The world’s dominant supply chain model is broken. Making things in huge factories far away, shipping vast quantities of ‘stuff’ around the world, and throwing products away because no-one knows how to repair them or new ones are cheaper is not remotely sustainable. We need better approaches to production and consumption.

Manufacturing, repair & re-purposing, innovation, and relevant education can and should be happening at the local level, all over the world. Local production ecosystems can flourish when they are connected by modern technologies and global knowledge. There are so many possibilities emerging for different ways of doing production & consumption. The LocalEconomies.org initiative has grown out of the need to share learnings about what works.

More local, circular, and small-scale approaches to manufacturing have benefits for communities, for humanity as a whole, and for the planet. However, many of the organizations experimenting in this area are impact-driven or technology-driven, and have less expertise in developing viable business models. We want to make it easier for these organizations – whether for-profit, not-for-profit, or hybrid – to reach financial sustainability so it is possible to expand their impact. We talk about ‘business models’ in the context of enabling impact, not of extractive profit maximization.