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Reprint from Pioneer Valley Local First.
The BALLE board of directors and staff are pleased to announce their selection of Doug Hammond as the next executive director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. His appointment follows a five-month national search conducted by the firm of Waldron & Company.
“Doug’s the right guy at the right time for BALLE,” said William Shutkin, who guided BALLE as interim executive director for the last nine months and is now chair in sustainable development at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado larger dougBoulder. “He’s got the vision, experience, and leadership to catapult BALLE and its 20,000 sustainability entrepreneurs to the forefront of a new economy and a new era. Doug’s, and BALLE’s, time has come.”

His career as an entrepreneur and self-described community systems engineer spans nearly thirty years of developing businesses and organizations that have at their core a deep commitment to economic justice and sustainability. A founding member of Business for Social Responsibility, a long-term active member of the Social Venture Network, and a founding board member of BALLE, he has served as finance chair and treasurer of our organization since its inception and has performed many key organizational capacity-building functions. In addition he has founded and chaired business alliance networks in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts since 1992, including one of BALLE’s first networks, Pioneer Valley Local First.

“The response to our search for a new executive director was extremely gratifying – through the process we met extraordinary national leaders,” said Michelle Long, board chair. “I’m absolutely delighted to be able to announce Doug Hammond as the right choice for executive leadership as BALLE moves forward to do what we believe is the most exciting and important work of our times.”

In accepting the position, Doug offered these thoughts: “As I prepare for this new role and consider the economic and environmental challenges we face, I am reminded of another role I had the great privilege to provide as a parent of two young daughters. I was their storyteller, and we would gather each evening to conjure up tales full of imagination and possibility. We created a set of characters for whom no situation or set of conditions was insurmountable. Not individual superheroes, but rather common-good contributors who intuitively understood that it was the path of community cooperation that led to greatest achievements. I am mindful of the parallels of those stories to our shared quest today. Epic challenges lie before us as does an urgent call for bold next steps. I’m absolutely confident that it will be through both a strategic and collaborative approach that our vision of local living economies will be fully realized. Together we are a remarkable set of common-good contributors, and as David Korten, a fellow founding BALLE board member, so clearly states in The Great Turning, we indeed are the ones we’ve been waiting for. I am honored to begin this next story with all of you.”

Judy Wicks, BALLE’s co-founder, spoke enthusiastically about the new executive director: “I have worked closely with Doug for fifteen years in the responsible business arena and for the past seven years in taking BALLE from its infancy to a critical force in addressing the dire economic, environmental, and social challenges we face today. Doug has the passion, entreprenuerial know-how, and strategic approach to lead us at this critical juncture. He is committed, heart and soul.”

Doug has outlined ambitious priorities for his first ninety days as executive director that include assessing operational capacities, reaching out to network leaders, meeting with individual and organizational funders and partners, moving forward on BALLE Bold initiatives, and other strategic priorities for the organization. He begins his work for BALLE on October 1 and will move into full-time capacity by January. Doug currently resides in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, and will be moving to San Francisco later this fall.

For those of us from Pioneer Valley Local First in Western Massachusetts, while we are sad to lose Doug to the left coast, we whole-heartedly congratulate him on his new position and feel that BALLE will be very well served by his leadership. Doug, we look forward to continuing to work with you to effectively address the economic and environmental challenges facing communities and local businesses.

Led by Arden Sundari, Structual Yoga Therapist

Open to all students for a multi-dimensional practice to address body, prana, heart, mind and spirit. Students goals of practice help create the format of class. Approach uses therapeutic understanding, gentle dynamic movement coordinated with breath, and adaptations to the individual.

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FOOD, INC.

How much do we know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families? Though our food appears the same-a tomato still looks like a tomato-it has been radically transformed.

In Food, Inc., producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) lift the veil on the U.S. food industry – an industry that has often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihoods of American farmers, the safety of workers and our own environment.

With the use of animation and compelling graphics, the filmmakers expose the highly mechanized, Orwellian underbelly that’s been deliberately hidden from the American consumer.

They reveal how a handful of corporations control our nation’s food supply. Though the companies try to maintain the myth that our food still comes from farms with red barns and white picket fences, our food is actually raised on massive “factory farms” and processed in mega industrial plants.  The animals grow fatter faster and are designed to fit the machines that slaughter them.  Tomatoes are bred to be shipped without bruising and to stay edible for months. The system is highly productive, and Americans are spending less on food than ever before.  But at what cost?

Cattle are given feed that their bodies are not biologically designed to digest, resulting in new strains of the E. coli virus, which sicken roughly 73,000 Americans annually.  And because of the high proliferation of processed foods derived from corn, Americans are facing epidemic levels of diabetes among adults and alarming increases in obesity, especially among children.

And, surprisingly, all of it is happening right under the noses of our government’s regulatory agencies, the USDA and the FDA.  The film exposes a ”revolving door” of executives from giant food corporations in and out of Washington D.C. that has resulted in a lack of oversight and illuminates how this dysfunctional political system often operates at the expense of the American consumer.

In the nation’s heartland, farmers have been silenced – afraid to talk about what’s happening to the nation’s food supply for fear of retaliation and lawsuits from giant corporations.

Foodincmovie

Sustainability

Best Tequila is at Mama Iguana

Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for “fifth of May”) is a regional holiday in Mexico, primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla, with some limited recognition in other parts of Mexico.The holiday commemorates the Mexican army’s unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.The outnumbered Mexicans defeated a much better-equipped French army that had not been defeated in almost 50 years. Cinco de Mayo is not “an obligatory federal holiday” in Mexico, but rather a holiday that can be observed voluntarily.
While Cinco de Mayo has limited significance nationwide in Mexico, the date is observed in the United States and other locations around the world as a celebration of Mexican heritage and pride.A common misconception in the United States is that Cinco de Mayo is Mexico’s Independence Day,which actually is September 16 (dieciséis de septiembre in Spanish),the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico.