Local Dollars, Local Sense Quotes

“an example the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op (SNFC). We have approximately twelve thousand members, and the median income for a family of four in Sacramento County is $52,000. That means that SNFC members earn $624 million per year, over half a billion dollars. We know that people at that income level give 3 percent of their gross income to charity, which means they give away $18.7 million. Who do they give it to? They give it to people that ask them for money.”
― Michael Shuman, Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity--A Resilient Communities Guide

“There’s a tendency for those unfamiliar with cooperatives to look down on them as the leftovers of the mainstream economy, implying that if these ideologically driven people simply reorganized themselves into “normal” private companies, they would be more efficient and productive. In fact, just the opposite is true: Cooperatives often enter into economic activities that private businesses will not take on. The most fertile period of cooperative growth was during the Great Depression. Rural electric cooperatives spread across the American plains when it became clear that other investor-owned and municipally owned utilities were uninterested in wiring up sparsely populated regions. Credit unions, as we’ll soon explore, have seen an upsurge during the recent financial crisis.”
― Michael Shuman, Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity--A Resilient Communities Guide