January/February 1985 RAIN Page 13 Building a New Economy: Three,Models They say good things come in threes. That was certainly the case when the following three articles ~ame in the mail within the same week. One had been requested, the other two were unsolicited surprises. They cried out to be run together-each was a kind of progress report on a different system of community-wide coordination for building local economies. We had · given each program brief mention before when it was just beginning (ARABLE-RAIN X:2, page 32; Earth Ban~ RAIN X:2, page31, and RAIN X:4, page 26; LETS-RAIN X:S, page 18); each is now entering a new stage in its development and is worthy of a fu.ller description. Each offers us a model of how we can work to build our local economies in a manner consistent with social and ecological responsibility. ' Although each is still.too new to be considered a "proven" model, all three seem to be on their way to success. Such success would herald a new level of maturity and sophistication in the movement for community-based, ecologically-sound social change.-FLS The Association for Regional·Agriru,lture -Building the Local Economy (ARABLE) by Mary Vogel Instead of searching for means to accelerate the drift out of agriculture, we should be searchingfor p,olicies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for gainfu.l occupation to larger nu"':_bers of people, whether it be on a fu.ll-time basis or a part-time basis, and to orient all our actions on the land.towards the three-fold idea of health, beauty, and permanence. E. F. Schumacher · Small.Is Beautifu.l ARABLE, the Association for Regional Agriculture Building the Local Economy, is a novel community investment program creating a rural-urban partnership in the southern Willamette Valley area of Oregon. Organized as·a nonprofit membership association, ARABLE helps provide access to credit.for member borrowers , . within the local agricultural economy. Beyond that, by •increasing coordi~ation among growers, marketers, processors, and consumers, ARABLE hopes to increase the market share for local agriculture, keep urban food dollars in the local economy, maintain and create jobs, and encourage a stable balance between urban and rural econo.mies. Now bei~g launched after 18 months in formation, it has the potential to become a national model of an important means of support for the endangered family farm.
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