Ithaca Local Economy Lab

There is an immigrant family somewhere in Tompkins County who bought their first home in the United States and spent the winter wearing their coats inside. There is a single mom in Hector whose 1850 farmhouse was so cold and drafty that she lost her in-home daycare business. There is a woman with cerebral palsy,...

Most people walk into Gimme! Coffee and order a latte. They don’t think about who owns the espresso machine, who voted on the charitable donation policy, or how the packaging decision got made. After this conversation, they might. Claire Christensen is the Executive Director of Gimme! Coffee — which means she runs the place day...

What If Your Town Printed Its Own Money, and It Actually Worked? In 1991, as the U.S. economy stumbled through recession, a community organizer in Ithaca, New York did something radical: he printed money. Not counterfeit dollars — something more interesting. A labor-backed local currency called Ithaca HOURS, where one note equaled one hour of...

Almost exactly two years before this conversation, Vanessa Weber and Jeremiah Signo overheard something at a flea market in Trumansburg that changed the trajectory of their lives: the owners of Found in Ithaca, a multi-vendor antique and vintage mall, mentioning that they wanted to sell. “Excuse me?” they said, in near unison. Six months later,...

A lot of people grow up thinking they want to own a restaurant one day. Rod Rotondi will tell you that’s one of the hardest ways to build a food business. Packaged goods, sold wholesale to grocery stores and distributors, might be one of the best. Rod is the founder and executive director of Shared...

“When I started selling yarn, my family looked at me askance and said, nobody’s gonna pay twenty-five dollars a skein for yarn when they can go down to Walmart and get five skeins for $25. And I said, I’m not competing with Walmart. My product is totally different from what Walmart’s offering.” Lisa Ferguson is...

“It’s not about patient care anymore. It’s about dollars, from pretty much all angles of the system right now. And that’s really frustrating for patients.” That’s Matt Simone, and he built his entire practice around fixing it. Matt has been in healthcare for over 25 years, the last 19 as a nurse practitioner: family practice...

There’s one question behind everything on this podcast: what would an economy look like if it was designed to take care of people? Better tools help: a currency that works, a co-op that’s fairly owned, financing that doesn’t run through a bank. But host Dia has come to think tools aren’t the whole story. The...