BALE (Building A Local Economy) is a community resource center for local economy initiatives in the White River Valley of Vermont; we are intentionally multi-issue in focus and multi-dimensional in our programmatic work. At core, our vision is to build a sustainable culture that can foster the economic and ecological capacity in our communities to thrive, even as the external forces of climate disruption – driven by an economy and culture of dominance and systemic scarcity – threatens our existence as a species. Our work is focused on appropriate scale, valuing the commons, and creating community-driven assets. BALE sees its work, along with many other inspiring collaborators, as building new resilient models grounded in a new story of how we live on the Earth. We know we have so much
to learn, and seeing that so much creativity is awakening in this time, we focus on such things as gratitude, conscious living and valuing what is important to the human spirit (which we know is not money… and not scarcity). Given that perspective, our tasks are to:
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Engage as many folks as possible in the deep reasons for addressing our failing climate and extreme economic inequality; offering intelligent programming that explores a systemic understand of our historical moment and our responsibility to be nothing less than “change agents” in the way we live our lives.
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Build the base of transformative leaders and connect with those now moving into awareness of the challenges we face (increasing that base).
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AND, crucially, build the new models; the new projects (some based on “old” knowledge) that sustain a new, resilient, community-driven experience of the world and our place in it.