Taking Stock of Buying Local

Today, we are in the kitchen making chicken stock.  The stock we make today will last us all winter as a base ingredient to make flavorful recipes.   Imagine our big pot on the stove, filled with the ingredients for the stock, the liquid simmering, steam rising with a rich and tasty fragrance. 

Now imagine that the stockpot is our community, and the stew inside represents all of us working and striving to add value to the recipe of love, ways, and means that enrich our households.  The imaginary stockpot is different.  It has a spigot on the bottom that is always stuck open to some degree, running off the broth.  So, to make the recipe, we must continually add at least as much as is flowing out. The ingredients for this recipe are limited to the goods and services that our commerce sells to the world outside our community. This is our challenge, to add more than flows out and keep the makings in the pot longer to increase the quality and flavor.  Over time the runoff in our community has been higher than the input.

Currently, we are approaching the holiday season of potential joy combined with the tension of financial choices.  It might be the best time to practice investing in ourselves and our neighborhood to make a better broth. 

When we buy outside our community, cyber shopping, Mall of America style, we open wide the spigot.  According to the American Independent Business Alliance www.amiba.net/resources/multiplier-effect, when we buy from a local chain or mass merchant, we keep about 43% of the dollar you spend in the community stockpot. However, the best investment is when you buy from local, independently-owned businesses.  This is when you keep 68% of the stock in the pot, give it more time to cook, and allowing enriching the flavor and quantity of this stock we share. It is a delicate balance that is reliant on the small choices we all make every day.   A vibrant local business community adds flavor, character, and improves your financial stock.

There is no price low enough to overcome the cost of buying something that does not bring you joy or deliver value. The value that includes keeping your dollars working in the community pot.  Chicken stock is a recipe where better is more unless you like a tasteless, watery soup.

You have the freedom to choose how you cook. Will you decide to invest in yourself, your household, your neighbors, and your community? 

One Ship - Drifting or Sailing

Would you like to improve the direction of our community? Help us uncover the hidden strengths in our region?  Continue to expand on the unity that we so vigorously exercised earlier this year?  The team that brought you MyMarinetteMenominee is hosting our biggest event yet.  Add your voice to the conversation. Attend the upcoming Regional Branding Summit, Tuesday evening, October 22, at 6 p.m., doors open at 5 p.m., the  Auditorium,  810 Frontage Road, Peshtigo (inside NewLife). Find it - FB@mymarinettemenominee 

Please imagine our region, Marinette & Menominee Counties together, as one ship.  It is a significant ship, equipped with enough compartments and assets to be a manageable, capable, and preferred vessel. We are aboard this ship in open water, working hard to maintain it.  But maintaining and sailing a boat are two different things.  It is not enough to keep a ship; it is the action of sailing that matters.  If we are not sailing, we are adrift, staying afloat, until inevitably running aground with our children and grandchildren left aboard.  Yes, maintaining the ship is foundational, but floating and drifting is not the purpose of the vessel. The use of the boat is to sail with a clear and present purpose. 

Our region’s economic health is rated a low, 436^th out of 530 communities our size in the nation. Yet in comparison, we have a better ship than communities that perform much better.

Our purpose before we entered The Small Business Revolution, was for our participation to help unfurl our sails. We were not awarded the reality show’s top spot, but our purpose persists. Creating our regional brand and the process of branding is the step we would be taking now, no matter what place we were awarded. 

If you are trying to decide how branding is essential, you can define it as all that we do beyond the minimum required: sailing versus drifting. Branding is a process of discovering how we see ourselves reflected in how others see us.  The method of branding will resume where we left off in creating a sustainable power of “Unity in Community” that we discovered with the #MyMarinetteMenominee effort.

We seek to develop a place where youth wants to stay and contribute their talents. A place other’s desire to belong and bring their skills to contribute to our success.  The branding process helps us clarify our purpose.  Branding merges economic and community development. The captains of our ship need to know the clear and present purpose we have for our community.  They need to understand how to invest to achieve a return to economic and relational prosperity.