BOULDER COUNTY GOING LOCAL! Campaign

In March 2006, we launched the BOULDER COUNTY GOING LOCAL! Campaign to help build community resilience and strengthen the local economy through partnership, collaboration and engagement. The Campaign sets the theme for a decade-long transition to a stronger, more localized economy in an energy-constrained future.

With its multiple themes, strategies, projects and events, this Campaign presents positive pathways of engaging citizens, communities, business and government to take the far-reaching actions that are required to mitigate the local/regional impacts of peak oil and climate change. Given the likely disruptions ahead resulting from these crises, resilient communities—self-reliant for the greatest possible number of their needs—will be infinitely better prepared than those who are dependent on globalized systems for food, energy, transportation, health, and housing.

Campaign Themes

BUY LOCAL FIRST!
Promoting buying local whenever possible, and being local by supporting local independently-owned businesses

EAT LOCAL!
Supporting local growers, CSAs and farmers’ markets, promoting local restaurants and stores offering locally-grown food; bringing new awareness, energy and vitality to the local food system; promoting closer connections between our communities and those who grow our food

GROW LOCAL!
Developing local food security through flourishing gardens, community greenhouses, and community farms

LOCAL ENERGY!
Catalyzing appropriate community responses to the coming energy crisis, developing sustainable local renewable energy sources

LOCAL CURRENCY!
Channeling flows of local economic energy to match unmet needs with untapped resources while keeping economic power within the local economy

Campaign Goals

• To celebrate and strengthen a renaissance of local, and begin reversing the local effects of economic globalization

• To reweave the fabric of connections that is at the heart of our communities

• To stimulate economic self-reliance based on local production of food, energy, goods and services

• To increase public awareness of the need for community responses to over-reliance on cheap fossil fuels

• To reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions to prepare our communities for an energy-constrained future
• To catalyze community actions that can become working models for other communities

Campaign Strategies

PUBLIC AWARENESS EVENTS
Speakers, panels, documentary films, teach-ins, and community dialogues focused on the five themes of the Campaign

THE GREAT RESKILLING
A curriculum of classes, courses, and workshops to reinvigorate traditional life skills that will be essential in making the transition to a more localized economy and a carbon-constrained future

BUY LOCAL FIRST! CAMPAIGN
Supporting locally-owned independent businesses, promoting buying choices that have dramatic impacts on our community, our economy, and our environment

EAT LOCAL! CAMPAIGN
Bringing new awareness, energy and vitality to the local food system, promoting closer connections between members of the community and those who grow our food

2008-2009 BOULDER COUNTY GOING LOCAL! Resource Guide & Directory
Advertiser-supported all-local magazine featuring directories of the local food system (growers, producers, restaurants, organizations) and locally-owned independent businesses, along with inspiring and educational articles by local writers

A RENAISSANCE OF LOCAL!
County-wide celebration of local food, local energy, and local business, complete with festival, conference and expo (Spring 2009)

2008 CAMPAIGN SPONSORS

2008 CAMPAIGN PARTNERS

BUY LOCAL FIRST!

"Sustainable businesses replace national and internationally produced items with products created locally and regionally, take responsibility for the effects they have on the natural world, create objects of long-term utility whose ultimate use or disposition will not be harmful to future generations, and engage in business practices that are human, worthy, dignified and intrinsically satisfying."

– Paul Hawken Natural Capitalism

• Support local entrepreneurs
• Sustain family farms and ranches
• Create local jobs that stay in our community
• Have greater control over environmental impacts
• Increase sales and tax receipts to finance schools, hospitals, police, arts, transportation, and open spaces
• Maintain a unique sense of place, directly contributing to what will keep our home place alive and special in the long-run
• Maximize the economic multiplier (that means every expenditure of a dollar generates more than a dollar's worth of activity and cascades into a larger number of transactions that enrich the community). Choosing local over non-local has 2-3 times more financial impact in our community, promotes more reinvestment locally, creates quality jobs, and encourages more donations to local charities and causes.

Boulder County's BUY LOCAL FIRST! campaign asks the community to be supportive of local, independently owned businesses. This will help enhance the livability of the community, the stability and diversity of the local economy, and support the retention and expansion of independent, locally owned businesses through increasing awareness about the personal, community, and economic benefits of choosing local first.