the private sector, making big investments in new technologies alone is not the answer. For communities, for Justice, we need a holistic approach. To get into the details and speaking of holistic, I’m going to pass it over to my other half, my co-host, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Oh, thank you Reggie. Now with that great introduction, we’re going to jump right into the interview. | | Thank you so much, Brenda for being here. Brenda Platt is the Director of the Composting for Community Initiative, and we are so excited to welcome her back to the show today. So today we are looking at BlackRock, a giant asset management firm acquiring Vanguard Renewables who operates anaerobic digesters nationwide. This acquisition was announced just last year, so we wanted to invite Brenda onto the show to get an idea of what anaerobic digestion actually is and what this expansion means for composters. So Brenda, I want to start by just defining a couple terms. Can you tell us what is anaerobic digestion? | | Brenda Platt: | Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me. So like composting, anaerobic digestion relies on microorganisms like bacteria to break down organic material. And that organic material can be animal manure, it can be food scraps, it can be any kind of wastewater, biosolids, and composting happens in the presence of oxygen and anaerobic digestion happens without oxygen. That’s why it’s called anaerobic. And it does produce biogas. So it’s considered a renewable energy, and it takes place in a sealed vessel called a reactor. And it’s those reactors that help those microbial communities break down or digest those materials and produce that biogas. One of the other products that comes out of anaerobic digestion is digestate, which is the solid end products of that process. And those are discharged from the digester and digestate needs to be dealt with as well. | | Luke Gannon: | Brenda, I’m trying to visualize what these anaerobic digesters look like. Can you give me an idea? | | Brenda Platt: | Well, interestingly enough, like composting, it comes in all sizes. So when we think of composting, you can have a bin in your backyard or worm bin in a classroom, at a school, at a firm. Large scale industrial anaerobic digestion is very similar. Maybe not at a home scale, although that we’re seeing that in places around the world, like Kenya has some home-scale digesters. But it’s been around for eons, proliferates in China, India, there’s many on-farm digesters handling poultry manure or litter, cow manure. And really what we’re seeing is a trend in this country to build large scale industrial anaerobic digesters alone in conjunction with wastewater treatment. And that’s when we can get into is that really the problem? Is scale the problem? | | Luke Gannon: | Yeah, that’s really interesting. I actually didn’t know that anaerobic digestion could be at different scales. I always thought of them at such a large scale. And then the second part I want to ask you, and we’ll jump into Vanguard Renewables, but before we get there, can you tell us about what is de-packaging? What does that mean? Can that happen at different scales? What does it look like? | | Brenda Platt: | So let’s just take food scraps, food waste from a grocery store. So we’ve all been to grocery stores. You go into the produce section, maybe workers have to come in and remove the tomatoes that are rotting or things that don’t look so good. So that’s already clean produce that a digester or composter would want. It’s not packaged. But then you have, let’s say a bag of carrots that no longer has a use, or even a can of soup, those are both packaged goods. So if you want to get that organic material, that food in there that no longer can be sold or rescued to feed people, you have to break it open. | | And so what a de-packager is, is a system that’s often, it can be alone, a standalone facility, or it can be installed at the place of an industrial composter or an anaerobic digestion facility. And it’s designed to mechanically share apart that material. Sometimes it’s shredding, sometimes it’s doing other mechanical techniques to break open the packaging. But the idea at the end of the day is you have organic material that can go into say the digester or you have the rejects, which is the waste packaging. | | Reggie Rucker: | Okay. And then, so we wanted to have you break down these concepts for us because Vanguard Renewables operates in both of these spaces. They both do de-packaging work, and they have facilities where they do anaerobic digestion. And BlackRock, the asset management and investment firm, saw an opportunity to invest in the anaerobic digestion side of this business to the tune of $700 million dollars. Can you explain to us why this anaerobic digestion operation was the thing that BlackRock really wanted to go after? And what does this mean to the landscape of composting and specifically related to our work, community composting? | | Brenda Platt: | Yeah. I wish I could get inside their head. I’m sure it’s all money, money, money is the short answer. Well, let me just say that if you look at the waste industry as a whole and handling food waste and making biogas out of it, it’s a big industry and it’s dominated by a handful of companies. I think depending on your source, managing waste is anywhere between $80 and $90 billion industry and 50%, more than probably half of it is controlled by just three companies. And so there’s more companies getting into the space. Let me have a slice of that pie. There’s a lot of money there. And when you have market dominance by a handful of companies, they want to control the collection. They want to control the processing. They want to be vertically integrated and control every step of the process. And I think that’s where my concerns with anaerobic digestion lie is that we’re seeing a disturbing trend towards large scale industrial facilities. | | These companies and haulers that serve them are basically telling grocery stores, “Hey, you don’t now need to separate that rotting tomato in your produce section from your packaged soup cans. Commingle it all, we’ll send it to our big facility. We’ll have a packager and we’ll handle it.” Well, where do you think that wasted packaging goes? And we are hearing more about microplastics and soils in the oceans, everywhere. So I think it was Einstein who said the smart person solves a problem, but the genius avoids it. So we need to rescue food to feed people, which with the advent of de-packagers are now collecting all this stuff. So less food is being recovered to feed people. It’s not staying local. We’re seeing de-packagers and big anaerobic digesters being built in one state and it’s like a black hole sucking up material in a multi-state area. | | So Vanguard operates at least six anaerobic digesters in the Northeast. I understand they have 10 new facilities under construction. They plan to develop a hundred new projects by 2025. That’s really astounding. And so BlackRock Real Assets which acquired the company, is really helping to drive that plan to commission those a hundred new projects. | | Reggie Rucker: | And then, so I want to make this clear for the people who are listening right now, is anaerobic digestion as a process something that we need to be concerned about? Or is it … We heard you talk about just this scale and this concentration. What’s the thing that we should really be concerned about when it comes to anaerobic digestion and BlackRock’s investment in it? | | Brenda Platt: | Yeah, no, as a technology, I don’t think anaerobic digestion is the concern. In fact, digesters can handle often different materials than compost sites. They can handle more liquid materials. Composters can handle what we might call materials high-end carbon, carbonation materials like yard trimmings. You don’t want to send your woody material or fall leaves to a digester. So that would be a waste of that kind of technology. Anaerobic digestion tends to be more expensive. It’s a more expensive technology, but it can fit on a smaller footprint. So depending if land is an issue, a digester might make sense and those kind of decisions or criteria. But in general, I don’t think it’s a technology we need to worry about. But what it comes down to is garbage in, garbage out. So if you’re got a composter and you’re putting contaminating materials, we wouldn’t like that so much either. | | Reggie Rucker: | Right. | | Brenda Platt: | We want clean materials in, we want clean materials and products out, and that digestate, the reason I explain that solid is that also can be considered a soil amendment. So like compost, it’s going to end up back in the soil. So we don’t want contaminants like microplastics in compost or in digestate. And then as you’re removing de-packaging, you’re also getting a lot of the valuable organic material removed as well. So as you’re screening contaminants out one way or another, it’s very inefficient in terms of maximizing the recovery of that organic material. | | Luke Gannon: | So while I was reading some articles on this, Brenda, I was wrestling with this question, which is a lot of the articles that I read made it seem like the Vanguard Renewables specifically was one of the only facilities that were going to these large grocery stores and taking all their produce that would go to the landfill and taking it away from the landfill and putting it in an anaerobic digester. So I’m like, “Okay, well we don’t want food in our landfills,” but we still have this issue with all of these microplastics ending up in what becomes the digestate or the soil. How do you level that? Are there composters who have the capability and the resources to go to these grocery stores to take food and process it and not have that issue? Or is this efficient in some way? | | Brenda Platt: | Our policies, the investment is flowing and privileging large industrial sites that want everything commingled. If you do have packaged food, it’s going to systems that maybe meet some standards on the efficiency of their systems for repackaging. There’s a wide variety of companies out there and some do a better job than others. And we could be setting some of those standards a little higher or working towards higher standards and improving the technology. But this notion that we can’t keep things local and keep these assets and materials local is just nonsense. | | Luke Gannon: | I want to get your insight, Brenda onto, why is it BlackRock in particular that you find problematic in its investment in Vanguard renewables? | | Brenda Platt: | Well, interestingly enough, I wasn’t keyed into BlackRock. It was a farmer in Vermont who collects food scraps and compost who was losing market share to these anaerobic digestion companies who’s like, “Yeah, Vanguard’s expanding. And Brenda, do you know it was bought out by BlackRock Real Assets?” | | And I was like, “Well, I actually care about that. Let me look into that.” And that’s the real estate and infrastructure investment arm of BlackRock, the big company, which I don’t know if you know, but then I learned it was nominated for the 2022 Corporate Hall of Shame by our friends at Corporate Accountability. And if you look into that award they gave them, they’re very clear in laying out some of the issues. The firm props up the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $260 billion dollars in investments. | | So they’re basically propelling in our climate catastrophe. It has nearly $6 billion invested in civilian gun manufacturers and retailers and an astounding $36 billion invested in military weapons companies. So these are the kinds of companies that are now again, driving big waste in this case now called renewable energy, which it is. But when we are talking about we want more renewable energy, we want maybe biogas production, we want clean digestate and soil amendments, what are the systems that we can see? And when you have a technology like anaerobic digestion, that can be farm scale, can be small scale, there’s one small scale anaerobic digestion company has its site next to a tofu manufacturer producing biogas that then fuels that manufacturing facility, that to me is the epitome of local self-reliance right there. | | Reggie Rucker: | This was very helpful in helping us to understand why, despite anaerobic digestion as a technology, having some potential and having a place, why the pattern of it becoming too large and getting these large investments from a BlackRock and it just sucking up all the oxygen in a way, in this space, why that particular is problematic. And why as we hear these conversations evolving over time for our listeners in particular to be aware not to be fooled by just this shiny new object that promises to deliver everything. So this was a helpful conversation in breaking down a little bit some of the nuances there, but making it very understandable. So thank you so much, Brenda. This is super helpful. | | Brenda Platt: | And I’ll just say to be clear to something you said, Luke, because we do need to get this material out of landfills and trash incinerators, and so that’s so important, but how we do it also counts too, and there’s more than one option. It’s not landfills or large scale facilities owned by corporate giants. There’s some things in between. | | Luke Gannon: | A big thanks to the wonderful Brenda Platt for giving us insight into de-packaging, anaerobic digestion, and BlackRock. In the latter half of today’s episode, we are hearing from the executive director of a composting service in New York City. But before we jump in, I’m going to pass it to my co-host who excels at fostering robust, vibrant and dynamic work environments mirroring the vision we hold for neighborhoods and cities across the nation. Over to you, Reggie. | | Reggie Rucker: | Thank you, Luke. You are way too kind, but I truly appreciate it. So folks, I said this last time and I realized I didn’t stick to it, but I’m really going to keep this break short. You just heard from Brenda really brilliantly break down why this fancy, shiny, big new thing is not going to solve all of our problems. And that nuance and that important distinction between what’s good for some and what’s good for all is what our next guest is going to jump right into. So I want to get you there, but before you do, like I always say, do it now if you’ll forget, pause this episode, find that share button and send this episode with a friend who really likes to engage in thoughtful conversations about building stronger, more vibrant communities. Building these types of conversations and this type of community together is how we will make change and we need you to help us get there. Share this episode and then come right back for the second half. Thank you so much. | | Luke Gannon: | Now, every episode this season has taught me that oftentimes it’s not what the company is doing, it’s at what scale it is doing it. Bigness is the problem. On the second half of the episode Dior St. Hillaire so beautifully expresses exactly why localizing our economies is a solution. Dior is the executive director of BK ROT, a nonprofit community supported, bike-powered, fossil fuel free waste hauling and composting service in New York City. Today, Dior inspires us as she details her journey, learning about food sovereignty and creating decentralized systems. Here’s Dior. | | Dior St. Hillai…: | I’m a Bronx native. I was born and raised in the Bronx, lived upstate for a little bit. So I always say that I know the difference and the contrast between the city and the suburbs because I have lived both. My family’s of Caribbean descent, so my family’s from Saint Thomas, US Virgin Islands, and so I came up a lot with Caribbean culture in my upbringing. I would say that I grew up in a very strict household. It’s the West Indian, so that just is what it is. Education was really important and high on the list of responsibilities, keeping the home, things like that. What I was into growing up was really I loved to ride my bike, I loved to draw, actually, I don’t draw like I used to, but that was actually something that I really enjoy doing. And when I hit my teenage years, I started to write. | | So I’m also a hip hop MC, so that started in my early teens. I would say life in the city, coming up in the Bronx, there’s many things. You have a good time. There’s talent shows, there’s violence, but there’s also joy sprinkled in there. And I think that even just being able to be outside and run around is different. I don’t know that I would feel comfortable with my daughter doing half the stuff that I did when I was younger in the city now. Maybe we were just crazy to let our kids roam, but I was one of the roamers even though I was with my older brother. So I spent a lot of time with him. | | And in the suburbs it was the same, I just was able to explore. Instead of exploring in the city, I was exploring up in the woods, which was completely different. I remember the very first night that we finally slept in the house. Everybody was sleeping in the house and I was up making sure all the doors and windows were locked, because I just knew somebody was going to come and try to murder us. Don’t ask me why, because I just was like, “It’s too dark, it’s too quiet, and it’s very eerie.” And it took me a while to adjust to that lifestyle when you’re coming from so much noise. | | Luke Gannon: | Dior spent a significant amount of her childhood outdoors, but it wasn’t until she attended a sleepaway camp at the age of 10 that she was introduced to composting. | | Dior St. Hillai…: | So my mom’s not very nature-based. I shouldn’t say that, my mom’s not really the outdoors kind of person. You’d be lucky if you can even get her to go glamping. So I think that she wanted me to have those skills and have that appreciation. So she sent me to a sleepaway camp, and that’s when I was introduced to compost. Every week each cabin had a different chore. So our cabin, again, this was rotating, so everybody had to do it at some point, but we always knew that when we were done eating our food, we had to go to the buckets that were on the counter and that’s where we would dump our food. We didn’t dump them in trash, we dumped them in these buckets. They were white buckets lined across the entire counter. After we ate, that’s where we put our food. | | It wasn’t until it was time for our chores, why I understood why we did that. We had to carry the buckets down to the compost heap and we would dump it, mix it with manure and straw, and leave it and go on about our business. Now, I can’t tell you what my attitude was towards it at the time. Don’t really remember. I just know that this was something very significant and my understanding and awareness of what we did with our food waste at a very early age. It just is a memory that is so vivid in my imagination that I always point to this story when I talk about my introduction to compost. This was my hands-on experience with it. It wasn’t somebody teaching it to me in school. It was literally getting my hands in it. | | Luke Gannon: | Dior was raised in an artistic family with her mother being a dancer and her stepfather, a musician and a carpenter. Throughout her life, Dior passionately engaged in writing and poetry. However, it was during her college years that she experienced a sudden revelation. | | Dior St. Hillai…: | Once I got a little bit older, I was in college and I was like, “I got too many soft skills.” I was like, “If the apocalypse came, how am I going to survive? Girl, it’s not going to be on spreadsheets and being able to do operations. What can you do with your hands?” So I was like, “I’m going to take more farming courses.” So I did agribusiness, I studied agribusiness and took a library course in my senior year in undergrad. And then I learned about BUGs, which is Black Urban Gardeners and Farmers Conference. And I went to the conference and I was like, “Okay, great.” Then I went to the botanical garden. What I always tell people, they’re like, “How did you get here?” I’m like, “I followed my curiosity.” Literally every time I had a question about something, I figured out where the resources were, who are the people who knew more about it than me, I asked questions. I immersed myself in the spaces, and life continues to move. | | Luke Gannon: | Dior enrolled in the Grow More Veggies course, completed a master composter program, volunteered with community gardens and pursued farm apprenticeships. However, throughout all her experiences in these courses and roles, Dior couldn’t shake a disconnect between the places she was working for and her own philosophy. | | Dior St. Hillai…: | I always felt like we were talking a lot about farm to table, but not table back to farm. And so for me, I felt like there was a really big gap, and that’s what I just chose to focus my energy on. So I stepped away from farming a little bit and started focusing a whole lot more on composting. So I was like, “Well, this is a big disconnect.” I was like, “How are we so excited to go to farmer’s markets and get our food if we put it in the trash?” I was like, “This just don’t make no sense to me.” It just doesn’t make any sense. I think part of my curiosity, but also part of my grievance was, “I am going to put more of my energy here,” and so forth I began my composting journey again, also just visiting different sites, learning from different people. | | Luke Gannon: | In 2018, Dior embarked on her journey by founding her own composting cooperative in the Bronx. Around the same time she began to discover BK ROT. Through a series of conversations and connections, she pursued the role of executive director alongside Nora Joseph. Now she’s able to engage, learn, and teach how composting is both restoring the environment and the people. | | Dior St. Hillai…: | Compost means community so move as one unit. We all have a part to play, interdependence is the movement, and that’s what I feel with compost. I feel like it just brings people together in ways that you never could imagine. I had a workday the other day, and it was literally from young child to grandparent as far as age was concerned, and that was just so special to me to spend time like that in that particular way. And I think compost has such the capacity to transform many, many, many different things, even things that you didn’t think were connected to compost. | | I have a very social justice oriented lens when I’m talking about these things because we’re talking about environmental justice communities and waste inequity and environmental racism, and why are we in this situation in the first place and what do we do in order to talk about what a just transition is and what restitution looks like? So that’s really big for us at BK ROT, and it’s really big out here in the Bronx as well because we’re talking about, these are communities that have to feel the effects of inequitable waste practices. And obviously when I’m composting, that is a form of waste management that isn’t, I guess, traditional because when we think about waste management, we’re thinking about landfills and maybe recycling facilities. But my work grounds me. | | Luke Gannon: | The majority of individuals working in composting, whether in hauling or processing, share a profound concern for the wellbeing of their communities and the planet. Despite their unwavering dedication and efforts, they continue to grapple with the influence of corporate bigness. As Brenda previously mentioned, BlackRock’s acquisition of Vanguard Renewables has brought about significant expansion within the anaerobic digestion industry. Dior perceives her own work and Vanguard Renewables as two different worlds. | | Dior St. Hillai…: | I get really frustrated when people try to compare the two. So one of the things that I’ll say is that obviously this is something that we’re dealing with in New York City as it’s now mandatory in order to separate food scraps and to collect them. And what we’re seeing is, okay, a lot of it is already going to the anaerobic digester, it’s not being composted. We’ve lost a significant amount of clients at BK ROT with the city having brought this in. Now, my reaction is absolutely going to again, stay in this justice focused lens. We need more decentralized systems. All anaerobic digestion does is aggregate and centralize yet another system, and that’s not what we need. And to be quite honest, I think it has its place and its role. And I’m not anti-AD, but I also believe that we cannot ignore and phase out composters because this feels easier. | | If we are to, as a society, really grapple with a lot of the challenges that we have with access to food, with how we deal with food waste, with how we’re wasting food, these are all things that come in conversation. I always argue that with composting and community composting, you’re always going to get people who learn more about systems in their own habits and connect with them a whole lot more than literally just sending everything to AD. First of all, you need to get people to separate it in the first place. That’s number one. Just because you have a system to deal with it, what’s going to actually make people want to do it, want to get involved? Your method of doing it, and this is just my opinion in that I stand strong on this, the bureaucratic way of addressing this isn’t going to get us anywhere. | | We already have difficulty with recycling in and of itself. When I say compost means community, I mean it. There are so many people that have even told us that they love coming to the drop-offs because it allows them to talk with other people in their neighborhood, to meet other people that they haven’t known before. It allows them that opportunity to be able to even talk about composting and why they love it, why they’re doing it, connecting with neighbors. These are things that are important to build a community. You don’t know what resources can be shared. You don’t know what resources you’re taking out of a community when you do things like this. | | So I always push back against Big AD because again, it’s yet another system that is meant to make people feel like, “Oh, there’s this great solution,” and then it ignores all of the other ones that have literally come from the community that have had to build these movements as a form of resistance. And then you come and you just step on it because now you have the resources, you have the funding, you have access to the land, which by the way is stolen. So all of these things are implications where we’re trying to bring back an ancestral way of doing something. And I always say compost is really just like the commodification of a thing that is already being done. Compost is just human assisted decomposition. It’s going to happen whether we help it or not. | | So it’s not this big fancy thing that anybody has invented, and it’s actually a very indigenous and ancestral practice to give reverence to the land the land gives to you when you give back to the land. That is just an understanding that natives have with their built environment. And so for me, I feel like as we are clawing to get back to that, as human beings, as we are literally trying to figure out how to give that back to us, to ourselves, and to our children, to our community members, we have larger organizations that, again, it’s always just business as usual and they could care less. I think it really just needs to be less of a competition and more collaboration anytime I hear about AD taking over these kinds of systems. | | Luke Gannon: | Giant corporations are extracting profit from communities, operating from a distant vantage point and lacking a true understanding of the community’s actual needs. Dior envisions a distinct community-centric future for New York. | | Dior St. Hillai…: | The biggest dream I have around composting specific to New York City, even in New York state, my vision is that we create the systems that allow us to process the food scraps locally. I think that we do too much. First of all, we export a lot of our waste outside of New York City anyway as a whole, and that’s a problem. I want to see all types of systems being utilized locally, but also serve as educational spots where young folks can come in and want to be scientists, that they get their hands on this stuff. It was me getting my hands on it when I was younger that allowed me to have some kind of respect for it. And I think that we need to be able to display, there should be way more demo spaces of what composting looks like and all of the different types of ways that we can support decomposition. | | And so yeah, I think for me, what it looks like is, I’m going to say increasing local processing capacity, which that means for me, every community board, every block has something. Something that is supporting handling these food scraps locally and not exporting them outside of the city. I want to see where food is being eaten, cooked, prepared, that not that far away it’s being turned into compost or something else. And then we have another food distribution network. I just want to see us working better with farmers and to utilize land and space within the state and bringing the economy back into our neighborhoods. Because if we’re able to create jobs off of this, that means that we’re able to increase our local economy as well. The use of landfills and needing to have such a disposable culture, but really just having people come back into this really cyclical and circular way of thinking and that that is actually exemplified in our local environment. | | Luke Gannon: | Dior recommended one of my all time favorite reads, | | Dior St. Hillai…: | The Alchemist. I think that that book was so inspirational for me as far as transmuting energy, and that’s what composting is for me. It’s literally the transportation of energy. You can put words, phrases, whatever into the compost pile in order to try to inspire something. Like we are such energetic frequencies as humans, and we don’t give enough power to it. And I think that compost is a great example of those energies. This is God’s works, really. You got to just call it what it is. This is why it’s difficult for people to value it as paid work and paid labor. | | But at the end of the day, this work is work that if it chooses you or you choose it, we don’t do it for the glitz and the glamour. We do it because it’s necessary work. We do it because the next young person is able to look at us and see themselves. And I think if anybody really wants to get into this work, connect with this work, they have to trust the village, but they also have to be willing to endure. So The Alchemist was a book that when I read it, I was like, “Man, I could really turn energy into something else,” and that was powerful for me. And that’s what I see when I see composting. | | Luke Gannon: | Dior is one of those storytellers that I could listen to over and over again and learn something new every time. This is a reminder to myself and all of our listeners to go get your hands in some compost. If you’ve never held compost before, I recommend finding a local community composter and dipping your hands into the warm matter. You can feel its energy. A huge thanks to Dior St. Hillaire and Brenda Platt for joining us on the show today. | | Reggie Rucker: | Yes, thank you both, and thanks to all of you for listening all the way to the end. I assume that means you liked this episode, so please share with even just one person you think will enjoy it too. We have a goal of 10,000 listens for this episode. Help us get there. And if you’re not a subscriber to the podcast yet, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you know when every new episode drops. And of course, your donations are essential to help us keep this podcast going and support the research and resources that we make available on our website for free. We truly welcome and appreciate it all. | | And last, if you have feedback for us or wanted to share a story about how your community approaches this issue, send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. We’d love to share these on a special mailbag episode one day. We’ll keep an eye out. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. This podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and andrew Frank. The music for the season is also composed by Andrew Frank. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSMusic Credit: Andrew Frank
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
Lead Editor at Waste Dive, Cole Rosengren, explains how the Waste Management and Advanced Disposal merger further consolidated the $90 billion annual waste and recycling industry, the pushback it faced from local entities, and how it impacted communities across the nation. Kirstie Pecci, Executive Director at Just Zero, shares her journey that led to the fight against polluters in her hometown and sheds light on the strategies employed by Big Waste to target low-income communities and communities of color for landfill expansion.
Related ResourcesTracking Waste Management’s acquisition of Advanced Disposal, divestitures to GFL Environmental
Waste Management completes $4.6B acquisition of Advanced Disposal, following regulatory approval
Tracking the waste and recycling industry’s M&A boom
Just Zero: Advancing community-centered Zero Waste solutions
Southbridge Residents Make It Clear: They Don’t Want Casella’s Polluting Landfill Any More
Fighting Monopoly Power: Waste – The federal government has turned a blind eye to the monopolization of the waste industry and the high costs it imposes on communities and the environment. But local governments possess significant authority to break up landfill and garbage monopolies, reenergize our stagnant recycling sector, and germinate local composting efforts.
Opposition to Casella landfill expansion in Massachusetts grows
Books:
Giants of Garbage: The Rise of the Global Waste Industry and the Politics of Pollution by Harold Crooks
Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade by Adam Minter
The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
Transcript
| Reggie Rucker: | Hello and welcome back to another episode of this season of Building Local Power, which we are calling How To Get Away With Merger. I’m your co-host Reggie Rucker. On the last episode, we looked at how mergers and acquisitions in the beer industry put local breweries and brewers at a severe disadvantage and threaten the existence of these institutions that through the nature of their product and place can really bring communities together. | | Today, we go downstream and look at the industry that deals with the beer cans and bottles when we’re done with them. Consolidation in the waste industry and its convergence with recycling is having dramatic effects for the health of our communities and our planet, and we have two great guests to help us understand it all. To get us into the interview, let me throw it over to my co-host who has to put up with my garbage just about every day, Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke? | | Luke Gannon: | Thanks, Reggie. Well, one man’s trash is another woman’s treasure. Today, we are talking about Waste Management’s largest acquisition to date. In 2019, Waste Management or WM bought Advanced Disposal for $4.9 billion. The lead editor at Waste Dive, Cole Rosengren, explains what led up to this merger and the ensuing consequences. Let’s jump into the show. | | Reggie Rucker: | Cole, thank you so much first for being on the show and bringing us your wealth of knowledge on this topic. It’s really great to have you. First, I’ll be the first to admit that for as much as I care about the preservation of this planet, and in fact, I recently did a presentation in my ethics class on why curbside community composting is not just a practically good policy, but a morally good one, I still couldn’t tell you the first thing about the waste industry, other than it’s too concentrated with a few big corporations dominating the industry, like many industries in America. | | But that’s really where my knowledge ends. Can you carry this forward? Educate me, for sure, and then perhaps the rest of our audience about the waste industry, like who are the big players, how much of the market do they control. As we talk about the market, even just break down what is the market. I know there are people who pick up the trash. There’s the place where the trash goes. Just walk us through what the waste industry is and what it looks like. | | Cole Rosengren: | Sure. In the United States, the solid waste and recycling industry is roughly a $90 billion a year industry. Very corporate now. It has a big history in mergers actually, which is, of course, a good fit for the topic today. It used to be a pretty local business, family companies. Cities would provide service. It started to change ’70s and the ’80s in part due to federal regulations that put higher standards for landfills, and it made it more expensive to operate these landfills. Business saw an opportunity there. | | Major names such as WM, formerly known as Waste Management, among others, came in, became publicly traded companies, and went on a huge acquisition spree. There’s quite a few stories. Really there’s many deals per month, per week. Execs flying all around the country just to go buy the next thing, the next thing. A lot of roll-ups happened for many decades. Where we are today is the industry is predominantly run by three major companies. WM is the largest, Republic Services is number two, and then Waste Connections is number three. | | The way to think about market share, the greatest source of power from a business standpoint is who controls the disposal capacity, this being landfills that we’re talking about. Those three companies, according to some recent research, control about 56% of the disposal market in the US. The public sector is only about a quarter, and then other smaller players from there. | | The services they provide range from the collection we see at the curb, collecting from homes, businesses, institutional and industrial settings, processing for recycling facilities, locations known as transfer stations, which may come up later in this discussion. If you pick up the trash, but the landfill is many hours away will go to a station in between, get moved on after that. They do provide other services, but that’s the main scope of it. | | Luke Gannon: | Cole, you lay out these three major companies that primarily dominate the waste market, but there still exists a small independent market for waste. Can you talk a little bit about what that market looks like for these services and what challenges that these smaller independent services face? | | Cole Rosengren: | Yeah, so it’s interesting, there is in some parts of the country more than others, there’s still a fairly robust market of family companies, small independent companies. They tend to be more focused on the collection just in terms of the barrier to entry. They may not have the capital to go out and buy a landfill, or it’s just very complex to own and operate one of those sites. But not uncommon to see a small independent business with two trucks, 10 trucks, even more out competing in the market. | | The challenge though is, as we mentioned earlier, the disposal is key here. That’s the moat. That’s the competitive factor. Even if you are a local business and you’re going to go out and start picking up recycling or try to bid on business services or city contract, you still have to pay for it to be disposed or processed at someone else’s location at the end of the day. That’s a big challenge. Another factor, I don’t know if I’d call it competitive factor, it sort of is, private equity is playing an increasingly larger role in the waste industry, definitely within the last few years, say at least the last 10. | | In some cases, smaller local companies have decided that’s a benefit to them and they’ll team up with these private equity firms and can grow faster because of that. But on the flip side, if you’re trying to compete against someone who has that private equity money or is part of one of these large private equity platforms, that’s a real factor. None of them are quite as large as WM or the other companies we mentioned, but they’re billion dollar waste platforms now backed by private equity. They’re not insignificant. | | Reggie Rucker: | Cole, when I hear you talk about the disadvantage that the smaller waste companies are at because they still need to access these landfills, which are very expensive to operate or they need lots of big trucks, I immediately start thinking about the work that we do around community composting and how they don’t have that same need for landfill space because we’re finding better use for those food scraps. | | Similarly, they don’t have the need for lots of big trucks because there’s better ways to move those food scraps and the organic waste around. Can you talk a little bit about how the smaller community composters play into the landscape of the waste industry? | | Cole Rosengren: | You’re right, if we’re focusing on organics specifically, and then we’ve seen some good examples of that. Even here where I’m in the Boston area, there’s a pretty robust little network of subscription services, folks in vans, bicycles, other ways to pick up your organics in the buckets and such. Even they will run up, and I’m sure from working with folks in your network, finding the land, dealing with permitting requirements, all this stuff, to have a compost site is not always simple once you get to a scale. | | Or depending on what kind of market you’re in, there could be franchise requirements for where stuff is supposed to go or how that works. Just some of the technology is getting harder as PFAS chemicals, for example, become something that composters need to be more wary of. That’s complicated and expensive. Pre-processing to get microplastics out, all of these things. Though it does seem to be one of the areas where it is I don’t know if easier is the right word, but we’re seeing more ingenuity from small… | | Folks will get in and start a local organic service in part because the big players aren’t focused on doing that nationwide. They will do it in areas where state or local policy drives it or customers are asking for it. But WM does not offer composting to every customer in the country right now. If you’re in a market where they’re not doing that and you can start a whole service, that’s an opportunity. | | Luke Gannon: | Cole, you’ve done a great job of laying out the industry, so we’re going to turn now to the merger that we’re featuring today, which is Waste Management, WM for short, and Advanced Disposal. You mentioned earlier that there have been a number of mergers and acquisitions in this industry. How did we get to this point where these two massive conglomerates are merging? What was the market like and what were the factors in the market that made these companies believe that this merger was the only way forward? | | Cole Rosengren: | There had been already a lot of large what we call public to public mergers, public waste company buying another one. I’d have to triple check this, but I would say there used to be probably at least twice as many publicly traded waste companies back in the ’90s, for example, and that shrunk through mergers over the years, including some very large ones. | | And with WM being the largest in terms of what’s really a way to move the needle, what’s going to be a big deal that’s out there, this was considered a logical fit essentially in terms of where can we really go and make a big move and grow through this. On the flip side, and I’ll admit this, I don’t have this directly from the companies, but in their SEC filings that laid out the deal history, Advanced had been approached by buyers before this that were not WM, which is not uncommon. | | They all talk. They’re all looking at options. This was happening in looks like early 2018, Advanced was approached by some folks. Deals didn’t work out, and then WM entered the mix in fall of 2018 and said, “Oh, we actually have an offer that would work.” For context, at the time, WM was the number one in the market, Advanced was number four. It was a big deal to be able to get them. | | As far as why they thought it made sense, Advanced had a very large network of disposal facilities, these landfills that we mentioned, transfer stations as well, going back to the competitive advantage, and just a large hauling business too. It was probably viewed as a way to move the needle pretty quickly to them. | | Reggie Rucker: | So then can you tell us about what the public reaction was to this merger? I think particularly with the federal government, were there any agencies or officials that attempted to block or significantly alter the terms of the deal? I think from the public, was there a sense of public awareness about how this merger might impact service in different communities? | | Cole Rosengren: | Yeah, it was a very protracted process. It went on for about 18 months. They went into this expecting certain amount of divestitures would be required from DOJ, which is not uncommon in deals of this size, of course, but they ended up having to renegotiate the deal because DOJ asked for more divestitures than they had even envisioned originally. The COVID pandemic started at this time as well, so that maybe dragged things out a little bit, but it was a messy timeline on this. | | There was some public pushback, most notably, at least, in terms of what we could get on the record of the time around the Chicago area. A couple local entities, Solid Waste Authority of Lake County and Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County got very involved. They hired attorneys. They met with DOJ. They flew into DC to raise their concerns about what this would mean for their market, and that was just one snapshot. | | But the reason they cited was basically Chicago area would go from four major players to three, and they were concerned about what that would mean as an entity that has to contract for these services, would costs go up, would things be as competitive. Some of these concerns ended up playing out. DOJ did end up requiring a large divestiture package. It spans numerous states. I have it here, I’m just trying to pull it up. There’s about 10 states. Multiple state AGs signed on to the process, and that all played out amicably in the end. But yeah, there was a lot of pushback on this one. | | Reggie Rucker: | Actually, yeah, Cole, please go ahead and continue. Talk a little bit about the communities and how they responded to the proposed remedies and perhaps even other government officials who maybe had a different point of view on this. What were you hearing from your research and reporting? Were people generally satisfied? | | Cole Rosengren: | I think largely yes. I mean, at least the two agencies I mentioned in Illinois I think largely were. Other folks that we’d been talking to in other states that were concerned didn’t raise huge issues after it was all said and done. I think some people would’ve maybe preferred to see multiple buyers of the divestiture package to further enhance, in their view, enhance competition. We never got this directly from them, but the understanding at the time was DOJ just wanted one buyer to make it cleaner. | | There were a lot of people. It was a pretty funny period. Everyone wanted in on this. About 50 different buyers approached the folks in negotiating, “Can I buy this site, but not that site?” They said, “No, we’re not going to do it this way,” and they just sold it to one company. This company, GFL Environmental, which is now number four in the industry, in part after buying this. They were growing quickly through their own acquisitions and they’re a big deal now in part because they picked up this package. | | But yeah, they were required to divest about 15 landfills, 37 transfer stations, 29 hauling locations and various other routes. Just a very quick point, what DOJ looks for in this industry is they look at landfill and transfer capacity and they look at commercial collection, and that’s their lens to assess competition. | | Luke Gannon: | Cole, you mentioned this group in Chicago that had concerns about how the merger would affect the city. What ultimately ended up happening there? | | Cole Rosengren: | Multiple sites were required to be divested in that market. And also Wisconsin, which is relatively close to Chicago, was a very big focus. Just a funny piece of history to show how much this industry’s built on mergers, a lot of what was at the Advanced Disposal portfolio had come from multiple mergers, including them buying divestiture requirements from other companies in the past. | | It’s a thing where sites just change hands time after time, and maybe we’ll get to it a minute, but after GFL bought its package, it then sold off some of these assets to other companies. Some local governments had… Say they have a local landfill in their community and have to deal with them for a contractor for service. Within the span of two years, they were dealing with three different owners because it just kept changing hands because of the deal. | | Reggie Rucker: | Wow. Okay, so then what happens next? | | Cole Rosengren: | Yeah, usually DOJ wants certain holding periods. GFL had to hold onto the assets for a bit, about a year or so. This deal closed, WM-Advanced, closed in fall 2020. And then in 2021, GFL turned around and sold most of the Illinois and Minnesota assets that had picked up to another company at the time called Lakeshore Disposal, now known as LRS, which is backed by Macquarie, a very large private equity firm. | | It also sold some assets in Pennsylvania to another company called Noble Environmental, and that kind of spurred, especially for LRS, that helped gave them a launching pad to go acquire other companies in those markets. We think we started the final ripple effects of this whole thing this year because GFL has acquired so many companies in recent years, including this divestiture package. GFL also did its own big divestiture package this year, not required by DOJ, but just to streamline its portfolio. | | Who did it sell those assets to? WM in one market, Republic in another market, and another publicly traded company Casella up here in the northeast. That was interesting. I’d consider that full circle three years later. | | Luke Gannon: | I was listening to this news clip in preparation for this episode, and one of the news hosts said that a small town down south when these two companies merged didn’t have trash pickup for multiple weeks. I’m wondering what the effects were, on the ground effects, on communities around the country because it’s been now three years since this merger. | | Cole Rosengren: | There’s certainly short-term effects, but for the most part, these companies do so many of these deals that they find weird and iron it out. But what we saw here, and it’s not uncommon to see in other acquisitions of varying sizes, there’s usually an interruption in service in the beginning. There’s two different sides of why this may happen that we hear. From the acquiring company, they say it’s often because they have higher safety standards for the fleet and the workforce. | | Occasionally trucks will get taken off the road, certain drivers won’t pass certain tests. It’s not uncommon to see day after a deal closes, service cannot be provided in the same way as it was the day before the deal closed. Others will say, well, it’s because the acquiring company is not adept at integrating this, but there may be different software platforms. There’s a lot of complicating factors. But yeah, you see that pricing will go up, which Advanced was known for being relatively lower on pricing versus its publicly traded peers. | | WM went and raised prices, and also the fact that this happened in the midst of COVID was another reason. 2020 was when the big price increase started, the company set to offset the costs of COVID. | | Reggie Rucker: | I think the last question we have for you is if you can look into your crystal ball and tell us about the future of this industry. I mean, I guess from what you’ve said, if it’s possible to get more concentrated with more mergers, maybe that’s where it’s going. But yeah, I’ll let you tell it. What’s the future of the industry look like? | | Cole Rosengren: | Yeah. I mean, from a consolidation standpoint, yes, I think there’s more to go. We’ve seen very high levels of activity in recent years for various reasons. The tax cuts under the Trump administration was one factor. There was a lot of reasons why this was happening. COVID drove some family run businesses to choose to sell because the higher expenses, the concern around that. | | When there was a concern that maybe Congress under the Biden administration would change the corporate tax rate structure, that led to a lot of sales, even though that didn’t end up happening, but that really pushed a lot of things. Every time we think that wave is done, there’s more to come. Yeah, there’s a lot still ahead. It’s less likely we’re going to see another large public to public merger. We don’t think there’s a couple possibilities. But WM, for example, this is from a DOJ standpoint, it wouldn’t really work. | | I don’t think they could get that through, and they’re not trying to do that. They haven’t really bought that much of anything since this has happened. A couple things, but not nearly to the level of their peers. Where a lot of the activity is right now is through the private equity firms. Republic, Waste Connections, GFL is still very active, still buying a lot of stuff, but private equity is really active as well in terms of building up some of these big platform companies, which probably will get sold to the public companies someday or become public companies themselves in the future. | | There’s a lot of that coming. And more broadly what that means, the industry is very focused on capturing value from the gas at landfills in part due to federal requirements, but there’s a big push there. A lot of the tax money around what they call the renewable natural gas is driving investment there. Some degree of investment in recycling, but nothing that’s necessarily going to move the needle that much beyond what they’re doing now. I’m trying to think of any other factor. | | I think that’s the main thing. To bring it back to antitrust, I don’t think we’ll see another large one, at least under this current administration. If administrations change, it’s possible. And for what it’s worth, some folks don’t know that this, WM and Advanced, would’ve played out in the same way and hypothetically under the Biden administration. That’s something we’ve heard as well. | | Luke Gannon: | At the end of every Building Local Power episode, we ask our guests about a book that has impacted the work that they do today. I’d like to extend this question to you. Is there a book that has influenced your work? | | Cole Rosengren: | Yeah, definitely one that’s helped with my reporting on antitrust in the white space would be Giants of Garbage by Harold Crooks. This came out in the early ’90s. And for anyone who’s really in the weeds on this, this is a follow-up to another version he’d written in the ’80s. If you’re going to read one, read this one because it’s the more updated one. That’s probably the last really good in-depth look at antitrust in the waste sector. But if you want a more broader read or even just… | | I’ll try to think real quickly. Have a couple that are also good. Anything by Adam Minter. Junkyard Planet is a great one to understand the scrap recycling sector. Fat of the Land by Ben Miller if you really want to know New York City waste history. And then the final one I’ll put out is Picking Up by Robin Nagle. She is an anthropologist who became a New York City sanitation worker and chronicles that in her book. I don’t know, put it in the show notes, put my email. I’m always happy to talk waste books. There’s more. | | Luke Gannon: | A huge thanks to Cole Rosengren for sharing his extensive reporting and research on the show today. For the second half of today’s episode, we are hearing from a waste and environmental expert out in Massachusetts. But before we jump into talking about waste, food, and compost, I’m going to toss it over to my radish berry sweet and always on bleak co-host Reggie Rucker. What’s up, Reggie? | | Reggie Rucker: | Luke, for someone who spent much of his childhood being called Reggie Veggie, these puns are quite triggering, so thanks. For our regular listeners. I’m going to keep this break short today because I really want to get to our next guest’s story. Before I toss it back to Luke, I want to ask you to reflect for one minute. This episode and our next we’ll do the same, is asking you to think about the systems that we don’t pay much attention to, but have an outside influence on things we care deeply about. | | It’s easy to put the trash, the recyclables, and for some of you even, the compostable organics to the curb or down the chute and believe from there it’s in good hands and good riddance. But what this conversation is about today is the ways in which giant companies that grow larger through these mergers and acquisitions have so much power in deciding what gets picked up and how these materials are either discarded or repurposed. These decisions have a dramatic influence on our ability or inability to tackle the climate crisis and build healthy, vibrant communities. | | Think about that friend who really cares about environmental justice and preservation and invite them into this reflection and conversation by sharing this episode with them. As I always say, pause and do it right now if you’ll forget, then come right back as Luke takes you through the story of a student activist turned environmental attorney fighting against big waste conglomerates. Stay tuned. | | Luke Gannon: | As Cole explained, the waste industry is dominated by just a few players in the northeast. A company called Casellas dominates the industry. Kirstie Pecci, an environmental lawyer and the executive director at Just Zero, has spent years fighting her hometown’s, landfill expansion and implementing just an equitable zero waste solutions across the nation. Today, Kirstie walks us through her journey of becoming an environmental guru and just why this fight is so important. | | Kirstie Pecci: | I think my story reflects that of a lot of environmentalists, and that is my parents were very connected to our home, to our natural home and then our home. We took great pride and put a lot of work into our home. My parents always composted. I actually live in the same town that I grew up in, in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. It’s a lovely semi-rural community in Central Massachusetts, and we are near enough to the highway, so it’s not too hard to get to Hartford or Boston or Worcester to work, but still always had a nice big yard, lived near the woods, spent a lot of time outside. | | My parents are very, very dedicated to preserving the natural beauty of our world. I would say also that my parents were very cognizant of two things. One, that we are not separate from the environment, so our health is dependent on the health of our environment. The number one indicator of how healthy you’re going to be and how long you’re going to live is where you live, and we know that now. My parents had an intrinsic understanding of that. They’ve always worked to preserve open space. | | I’m the oldest of six children. All six of us are involved in public service in some way, shape or form, whether that’s being involved in local government or on the Trails Committee locally or teaching or myself doing environmental work. It was something that was really instilled in us from the beginning. And again, my parents also were just very much always had a garden, always composted. It wasn’t a question. You didn’t put your food scraps in the trash. You put them over the stonewall in the woods, which is what I still do today. | | Not surprising that I was interested in this. I would also say the other thing that’s kind of funny is that my parents were really involved in the town, they still are, and in good governance, good local governance. They helped, especially my mother, establish our recycling center. We had a little local landfill that was due to close if we didn’t reduce what was put in it. | | If you wanted to use the landfill, to this day this is the case, you have to show up with your recycling separated, sort it by hand yourself, and then only the remainder can go into the trash. And as a result, our little local landfill is still open decades later than it was supposed to be. | | Luke Gannon: | One afternoon, Kirstie and her father were stacking wood in the backyard and her dad asked. | | Kirstie Pecci: | What do you want to do? I was always a good student. I loved school. I love people. Don’t have a shy bone of my body. My dad said, “Well, what do you want to do? What are you going to do?” We talked about it and I really felt like my heart would break if I worked on health or poverty issues, women’s issues, a lot of things that I care about a lot. I just don’t think I could take it. | | We talked about that and my dad said, “Well, you’re too much of a people person to be a writer. You want to be out in the middle of things.” He said, “What about an environmental attorney?” When I applied to school, I said, “I want to be an environmental attorney.” I went to Harvard. | | Luke Gannon: | At Harvard, Kirstie took her environmental knowledge from childhood and worked on the recycling system. She went to law school at Boston College and continued to immerse herself in environmental courses, clubs, and internships. When she moved back to Sturbridge, her hometown, and had kids, she got involved in a fight against expanding her local landfill, | | Kirstie Pecci: | Got a call from a bunch of different neighbors, including people in my family here in Sturbridge, saying the landfill in Southbridge is going to expand. It’s going to be a mega landfill run by Casella Waste. You have to help us stop it. That put me on the path, quite honestly, to working in zero waste. Landfills used to be local landfills, community-based local landfills, and they were small. We didn’t have as much plastic. We didn’t have as much toxic stuff to put into them, and we didn’t have as much stuff. | | We didn’t have as much single use stuff certainly to put into them. And then two things happened. One, the waste became more toxic and then became more waste. And then also meanwhile, we did develop regulations to try and limit the leaking of the landfill and the toxic emissions into the air from the landfill. You can’t stop either of those things, but the EPA regulations, which are then handled by each state, they at least try and control and limit and measure it. While that’s a good thing, what happened is that large corporations took over the landfills and made them into mega landfills. | | Now, what happened with what we’ve seen is that large corporations like Casella Waste, which has pretty much a monopoly in the Northeast in some parts, especially Vermont and other places, on certain aspects of recycling and composting and waste disposal along with Waste Management, Republic, there’s a few big players in every region. Of course, then there’s the incinerator companies. | | But the large landfill companies, what they did is they found impoverished communities or communities where the landfill was in trouble, meaning that it was clearly leaking and unlined, it was creating a lot of odor problems, and they took that landfill and either purchased it from the private local owner or they purchased it or decided to run it for the city or town that the landfill was in if they were owned before. Sturbridge’s situation, as I referenced before, Sturbridge still owns its landfill. | | Sturbridge still runs its landfill. Sturbridge is a middle class community with a lot of engineers who live locally, et cetera, and we figured out how to limit the landfill. It’s still, I’m sure, not safe, no landfill is safe, but that’s what we did with our landfill. In contrast, the town next to me, Southbridge, Massachusetts, is an environmental justice community. About 25% of the community hails from Puerto Rico, limited access to English, less education. And honestly, it’s a lot of work to keep the town in the black, right? | | In other words, meaning pay the bills, the municipal bills. What one of the town managers decided to do was to take the landfill that was owned by the town and start shipping in construction and demolition materials. Then they have a terrible odor problem. Fires, like week long fires at one point. Then Casella shows up and says, “We’re going to save you. We’re going to solve this problem for you.” Now, the reason that Casella Waste Management and other companies take over existing local landfills is one, it’s easier to get permitting if there’s already a blight on the land, right? | | The agency says, “Well, that’s already contaminated. They’re already screwed, so we might as well let them expand it.” The other reason is that they can never be blamed entirely for the condition of a landfill. In other words, at the Southbridge Landfill, which is about 52 acres large, about 11 acres are unlined. Anytime that there was any groundwater monitoring that showed significant contamination, Casella could point and say, “Oh, it wasn’t us. It was before we ran it. That leaking happened because of an unlined cell. | | It’s not the millions of tons of waste we’re putting in. It’s the tons of waste that happened before we came here in the unlined cell.” It’s very purposeful. And then also, a more impoverished community with less resources, less scientists, less lawyers, less engineers who live there is less likely to fight back. And that’s why the Southbridge Landfill was targeted, to be perfectly honest. | | Luke Gannon: | This story is not unique to Sturbridge. Casella has bought landfills all over the Northeast. Casella’s tactics are exemplary of what these corporations do across the country. Waste behemoths like Waste Management and Republic Services have targeted low income communities and communities of color to expand their services to rake in profit at the expense of the community’s health. | | Kirstie represented over 300 residents from Southbridge and lost. But as is often the case, the game was rigged. Casella had engineered the Board of Health to secure votes and hired the biggest law firm in the region. Kirstie lost the case, but she knew she was winning something bigger. | | Kirstie Pecci: | On the way though, not only did we build a coalition of people who cared about this and educate a coalition of residents who cared about this in all three towns, but we also educated local officials. Officials left office and were elected in because of this. This was very disruptive to the region, as you might believe. That local control and education was crucial going forward. Local officials at the state level too, reps and senators, learned a lot and then also made a lot of connections with state agencies, understood how they worked, and then also journalists. | | Those are kind of the pieces. If you’re fighting a big polluter, whoever they are, you need people power to show up and to show local officials that people care. You need people power to show up so that the agencies will do something because they will not if people don’t show up. To be perfectly honest, they have too much on their plates already. You need to educate folks as to why what’s happening is dangerous. | | Luke Gannon: | In 2015, Casella wanted to expand the landfill again. Fortunately, the coalition of residents, lawyers, activists, engineers, and scientists were able to stop it. But as Kirstie explains, winning the fight against waste will take more than winning individual battles. It requires tackling how big we let these waste companies get to begin with. | | Kirstie Pecci: | The one problem is we’ve accepted the bigness of our waste problem, and the money being made is based on that tonnage. When you build an incinerator, you need to feed the beast. The sagas incinerator has been running since 1974. I’ve been fighting it for years because once it’s built, you can’t shut it down. You got to pay the bills every year. You have to create a certain amount of trash to go into it. Landfill and incinerator companies get paid by the ton. They do not want that tonnage should go away. | | If you say to them, “I’m going to put a bottle bill in place in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I’m going to expand it,” or in Maryland, we’ve been talking to people there about putting a bottle bill in place, a brand new bottle bill. A bottle bill is a deposit return system or a bottle can return for money system where there’s a deposit on the bottle or can. The consumer pays an extra 10 cents and then gets that 10 cents back when they return their bottle or can, and then they’re recycled. | | It’s also in the United States, it could be the basis for a refill program, which is really how we get rid of plastic is have glass refillable bottles. That’s the cheapest way and also the best way to get our drinks. There’s no more plastic in our drinks, but also it uses a lot less resources to ship glass bottles back and forth, good local jobs to wash them, and then have them come back to me and be refilled. A nice local job refilling, you’re not shipping these drinks across the country. And then also, again, lightest impact on the environment and the climate. | | That’s what a bottle bill is. Maryland should have a bottle bill. Massachusetts should have a bigger, better, more modern bottle bill. When you talk about passing a bottle bill, who shows up in opposition? Well, Casella Waste showed up at the hearing here in Massachusetts to expand it because they don’t want that tonnage to leave their landfilling or their recycling. | | Because what Casella has done, and this is getting the second part I was going to say, Casella has purchased what are called the material recycling facilities, the sorting facilities, as well as transfer stations, as well as small recycling companies to make sure that they can dictate what is happening, and what that means is dictating the price. In Massachusetts, cities and towns are paying 70, $90, maybe even $100 per ton for curbside recycling and somewhere between 90 and $125 for curbside trash per ton. | | That bigness is what the business model is based on. The bigger the company like Waste Management or Casella or Republic or Covanta or Wheelabrator, which now calls themselves WIN, if you can believe it, Waste Innovations, those companies, the bigger they are, the more tons they want you to produce. They’re going exactly the opposite up to the waste hierarchy, which is reduce, then reuse, then recycle, right? We see the bigness is the big problem. Now, is everything going to be local? | | No, but I don’t need everything to be local. Some examples of local waste to deal with the trash problem, 25 to 33% of it is compostable. It’s food. It’s yard waste. That stuff, very local. You don’t want to be shipping heavy, wet, stinky food trash all over the place. You want it to be handled local. A great source of local jobs and a great source of local clean soil that you can keep your eye on and make sure it’s clean and then have it being used on your local farms, on your local gardens, on your local parks. | | That’s what we want. Big is not better if you’re going to be trying to make as much money as possible off of every time, which is what the big company’s try and do. | | Luke Gannon: | The giants that we’ve spoken of today, Waste Management, Republic Services, Casella, and Waste Connections, will use any tactic despite its negative effect on the environment or the health of residents to reap profit. Their size allows them to do this. Kirstie’s book recommendation provides a humorous and hopeful anecdote to this daunting work. | | Kirstie Pecci: | I spend every day reading reports and articles, and obviously there’s a lot of skimming. There’s a lot of redundancy in everything that we do to a certain extent. But I spend every day reading some really tough stuff about PFAS in loon eggs was the article I was reading about today in New Hampshire. There’s some really tough stuff out there. My antidote to that so that I don’t lose my mind is to read romance novels and fantasy novels to disengaged. The book that inspires me that I think everybody should go read is by Sir Terry Pratchett and it’s called The Wee Free Men. | | First of all, you should read it because it’s funny as hell. It’s a really funny book. I just sent it to a friend of mine who had COVID because as I said to her, the book is about a girl who steps up to protect her home, and that’s at the core of all of us. That is at the core of all of us. It’s about stepping up and with your friends and with other people that you are sustained by who you’re taking care of and they’re taking care of you as you do this work together arm in arm, stepping up and protecting our homes and saying, “This is not okay.” | | Everybody deserves a clean place to live, a safe place to live where they can take care of their families. Read The Wee Free Men. Learn how Tiffany Aching becomes a witch so that she can do that in her community and embrace your own witchiness and do that in your community and do it your own way. Because some people like to read and write and show up for podcasts, and some people like to show up at meetings, and some people like to call their legislator. We need everybody to do all those little bits. If everybody does their part, then we can win because we’re right. | | Luke Gannon: | This episode has been so thought-provoking. Thank you so much, Kirstie Pecci and Cole Rosengren for your stories and knowledge. | | Reggie Rucker: | Yes, thank you both. Thanks to all of you for listening all the way to the end. I assume that means you like this episode, so please share with even just one person you think will enjoy it too. We have a goal of 10,000 listens for this episode. Help us get there. If you’re not a subscriber to the podcast yet, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you know when every new episode drops. Of course, your donations are essential to help us keep this podcast going and support the research and resources that we make available on our website for free. | | You’re truly welcome and appreciate it all. And last, if you have feedback for us or want to share a story about how your community approaches this issue, send us an email to buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. We’d love to share these on a special mailbag episode one day. We’ll keep an eye out. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. This podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank. The music for this season is also composed by Andrew Frank. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power. |
Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by sharing Building Local Power with your family and friends. We would love your feedback. Please email buildinglocalpower@ilsr.org. Subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSSMusic Credit: Andrew Frank
Photo Credit: Em McPhie, ILSR’s Digital Communications Manager
Podcast produced by Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon
Podcast edited by Luke Gannon and Andrew Frank
Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.
Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.
A brewer details the importance of creativity, community, and empowerment in the male-dominated brewing industry and highlights the struggles faced by smaller breweries. … Read More
A brewer details the importance of creativity, community, and empowerment in the male-dominated brewing industry and highlights the struggles faced by smaller breweries. … Read More
Our new season, How To Get Away With Merger, shatters the deceptive facade often employed by merging companies that falsely claim their consolidation will benefit consumers.… Read More
Chris Noble, the Director of Organizing at Health Access, and Allison Hardt, the Advocacy Manager at T1 International, share their personal experiences accessing life-saving medication in America. Stacy Mitchell delves into the hidden world of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — their role in the pharmaceutical industry and how their practices hinder people like Chris and Allison from obtaining essential medicines at reasonable prices.… Read More
Kay Eady and Ry Marcattilio dive into the lack of broadband access in the rural South, shedding light on the consequences it holds for individuals seeking telehealth services.… Read More
Rose Thelen shares her story of working with the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign and successfully mobilizing hundreds of concerned residents in an effort to shut down the Minnesota Sherco coal-fired power plant. Tyson Slocum joins the second half of the episode to discuss how private equity firms across the country have been acquiring and sustaining coal plants like the ones Rose is fighting against.… Read More
Jasmine Harris, a Louisville Tenant Organizer, turned to activism after her roof started caving in to ensure that every resident in Louisville has safe and affordable housing. Tara Raghuveer, Executive Director of Kansas City Tenants, discusses how private equity firms exploit the housing market and government reforms to protect tenants' rights.… Read More
In this episode of Building Local Power, three community composters detail how the biggest challenge in developing their program is funding. Jessica Toth joins the second half of the episode to outline how the very people implementing solutions to lessen our carbon footprint — while providing jobs and education in a circular food system — are underfunded.… Read More
Twenty-five years ago, there were over 2,000 commercial shrimp boats in Mississippi. Today, that number has fallen to around 200. This trend is not unique to Mississippi: Across U.S. coastlines, commercial fisherfolk are seeing their way of life disappear.… Read More
The rapid consolidation of agriculture across the U.S. has obliterated many small and mid-size farms and has posed monumental challenges for small farmers and consumers alike. On this episode, an onion farmer tells his story of how small and mid-size farmers across the country are going extinct. Sarah Carden weaves his story with the necessary policy decisions to build a more equitable farming system. … Read More
Aaron Johnson, founder and owner of Oasis Fresh Market in North Tulsa, Oklahoma, tells his journey of opening a grocery store to provide a refuge, safe place, and shelter to a community that had been a food desert for fourteen years. On the second half of the episode, Stacy Mitchell explains the policy decisions that have led to an increasingly consolidated grocery sector and the steps to take to support locally-owned, community-centric grocery models. … Read More
Dr. Perryman, a life-long Toledo resident, tells his story of leading a religious, social, and political movement to empower his community and fight against dollar store proliferation. Kennedy Smith weaves Dr. Perryman's story into the national fight against dollar stores. She notes the harms that dollar stores inflict as well as the strategies communities can use to battle them. … Read More
For our final Building Local Power episode of 2022, we invited Co-Founder, David Morris, to offer a history lesson on the self-reliance framework that underpins ILSR’s work. He discusses how that framework has evolved over four-plus decades, the organization’s inherent aversion to bigness, and the successes and hardships of ILSR’s early years. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, Christopher Mitchell and Sean Gonsalves talk about the work that immediately lies ahead for the broad array of communities seeking to free themselves from the unbridled power of monopolistic Internet providers.… Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, three members of ILSR’s Independent Business team, Lauren Gellatly, Katy Milani, and Kennedy Smith, answer: What challenges are small, independent businesses facing? And what legislative solutions are on the way? … Read More
The three members from ILSR's energy team engage in a riveting conversation on the biggest energy stories from 2022, including the Inflation Reduction Act’s big funding for solar, the antimonopoly focus in the Biden administration, how utility companies are continuing to use their financial power to lobby against energy, and a new tool designed to bring distributed solar to more communities.… Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, members of the Composting for Community team, Brenda Platt and Clarissa Libertelli, explain how their accomplishments in 2022 have impacted communities across the U.S. and forged a more sustainable future. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, Josh Ewing, Director of the Rural Climate Partnership, explains how we must put rural America at the forefront of the clean energy transition. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power Alejandro Roark, the Chief of Consumer and Governmental Affairs at the FCC tells a captivating journey of his career from working at the Hispanic Technology and Telecommunications Partnership all the way to his current career at the Federal Communications Commission. He speaks about his LGBTQ inclusion work, racial and economic justice in the telecommunications sector, collective action, and how the ACP is filling an immediate and vital need. ILSR's Sean Gonsalves weighs in on how to strategize for longer term Internet solutions that will make our broadband economy more fair and equitable.… Read More
This week on Building Local Power, we are joined by Brandi Collins-Dexter, author of Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and our Political Future and Stacy Mitchell, Co-Director of ILSR. We engage in a riveting conversation on how political parties have monopolistic tendencies, how Big Tech has dominated mainstream media, and the future of Black-owned and led businesses in America. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, Bloomberg reporter, Linda Poon joins us to talk about how cities are [mis]managing rat infestations. We dive into the decline and spike in rat populations during and after the pandemic, cities' solutions to mitigating rat infestations, and how to shift the public focus from a problem with rats to a more proactive and thoughtful approach to how we discard food.… Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, Rakeen Mabud the Chief Economist at Groundwork Collaborative and Ron Knox, Senior Researcher and Writer at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, take us on a riveting journey exposing the story of inflation that most economists don't want to tell.… Read More
The pandemic exacerbated the deeply rooted issues in cities around the nation — but the youth of Worcester, Massachusetts, decided that they wanted to enact change to create a better now. Their action lead to the formation of the Worcester Youth Cooperatives. On this episode of Building Local Power, we are joined by two youth collaborators Mario Harper and Samuel Posner and an adult ally Addison Turner.… Read More
What can you win if you fail? Minneapolis has a unique story of its path towards clean energy. Although Minneapolis failed to get a public utility on their first significant push, they ultimately made a deal requiring utilities to engage the local government and residents more in their operations. So despite their public power pursuit not … Read More
Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon are joined by guests Shayna Englin and DeAnne Cuellar who discuss how the digital divide is closely tied to housing, healthcare, immigration, and civic education concerns. As the pandemic moved everything online, they explained, we realized that connectivity is an issue that affects the entire human ecosystem. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, hosts Reggie Rucker and Luke Gannon are joined by the Director and Project Manager of the Composting for Community Initiative, Brenda Platt and Linda Bilsens Brolis respectively. They discuss waste imperialism, composting equity, and the necessary paradigm shift within our consumer culture.… Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by her colleagues John Farrell, Stacy Mitchell, and Ron Knox, a where they discuss the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission's plan to overhaul their merger guidelines. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by members of ILSR's Community Broadband Networks team: Ry Marcattilio-McCracken, Sean Gonsalves, and Christine Parker. They discuss the importance of mapping for building broadband networks.… Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by several ILSR colleagues: Susan R. Holmberg, Senior Researcher and Editor for the Independent Business initiative; Katie Kienbaum, Senior Researcher for the Energy Democracy initiative; and Sophia Jones, a Fellow with the Composting for Community initiative.… Read More
In this episode of Building Local Power, Jess Del Fiacco and Neil Seldman are joined by several guests who are involved in the canning community. Canners, also called waste pickers or scrappers, collect recyclable materials such as cans and bottles from the streets and redeem them at recycling centers. … Read More
On this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast, ILSR's John Farrell is joined by Michael Murray, President of Mission Data. … Read More
Leah Douglas is a reporter at Reuters covering the politics of food, agriculture, and the environment. Douglas discusses how the poultry industry is structured by contract production, how dairy farms are the bedrock for many rural communities, and Earl Butz's conviction for farmers to plant "fence row to fence row" to enable economic food production. … Read More
On this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast, Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Stacy Mitchell and Arlene Martínez who discuss the use of nondisclosure agreements, the acceleration of mega-deals during the pandemic, and what true economic development looks like. … Read More
Listen to highlights from a recent ILSR event called "The Progressive Fight for Small Business" featuring Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal and White House Advisor Tim Wu. … Read More
On this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast, Jess Del Fiacco is joined by John Farrell and guest Ari Peskoe who is the director of the energy law initiative at Harvard Law School. They discuss the acts that Congress has passed to increase (but hasn't) competition in electric utilities, the four orders the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) ruled between 1996 and 2011, and the cost utility's evading competitive processes has on consumers. … Read More
Harry First, law professor and co-director of New York University’s Competition, Innovation, and Information Law Program discusses moving antitrust away from a technocratic approach, the politicization of law enforcement, and how to reinvigorate strong antitrust legislation. … Read More
On this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by her colleague Brenda Platt who leads the Composting Initiative and guests Sarah Boltwala-Mesina, Monique Figueiredo, and Kourtnii Brown who each run composting programs. They discuss solid waste franchising and how it impacts community composting. … Read More
Kevin Erickson, Director of the Future of Music Coalition discusses how music is being impacted by monopoly power and what kind of marketplace breeds broad participation.… Read More
On this episode of the Building Local Power Podcast, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by her colleagues on the broadband team, DeAnne Cuellar and Sean Gonsalves. They discuss where the bulk of the broadband funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is geared towards and how to engage local champions to create community broadband strategies. … Read More
In this miniseries, we return to our most insightful podcast conversations. These five minute episodes highlight critical themes that are still relevant today. Jeremy Greer and Solana Rice argue for organizers of color to be embedded and centered in the antimonopoly fight.… Read More
In this episode of Building Local Power, we share a recording of ILSR's recent event Democratizing Power: New Citizen Initiatives Challenge Monopoly Electric Utilities. Across the country, powerful utilities are actively blocking decentralized solar energy, degrading the reliability of the power lines even as they raise prices, and failing to make the grid investments needed for a clean, carbon-free future. Listen to ILSR's Stacy Mitchell and John Farrell facilitate conversations with the advocates who are leading the movement to take back control from electric utility monopolies. … Read More
In this miniseries, we return to our most insightful podcast conversations. These five minute episodes highlight critical themes that are still relevant today. Alec MacGillis discusses how economic concentration leads to regional disparity. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by John Farrell, ILSR Co-Director, and Ron Knox, Senior Researcher with ILSR's Independent Business initiative. They take a look back at ILSR's work in 2021 and share big wins, challenges, and interesting trends from the year.… Read More
In this miniseries, we return to our most insightful podcast conversations. These five minute episodes highlight critical themes that are still relevant today. Zephyr Teachout and Stacy Mitchell discuss the increased recognition of the intersection between race and antimonopoly. … Read More
On this episode of the Building Local Power podcast, ILSR Co-Director John Farrell speaks with Luis Reyes, General Manager of the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative in New Mexico. John and Luis discuss the many benefits of distributing solar power through the community and Kit Carson's plan to provide members 100% of their daytime electricity from local solar projects.… Read More
In this miniseries, we return to our most insightful podcast conversations. These five minute episodes highlight critical themes that are still relevant today. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, ILSR's Linda Bilsens Brolis and Sophia Hosain speak with Emma Jagoz, owner of Moon Valley Farm in Maryland. Their discussion focuses on the importance of supporting local food systems and how Emma's farm is operated with community and sustainability in mind.… Read More
On this episode of the Building Local Power podcast, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by two members of ILSR's Community Broadband Networks initiative: Sean Gonsalves and Emma Gautier. They discuss new research they've been working on, including tracking how communities are spending federal infrastructure money on broadband projects and why shopping for a new Internet service is such a frustrating process. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR's Brenda Platt are joined by Jacob Hannah, Conservation Director at Coalfield Development. Coalfield Development works across many sectors -- solar energy, agriculture, manufacturing, deconstruction, reuse, and more -- as it pursues its mission of rebuilding the Appalachian economy. … Read More
In this episode of Building Local Power, ILSR Co-Director John Farrell is joined by Chris Villarreal, President of Plugged In Strategies and an Associate Fellow with the R Street Institute. Their discussion focuses on monopoly power in the energy sector, and how lack of competition impacts consumers and stands in the way of progress. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell interview Chuck Marohn, President of Strong Towns. Chuck is also the author of the new book Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town, which explores what conventional transportation planning is costing our communities. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Neil Seldman, Director of ILSR’s Waste to Wealth initiative. Jess and Neil interview Gary Liss, Vice President of Zero Waste USA, and Bob Gedert, President of the National Recycling Coalition, about the Recycling Is Infrastructure Too (RIIT) campaign and the proposed American Recycling Infrastructure Plan (ARIP).… Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Ry Marcattilio-McCracken and Sean Gonsalves, Senior Researchers with ILSR’s Community Broadband initiative, as well as Christopher Ali, an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Christopher discusses his new book Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity and recent news in the broadband policy space.… Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco, ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell, and Senior Researcher Kennedy Smith are joined by Ilana Preuss, the founder of Recast City, a firm that works with city officials and local leaders to integrate space for small manufacturers into placed-based development projects.… Read More
John Farrell, Director of ILSR's Energy Democracy initiative, interviews Representative Seth Berry, House Chair of the Maine Legislature's Joint Standing Committee on Energy, Utilities, and Technology. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco and Neil Seldman, Director of ILSR's Waste to Wealth initiative, interview three zero waste advocates from Gainesville, Fla. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by ILSR's Linda Bilsens Brolis and Amanda Cather of the Million Acre Challenge to discuss regenerative agriculture. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, ILSR's John Farrell, Stacy Mitchell, and Christopher Mitchell discuss some of the exciting things happening in different sectors of ILSR's work. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell are joined by Solana Rice and Jeremie Greer of Liberation in a Generation. They discuss their recent publication Anti-Monopoly Activism: Reclaiming Power through Racial Justice. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, ILSR Co-Director John Farrell interviews Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Energy Justice program. … Read More
In this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by three ILSR colleagues to discuss recent news and upcoming policy decisions that could have major ramifications on local-level solutions. … Read More
ILSR's Jess Del Fiacco and Brenda Platt are joined by Tom Gilbert of Black Dirt Farm and Lor Holmes of the CERO Cooperative. Their discussion focuses on the need to support local and distributed infrastructure for food scrap recycling and composting.… Read More
Small business owners Danny Caine and Natasha Amott discuss Small Business Rising, a coalition that is calling on federal policymakers to reign in monopoly power.… Read More
Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Christopher Mitchell and Christopher Ali, Associate Professor at the University of Virginia. Their conversation focuses around the idea of what it means to be local during a time when more and more pieces of our lives are shifting online. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell are joined by Brad Lander, who represents Brooklyn's 39th District on the New York City Council. Brad shares his perspective on how the pandemic has affected NYC neighborhoods. … Read More
LSR Co-Director John Farrell speaks with John Romankiewicz, Senior Analyst for the Beyond Coal Campaign at Sierra Club. Their discussion focuses on a new report from the Sierra Club called The Dirty Truth About Utility Climate Pledges, which takes an in-depth look at electric utilities' public commitments to lower carbon emissions. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell are joined by award-winning journalist Alec MacGillis to discuss his new book, Fulfillment. Their conversation focuses on how the shift toward online shopping — led by Amazon — has reshaped America. … Read More
Gena McKinley of Austin, Texas, discusses the economic and environmental benefits of the city's Circular Economy Program — including highlights from a recent economic impact report that found it resulted in more than $1.1 billion in total economic activity and approximately 6,300 permanent jobs.… Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by three members of ILSR's broadband team to discuss new resources that focus on tribal broadband projects and municipal broadband projects throughout the country. … Read More
John Farrell, Co-Director of ILSR, interviews Leslie Glustrom, founding member of Clean Energy Action about how we can equitably transition to a clean energy future. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Neil Seldman and Captain Charles Moore, author of Plastic Ocean, to discuss Moore's his vision for turning landfills into "resource recovery parks."… Read More
From small business relief to a solar homes stimulus, we look ahead to policy opportunities in the new year and beyond in this episode of Building Local Power. … Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by ILSR staff members John Farrell, Christopher Mitchell, and Ron Knox to discuss the 2020 election and what the results may mean for ILSR's work.… Read More
Host John Farrell interviews Jill Mangaliman of Got Green and Abigail Juaner of Puget Sound Sage about Seattle's JumpStart tax. The tax will be used to fund local projects centered around affordable housing and the city's Green New Deal. … Read More
Stacy Mitchell and Ron Knox dig into the new report from the House Antitrust Subcommittee on monopoly power in digital markets.… Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Denzel Mitchell, Deputy Director of the Baltimore Farm Alliance, and Sophia Hosain, leader of ILSR’s composting work in Baltimore.… Read More
ILSR's Christopher Mitchell interviews Rebecca Woodbury and Air Gallegos, who helped lead a local effort to build a Wi-Fi mesh network to connect residents in the Canal neighborhood of San Rafael, Calif.… Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco talks with John Farrell, Director of ILSR's Energy Democracy Initiative, about how cities are taking action around climate change.… Read More
Zephyr Teachout, author of the new book Break 'Em Up, shares her thoughts on building an antimonopoly movement, what she finds encouraging and discouraging in our current moment, and how she approaches antimonopoly work as a democracy activist.… Read More
ILSR's Stacy Mitchell and Ron Knox discuss the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee's recent hearing on monopoly power in online platforms, which featured testimony from the CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. The hearing was part of an in-depth, year-long investigation of anti-competitive behavior in these companies — the first time in more than 40 years that Congress has conducted a detailed investigation of monopoly power. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, David Dayen discusses his latest book, Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power, which tells the story of the daily impact of monopoly power on Americans’ lives. … Read More
In this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Zach Freed, researcher with ILSR's Independent Business initiative, and John Farrell, ILSR co-director. The three discuss the Fighting Monopoly Power guide, ILSR's latest release, which spans the banking, broadband, electricity, food and farming, pharmacy, small business, and waste sectors. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, John Farrell, ILSR Co-Director and Director of the Energy Democracy initiative, interviews Scott Hempling, a lawyer and professor with decades of experience working on utility regulatory issues. Scott and John talk about why energy utilities were once considered to be "natural monopolies," and how that assumption is being challenged by new energy technologies and the push for more choice in the energy market.… Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Christopher Mitchell, director of ILSR's Community Broadband Initiative, and Representative Seth Berry of Maine.… Read More
In this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by Brenda Platt, Director of ILSR's Composting for Community Initiative, and Kesiah Bascom, founder of OffBeet Compost.… Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco talks with Kennedy Smith, Senior Researcher with ILSR's Independent Business initiative, about efforts at the state and local level to support small businesses affected by the pandemic.… Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR Co-Director John Farrell speak with Gina Schaefer, ILSR board member and owner of A Few Cool Hardware Stores in the D.C. area. Gina talks a little about how she got into the hardware business and explains how they have adapted operations to safely serve customers during the pandemic.… Read More
Chris, John, Stacy, and Jess discuss the bumpy rollout of federal relief funding for America's small businesses, which are facing an unprecedented crisis in the COVID-19 pandemic. … Read More
Host Christopher Mitchell speaks with Fordham Law School Professor Nestor Davidson and National League of Cities Research Director Christiana McFarland about a recent report on home rule. … Read More
Host Zach Freed speaks with Jim Hrncir, owner of Las Colinas Pharmacy in Irving, Texas. Zach and Jim discuss how independent pharmacies are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. … Read More
Jess Del Fiacco talks with ILSR Co-Director John Farrell about recent publications from ILSR's Energy Democracy initiative, including the 2020 Community Power Scorecard and a report on community choice energy. … Read More
Stacy Mitchell speaks with Sandy Grodin, a small business owner, about the catastrophic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on small businesses across the country. … Read More
On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco talks with Stacy Mitchell and Christopher Mitchell about how communities are responding to the unprecedented challenge of Covid-19. The pandemic is already drastically impacting local businesses, and is on track to further exacerbate existing inequalities. … Read More
In this episode of Building Local Power, host Brenda Platt speaks with Elsa Higby and Aleks Jagiello of the Queens Botanical Garden Farm and Compost Site.… Read More
Host Christopher Mitchell is joined by ILSR Co-Founder David Morris for a wide-ranging conversation about whether or not modern populist movements are tied to concerns about centralized control. … Read More
Host Stacy Mitchell talks with Harry First about how competition policy has become captured by technocratic lawyers and economists, and strayed from its roots as a political movement for economic justice.… Read More
Host John Farrell is joined by ILSR Senior Fellow David Morris to talk about how new transportation technologies are changing how cities prioritize public space. … Read More
Host Linda Bilsens Brolis sat down with Marvin Hayes of the Baltimore Compost Collective for an inspiring conversation about the future of small-scale composting in Baltimore. Marvin and Linda talk about how the Baltimore Compost Collective is empowering and employing local youth while also revitalizing South Baltimore, creating quality compost and fighting food deserts. … Read More
Host Christopher Mitchell interviews Matt Rantanen and Brandon Makaawaawa, while attending the Internet Society’s 3rd Annual Indigenous Connectivity Summit. … Read More
Host Stacy Mitchell is joined by Sanjukta Paul, law professor and antitrust and labor expert. They delve into how antitrust laws have been used to hamper the efforts of workers and unions while corporations get a blank check.… Read More
Host John Farrell is joined by ILSR's David Morris and Maria McCoy, for a timely discussion on energy policy as it relates to Thanksgiving. First up, John and David chat about the perils of burning turkey waste to generate energy. Then Maria joins John to talk about the health risks of cooking with gas. … Read More
Host Hibba Meraay talks with John Farrell about the new and improved Community Power Toolkit.… Read More
Host Jess Del Fiacco talks with ILSR's John Farrell and Chris Mitchell about the power outages in California and how a distributed energy system could avoid future outages and detrimental fire damage. … Read More
Host Stacy Mitchell is joined by Matt Stoller, fellow at the Open Markets Institute, for a conversation about Matt's new book Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. … Read More
Host John Farrell talks to Berkeley city councilor Kate Harrison and affordable housing developer Sean Armstrong about why cities should help residents to switch from gas to electric for their energy needs. … Read More
This week we’re bringing you a bonus episode from our friends at the Green Dreamer podcast. The episode explores how decentralized energy grids can make communities more resilient against natural disasters, like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.… Read More
Host Hibba Meraay is joined by Brenda Platt to discuss the climate crisis and what communities are doing at the local level to address it.… Read More
Host Chris Mitchell is joined by Kim Haddow for a robust conversation on preemption and Kim's efforts to get power back into the hands of local decision makers.… Read More
Building Local Power Host Zach Freed is joined by ILSR's Stacy Mitchell to discuss the team's most recent efforts in fighting monopolies.… Read More
Host John Farrell speaks with Denise Fairchild. Denise and John delve into the connections between the environment, the economy and equity.… Read More
Host Chris Mitchell interviews two telecommunications experts to get their take on the potential T-Mobile and Sprint merger.… Read More
Host Zach Freed is joined by Kevin Erickson, Director of the Future of Music Coalition, to talk about the music industry's role in the growing anti-monopoly movement. … Read More
Host John Farrell chats with Jonathan Koehn, the Regional Sustainability Director for Boulder, CO. Jonathan explains how Boulder plans to get 100% renewable energy by 2030 and the high value of local control. … Read More
Host John Farrell is joined by David Pomerantz, Executive Director of the Energy and Policy Institute. John and David discuss how electric utility companies have become so powerful and how they use this power to protect their profits rather than the interests of their customers.… Read More
This week, we’re bringing you a bonus episode from one of our friends and favorite podcasters Laura Flanders. … Read More
Host Chris Mitchell is joined by Hannah Rank to discuss how San Francisco's innovative model to provide Internet in public housing can be used as a blueprint by other cities working towards digital inclusion. … Read More
Host Chris Mitchell is joined by ILSR co-directors Stacy Mitchell and John Farrell as well as ILSR co-founder David Morris to discuss the 2020 election and policy platforms that focus on anti-concentration. … Read More
Hosts Stacy Mitchell and Hibba Meraay talk with co-founder David Morris about ILSR's journey over the past 45 years. They reflect on the Institute's growth given changing political, economic and technological contexts.… Read More
Host John Farrell talks with Marcel Castro Sitiriche about the challenges Puerto Rico faces in building a clean and resilient energy system. … Read More
Host Chris Mitchell is joined by ILSR Co-Directors Stacy Mitchell and John Farrell for a conversation on various anti-competitive corporate actions and state policies that might have slipped under your radar. … Read More
Host John Farrell speaks with ILSR’s Marie Donahue and Neil Seldman about the harmful impact of burning trash to generate electricity. The trio dive into ILSR’s recent report Waste Incineration: A Dirty Secret in How States Define Renewable Energy. They also discuss Baltimore’s recent passage of the Clean Air Act.… Read More
Host Christopher Mitchell speaks with broadband champion Susan Crawford. Christopher and Susan talk about bringing better connectivity to rural and urban areas. … Read More
Host Stacy Mitchell speaks with Maurice BP-Weeks, co-director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. Stacy and Maurice discuss how our current economic structure is built on extracting wealth from people of color. … Read More
Host Stacy Mitchell speaks with Leah Douglas, a reporter covering the political economy of food. They discuss corporate concentration in the food industry and the future of American farming. … Read More
Host John Farrell speaks with Minneapolis City Council Member, Jeremy Schroeder, about the city's plans to combat climate change, increase affordable housing, and make sure Minneapolis is accessible to all. … Read More
Host Chris Mitchell speaks with community broadband network pioneer Billy Ray about parallels between the movements for municipal electric utilities and community broadband networks.… Read More
Chris Mitchell is joined by ILSR Co-Directors Stacy Mitchell and John Farrell for a year in review. They discuss developments in the movement against corporate concentration, Amazon's stranglehold on the economy, batteries as a game changer in the energy world, and more. … Read More
Host Brenda Platt speaks with Terry Craghead of Fertile Ground, a worker-owned community composting cooperative. Fertile Ground is building up the local economy by reducing food waste, creating jobs and combatting climate change.… Read More
We talk with Kimber Lanning, founder of Local First Arizona, about her organization's pioneering work to strengthen Arizona's entrepreneurs and its local economy. … Read More