Piece by Piece: Grassroots Building Blocks of a Transformed Economy.
by Dawn Nakano and Thad Williamson
Who Is My Neighbor? Economics As If Values Matter
Sojourners, April 1994

Page 4 of 4
Community Empowerment Through Community Audits

As experiments in community ownership and local trading increase, an important question to ask is what "handles" are available to help grassroots movements jump from the level of experimentation to actually challenging the systemic base of local political economies. One possible handle, is "community audits" or "self-studies" which seek to make visible the resource flows, production structure, and social needs of a community.

One city that has experimented with a resources audit approach is St. Paul, MN, through its Homegrown Economy Project. From 1982 to 1986, city officials attempted to "map and rationalize the flow of resources in the local economy" with the intention of identifying opportunities for increasing local ownership. As a result, the city generated proposals for how unused waste materials could be used as substitutes for imported energy sources, how disposed rubber tires could be used as sealants for the asphalt in local roads, and how a local microbrewery using locally grown hops could be started.Unfortunately the Project did not use the audit to target reducing inequalities, and it was a failure for both political and bureaucratic reasons--especially the lack of a serious effort by city officials to involve citizens in the project and generate strong public support. It did, however, show the possibilities for creative innovation when a city assesses its resource base with a specific goal in mind (in this case, increasing local ownership).

In the past 20 years, numerous other cities and neighborhoods, such as East Oakland, South Central Los Angeles, and Chicago have also experimented with forms of community audits. In Chicago, for example, academics have worked with city officials to identify local industries which might be expanded by increasing import replacement. In Oregon, the establishment of a state-run buyer-supplier network (which keeps a list of all the local producers of various goods) has kept millions of dollars within the state economy by connecting Oregon firms with local suppliers they would never have heard of otherwise.

While most audits to date have focused on resource use, the audit concept need not and should not be strictly limited to narrow economic issues. Other types of audits focusing on resource ownership and distribution, time use within the community, and local ecological patterns could also be tremendously useful in reconstructing democratic local economies.

In all cases, however, it is important that the process of effective local economic planning be brought into the open for public debate, and not kept within the province of professional experts (as was the case in St. Paul).

In the future, the most successful audits (from both a political and economic perspective) will be those carried out with a commitment to community-governed, bottom-up planning.

By laying out a common ground of community self-knowledge from which alternative proposals for local economic development could be generated, audits can act as a powerful tool for moving toward a more democratic, cooperative local economy that matches social needs with community capacities.

As traditional models of politics and economics fail to deliver the basis for a vibrant economic and public life at the local level, hundreds of communities have embarked, however haltingly, on alternate paths of community-based economic development. They have begun to change the way residents view themselves in relation to their community and to lay the basis for further development of community economic alternatives.

If the only other choice is to cede the future to continued social, economic, cultural, and moral decay and the failure of business as usual, it is likely that more and more communities will undertake the difficult but potentially joyous work of reenvisioning and reconstructing, piece by piece, a community-sustaining, democratic economic and civic life.

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