Policy Progress and Coalition Building — Episode 151 of Building Local Power

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On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco is joined by several ILSR colleagues: Susan R. Holmberg, Senior Researcher and Editor for the Independent Business initiative; Katie Kienbaum, Senior Researcher for the Energy Democracy initiative; and Sophia Jones, a Fellow with the Composting for Community initiative.

Highlights of their conversation include:

ILSR’s recent work at the state and local policy level, including dollar store restrictions, New York antitrust legislation, a new model for solar energy, and work around composting and waste reduction in Maryland.
How ILSR builds and works within coalitions made up of diverse partners to develop solutions and make change happen.
How ILSR’s work at the local and federal levels fits together.

“As these dollar chains proliferate across the country, they’re driving out neighborhood grocery stores in both urban and rural communities and that is actually creating food deserts all over the country.” – Susan Holmberg

“The bill in Maryland would create over $30 million of annual statewide grant funds to support waste diversion. That would be funded by a five dollar per ton surcharge on solid waste disposal at Maryland landfills, trash incinerators, and transfer stations. So the bill has a huge potential to be a game changer for spurring waste diversion throughout Maryland.” – Sophia Jones

“We’ve signed on to a petition to the regulatory agency, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking for them to investigate how these large investor owned electric utilities are abusing their monopoly power and they’re doing that to harm solar competition from solar energy and in a way to harm customers as well.” -Katie Kienbaum

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Transcript

Jess Del Fiacco:	Hello and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast dedicated the thought provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I’m Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. For more than 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities or power, wealth, and accountability remain in local hands. And hello everybody. Today, we are going to talk to members of several different ILSR initiatives to give you kind of a snapshot of the work we are doing and are going to be doing at the local and federal policy levels across the country. So with that, let me introduce you to our guests. We’ve got Susan Holmberg who is a senior researcher and editor on our independent business team. We’ve got Katie Kienbaum who is a senior researcher on our energy democracy team. And we have Sophia Jones who is a fellow with our composting for community team. Welcome to Building Local Power guys.
Susan Holmberg:	Thank you. Great to be here.
Sophia Jones:	Thank you.
Katie Kienbaum:	Excited to chat more with everyone.
Jess Del Fiacco:	So I think let’s start with just like the big overview question, which is what’s your team up to at the local level, local or state level, in terms of the policies you’re working on and are there any recent wins or important progress that you’ve made recently? And I’m going to pick Katie to start.
Katie Kienbaum:	Yeah. So at the state and local level, my answers are going to be national, but they are focused on the state and local level. So one thing that we’ve been up to is that we’re going to release our 50 state distributed solar model. It’s a tool that allows you to forecast how many homeowners are going to adopt solar based on different factors like the cost of it, how much they’re going to be paid for the solar energy they generate and send back the electrical grid. So that’s one thing coming out soon. Just to connect it to ILSR’s focus on challenging monopolies and corporate power that connects because utilities tend to underestimate the value and also the popularity and the growth of distributed solar for planning purposes when they’re planning out how much energy they’re going to need to procure in the future and what they’re going to need to build to get that.
Katie Kienbaum:	So we’ve developed this model based on one that some other partners created that will give a tool that advocates to kind of challenge that narrative that utilities are pushing in terms of, “We need to build big power plants. We need to do all this,” and give advocates an opportunity to challenge those estimates of utilities in terms of how much distributed solar, local rooftop solar, they think we’re going to see and also give advocates a way to propose potentially more cost effective solutions in the form of utilities supporting rooftop solar for their customers. There’s a lot of evidence out there that the lowest cost, cleanest grid is actually going to include a lot of rooftop solar. So that’s one important aspect of this. We did use this model ourselves in a filing with the state utilities commission here in Minnesota for a couple of our local utilities.
Katie Kienbaum:	So we’re really hoping to see that grow and to be a useful tool for advocates in other states as well with their local utilities. So folks should definitely sign up for our newsletter to hear more about that when it’s released. One other thing we’re working on that kind of ties in is we’re doing some research into how quickly utilities process applications for rooftop solar customers to connect their solar system to the grid and how quickly they’re able to process those applications. Utilities monopolize access to the grid and have control over that and we believe that in some cases, some utilities might intentionally slow down the ability of their customers to connect to the electric grid.
Katie Kienbaum:	So we’re hoping to kind of like put an eye on how that might vary because it can really vary from maybe it’s like no days or a couple days to it can take like weeks or months for customers to get their system up and connected to the electric grid. We’re trying to put an eye on how utilities might take advantage of their status as these energy monopolies to stand in the way of solutions like rooftop solar that can really benefit their customers and benefit society as a whole.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Thanks, Katie. I’m guessing we’ll probably dive a little bit deeper into some of the things you touched on in that answer once we hear from other folks. So how about Sue? What’s the independent business team up to lately?
Susan Holmberg:	Yeah. At the local level, Kennedy Smith is leading our work, helping communities fight the encroachment of dollar stores. Just as some background, so as these dollar chains proliferate across the country, they’re driving out neighborhood grocery stores in both urban and rural communities and that is actually creating food deserts all over the country. So we have been getting increasingly more requests from community leaders for information and direct assistance. And what we’re seeing, as Kennedy is seeing especially as she is providing all this assistance, is that more communities are succeeding in either limiting dollar store development or in keeping dollar stores out of their communities altogether. So just two very recent examples. The city of Cleveland passed an ordinance prohibiting new dollar stores from opening within two miles of an existing dollar store. At the same time, the city of Little Rock enacted a nine month moratorium on dollar store development while the city leaders just take the time to kind of explore their options about what they want grocery services to look like in their communities.
Susan Holmberg:	At the state level, we are a very active partner in a coalition called New Yorkers for a Fair Economy, which is pushing the state legislature to pass a sweeping antitrust bill called the 21st Century Antitrust Act. This bill is really, really exciting because it would make New York the first state in the country to clearly define what corporate dominance looks like. It would also be the first antitrust law in the US to explicitly include the welfare of workers. So the bill is a great model for other states in confronting outsized corporate power. It would also make New York a national leader in the growing anti-monopoly movement.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Thanks Sue. And Sophia, what’s the composting team up to?
Sophia Jones:	Yeah. Thanks Jess. So the composting team has actually been doing most of our policy work on the state and local level. So I do have a few buckets of work to share with you all today. Probably our biggest project in our policy work started with research that I was doing on policies that direct significant funding to waste diversion projects. And these include like reuse, repair, recycling, and composting, of course. And they’re directing this funding by establishing a surcharge on waste disposal. So that is essentially just an added fee on top of the tipping fees that waste haulers pay to dump their waste at landfills. So this system, this model, is just encouraging a more circular approach to waste and sustainability where the fees used to kind of disincentivize waste disposal are put towards investment in waste diversion. So this research led us to drafting a bill for Maryland.
Sophia Jones:	We worked with delegate Regina Boyce from Baltimore to introduce it in Maryland’s 2022 legislative session. A lot of our team is based in and around Maryland so we use our connections there to focus a lot of our policy work within the state. And for this bill we basically just took the best features of the best existing policies that I researched and adapted it into a format tailored to Maryland. So what makes the bill attractive is that the proposed grant programs have a built in funding mechanism rather than just mandating the state to allocate part of their own budget. So in Maryland’s case, that bill would create over $30 million of annual statewide grant funds to support waste diversion. That would be funded by a five dollar per ton surcharge on solid waste disposal at Maryland landfills, trash incinerators, and transfer stations. So the bill has a huge potential to be a game changer for spurring waste diversion throughout Maryland.
Sophia Jones:	My team, of course, is particularly interested in getting more infrastructure for food scrap composting. So we did include a pocket of funding to go to farmers to help them get the equipment and infrastructure that they need to produce and use compost on their farmland. Yeah. So we did a lot of work on the bill language itself. We also produced outreach materials, rallied support for the bill, testified at the committee hearing. So lots of exciting work and all those materials are available on our website. And during the legislative session unfortunately this bill got held off and ended up not moving out of committee, but the good news is that the bill received a lot of support and it’s expected to get taken up again next year, which we are very much looking forward to and we’re already gearing up for that. I will say that a bill that did pass this year in Maryland is one that created a school compost and food waste reduction grants program.
Sophia Jones:	And our team provided some advice on the bill language, which included advocating to keep language in that included a wide range of eligible grant recipients. And we also provided testimony on those bill hearings. And this is an exciting bill because it gets youth involved and exposed to composting and food waste reduction while also addressing food waste in schools. So, yeah. We’re excited to see schools in Maryland start to implement some of these food waste reduction practices. We’ve also been doing a lot of work to suppress, quote unquote, bad recycling bills from passing. More specifically, there have been a handful of state extended producer responsibility bills. These are proposals to make producers more responsible for the products that they make at the end of the product’s life. And on the surface, this is a great idea, but we have seen some existing examples that aren’t working out too well.
Sophia Jones:	For example, there are already some policies in places like Maine and Oregon that created what are called producer responsibility organizations. The producer responsibility organization is the decision maker for how packaging is handled, how it’s recycled, and what regulations surround that. So these organizations are often made up of representatives of the product manufacturers themselves. So while we do support holding producers responsible for their product that they create and where they end up, these producer responsibility organizations would essentially hold monopoly control over that decision making. So in these bills, the producer responsibility organizations would be the recipients of any recycling fee revenue, which they can then use to fund activities like lobbying.
Sophia Jones:	And this basically hands over control of recycling and packaging regulations and standards to the manufacturers themselves and it’s like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. So we want producers to be responsible for their products, but we don’t want to give them control over the whole system. So our teams have already helped to defeat two bad bills this year that included these producer responsibility organizations. One was in New York state and the other in Maryland. And we’re looking forward to a much better bill that will actually be introduced soon in New York state. So sometimes what seems like it could be a really good bill sometimes isn’t so good when you look at it from a different lens. In this case, the lens of monopoly control.
Susan Holmberg:	We should do a report that catalogs all the policies where the fox is in charge of the henhouse because every-
Jess Del Fiacco:	Are you volunteering to write that too because that sounds like an undertaking. I think it’s going to be lengthy. Yeah. I want to say thank you guys. We don’t give the whole breadth of the work that all of our different teams are doing on this show. We kind of like dive into one at a time. So it’s cool to hear just how many different focus areas we’re working on. I’m going to throw it to Katie who has a question about some of this local work.
Katie Kienbaum:	Yeah. So hearing everyone talk about all the different work that they’re working on at the state and local level, I’m curious how y’all are thinking about your work in terms of working with other partners and other organizations or community leaders, local politicians, and how you think about that in terms of these different projects you’re working on? I know I can speak for the energy democracy initiative. We’re a relatively small initiative. There’s just really three of us full-time. So being able to do things like developing this 50 state distributed solar model and being able to share those tools with other advocates to kind of bolster other folks work is something that’s really valuable on our end. I’m curious, Susan and Sophia, how you think about that in terms of some of these different projects that you’re working on now?
Susan Holmberg:	Yeah. I can answer. That’s a great question. I think we think about it in a couple different ways. There’s both at the national level, which I’ll talk about in a little bit and at the state level, there’s so much going on that the broader anti-monopoly movement is really pushing for. So we’re definitely involved with these bigger coalitions and they’re so well coordinated and Jess, you’ve actually been involved quite a bit in the New York coalition. So they’re absolutely necessary for creating momentum around legislation, I would say. And what we’ve been really trying to do is spotlight different types of groups within this one central argument about anti-monopoly reform. So we’ve got workers’ rights groups and small business organizations and racial justice and just trying to like really demonstrate this broad tent that is so important for affecting change.
Susan Holmberg:	The other thing that I would like to highlight is we actually co-founded Small Business Rising, which is a coalition of 30 independent business groups representing 150,000 small business owners. And when it comes to these kinds of anti-monopoly fights, it’s been really crucial to have the small business owners really insert their voices because a lot of the corporate lobbyists, especially the big tech lobbyists, are fighting these bills by arguing that it’s going to hurt small businesses. And you can even see Amazon is gearing up for this fight with its new packaging. If you see the orange packaging they just started producing or distributing, it says something along the lines of, “Brought to you by a small business.” But of course a more accurate slogan would be something like, “We use our power as a dominant gatekeeper to crush our smaller competitors.” Yeah. Those shareholders might not like it so much, but we’ve been really intentional in the coalition that we’ve been working with and that we’ve been building.
Sophia Jones:	Yeah. I’ve definitely seen some Amazon ads recently talking about how they support small businesses. Really interesting to see. I can definitely piggyback off of the value of working with coalitions. Our team works kind of in two ways with coalitions. The first way is we do get involved in more national coalitions like composting specific and I’ll talk about that more later in terms of our federal work, but those coalitions are really crucial in rendering support for federal legislation that our team of four right now doesn’t always have the capacity to do on their own. And we also host an international community composter coalition. And a lot of what we get out of that is hearing directly from community composters on the ground what they’re doing and what they need, especially in terms of policy and what kind of support they need, what kind of policies would be helpful to them.
Sophia Jones:	So incorporating that feedback that’s coming directly from small entrepreneurs, community composers is super helpful. Also in terms of our work, especially with this Maryland bill on the surcharges, we did a lot of work communicating with a lot of our partners to really get this language right and to also get their support on it in terms of drafting the language. We work with a lot of environmental focused groups, which just happens from the nature of composting and how composting interacts with environmental issues. But yeah. Environmental groups aren’t always necessarily anti-monopoly. So it is really interesting and a big part of our work is reconciling that difference and really advocating for the anti-monopoly lens for that to show up in the policy.
Katie Kienbaum:	I think something interesting that perhaps it resonates across different initiatives in ILSR, with what you were saying Sophia, something interesting now that we’re having this growing like resurging interest in antitrust, in community power, in challenging these corporate monopolies is that I do see it leading to these like broader based coalitions where we are bringing in partners who maybe we wouldn’t have worked with before as closely on some of these issues or maybe it is being able to be that voice in the room of a coalition or a partnership that is bringing attention to the monopoly power part of it and the importance of challenging that in addition to meeting our other priorities like increasing composting or making sure small businesses can thrive, making sure we have clean energy. I do see that kind of being an important role we can play sometimes in certain coalitions and certain partnerships.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Right. Yeah. I think being a part of these coalitions is beneficial in, I was going to say two ways, but maybe more than two ways. Not only are you building a support base and making change happen through having a larger group of people involved, but you’re also getting their feedback and what solutions you’re developing. So as Sophia mentioned and I think as you mentioned too, Katie, like we’re hearing from a diverse group of stakeholders what we should be fighting for and what real solutions need to be and then vice versa, we’re influencing how they think about, if they’re not thinking about scale already, if they’re not thinking about monopoly power, like we get to work with them and hopefully help them bring that into consideration in their own work. So working with partners and working in coalitions feels like it’s an absolutely critical part of ILSR’s work and really how we get anything done.
Katie Kienbaum:	Like that’s how we change things. Amazon has their team of lobbyists. Like we need to band together to be able to challenge these things as communities, as people, as organizations, all of it.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Yeah. Exactly.
Jess Del Fiacco:	We’ll be right back after a very short break. Thanks for listening to our show. If you’re enjoying this episode, I hope you’ll consider heading over to ilsr.org/donate to help support our work. Your donations not only make this show possible, but you’re also helping support our work across all of our programs to build local power in communities across the country. Head over to ilsr.org/donate to contribute today. Any amount is sincerely appreciated. And even if you can’t donate right now, you can support us in other ways such as by rating or viewing the show over at Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Those reviews make a huge difference in how we can reach a wider audience. Thanks for listening and now back to the show.
Jess Del Fiacco:	So I think everyone has kind of mentioned, hinted towards this aspect of their work. So I’m just going to let us go get there and wondering if you could just give like a few highlights of the work you’re doing at the federal level or the work your team is doing at the federal level. And I’m particularly curious kind of how you see that federal work and this local work kind of tying together and how they influence each other and kind of maybe how you prioritize one versus the other or whether maybe that’s not a thing that you’re doing. I’ll pick someone to start. How about Sue?
Susan Holmberg:	So at the federal level, one focus we have is advocating for passage of the big tech bills. So as background, in 2020 the house judiciary committee conducted a 16 month investigation and produced a groundbreaking 450 page report that accused big tech companies, we’re talking about Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google mainly, accuse these companies of very detailed specific monopoly abuses. In 2021, the committee introduced and passed, out of committee, five groundbreaking antitrust reform bills that would break up and regulate these companies and drastically limit their ability to grow through mergers. What’s front and center right now is the two Senate bills designed to regulate big tech, which we are expecting the Senate to have a floor vote on in the coming months. So that’s a major focus right now. We can provide more details about the two Senate bills on our webpage.
Susan Holmberg:	And in terms of the local and federal work fitting together, one thing we have emphasized this year is how local leaders can take advantage of big federal investments, like the American Rescue Plan, to fix pro-corporate economic development and level the playing field for small businesses. For decades local leaders have felt really obliged to offer public subsidies and tax breaks to draw corporations to their regions. And certainly this has helped finance corporate growth, but it has failed to really produce local economic benefits for communities in terms of good paying jobs and a healthy tax base. In fact, these local policy strategies ultimately hurt the small independent businesses that keep dollars circulating in the community.
Susan Holmberg:	So in January, we published a report called small businesses, big moment, which you can find on our website that details a dozen ways communities can, and some already have, use these federal dollars to strengthen and grow small businesses. These are ideas like cultivate small scale manufacturing, buy buildings to publicly provide affordable commercial space, close the racial entrepreneurship gap, support employee business ownership, and many, many more ideas are in the report.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Thanks, Sue. All right. Let’s go to Sophia next.
Sophia Jones:	Sure. So our team did a lot of work in 2021 on a federal bill called the Cultivating Organic Matter Through the Promotion of Sustainable Techniques Act, which condenses to become the acronym COMPOST. So it’s the COMPOST Act, which-
Jess Del Fiacco:	Love the acronyms.
Sophia Jones:	Pretty cool. Yeah. They did a good job. The main purpose of that was to basically make federal financial assistance for composting available because currently we don’t have a federal program that does that. And, like I mentioned earlier, we are part of the national US composting infrastructure coalition. Most of the work on the development of the bill came from that coalition and our participation in it. A key goal for us was to ensure that the legislation funded projects of all sizes and not just large scale and centralized composting facilities. And also that only projects that accept clean source separated compostable materials qualified for funding.
Sophia Jones:	So the current status of the COMPOST Act is that pieces of it are currently being deliberated as part of the farm bill. So we’re working alongside with the composting infrastructure coalition to make sure that whatever funding is established will go to support that wide variety of compost operations and not just the large scale and centralized operations. So in terms of the local and federal work, fitting together overall we need a massive investment into composting infrastructure throughout the US and what our policy work has in common at both the local and the federal levels is that goal of making sure that the resources and support for composting are going to local and community scale projects through a distributed investment of resources.
Sophia Jones:	We know that composting has massive potential to restore depleted soils, protect the climate, create thousands of new jobs, but we won’t get to see the bulk of these benefits if we don’t enable the farmers, the entrepreneurs, the local governments to build and to support the needed systems and programs at the community scale. So we’re always moving away and discouraging corporate control in the waste sector, hoping to move power and control into the hands of local communities.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Great. Thank you, Sophia. And Katie, you are up last.
Katie Kienbaum:	Thanks Jess. One thing at the federal level we’ve been working on with partners, including Solar United Neighbors, Center for Biological Diversity, and Energy and Policy Institute is that we’ve signed on to a petition to the regulatory agency, the federal trade commission, or the FTC, asking for them to investigate how these large investor owned electric utilities are abusing their monopoly power and they’re doing that to harm solar competition from solar energy and are doing that in a way to harm customers as well. So we joined in on this petition asking the FTC to investigate how these large utilities are abusing their monopoly power. They’re doing that in a lot of different ways. Folks might have seen recently in the last few years, there’s been a couple really large scandals in the form of these large electric utilities getting caught bribing or colluding, I guess you could say also with state officials.
Katie Kienbaum:	So in Ohio, there’s this huge case with First Energy. In Illinois, there’s this big case with Commonwealth Edison, but it’s kind of the tip of the iceberg in terms of how these large really powerful electric utilities are basically out of control and throwing their power around to suppress any competition from renewable energy, from solar energy, from solar on their customer’s rooftops. And that just harms their consumers. It can mean that their rates are higher, that we’re not getting the clean energy that we need. So this connects to some of the work we’re doing at the local level and the state level. Part of the reason that the FTC needs to step in here is that a lot of these utilities are regulated at the state level, but state regulators aren’t always able to really reign in the power that they have.
Katie Kienbaum:	Like many other industries, there’s a revolving door issue. It’s also a question of a lot of these large utilities operate across many different states. So it’s hard sometimes for state regulators to be able to stop that utility abuse of their power. And so some of the things I mentioned that we’re doing at the state level really are kind of highlighting some of these examples of possible abuses of utilities power. I mentioned that we’re looking at how long it takes different utilities to connect rooftop solar to the electric grid and that’s the kind of abuse of kind of their status as this platform that customers need to access to be able to have their solar energy. The research we’re doing that I mentioned into how long it takes different utilities to connect solar customers to the electric grid is one of these examples of how utilities might be abusing their monopoly power over the access to the electric grid.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Katie, that was great. So thanks everybody for sharing. Like I said, it’s so great to hear just like the many things that our work touches on. I think just since we’re kind of running low on time unfortunately, we can’t dive too deeply into any of them, but how about for our last question, could you share just like one or two things briefly that you’re really excited about for your team in the upcoming year?
Susan Holmberg:	I wanted to spotlight what everybody’s working on, but I can rate it a little bit. Well I want to mention Ron Knox, our senior researcher and intrepid reporter. He’s always digging for new examples of where monopolies are asserting their power in our economy. Right now he is researching the beer industry and how independent brewers are being muscled out by just two dominant brewers. So that’s a fun story to watch him develop. And then Stacy Mitchell and I, with the extraordinary help of our research and communications associate Luke Gannon, are doing an in-depth report on how monopolies target and exploit communities of color to build power. So that’s going to be a multi-sector analysis and we’re pulling from other initiatives at ILSR as well. And that will be hopefully published in a couple months.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Thanks Sue.
Sophia Jones:	So the composting team is counting on our surcharges bill being reintroduced in Maryland in 2023. So in January. So our work now is just to keep building the case for it and build more momentum and support, which is really exciting. There is a lot of work to be done. We will also be publishing a bill template based on this bill for other states to use that are interested in introducing similar legislation. One of the big reasons that our bill got the support that it did this year was because of the work of other states in paving the way and sharing their best practices and lessons learned. So it would be really exciting to see other states implement parts of this work and interpret it in their own ways. Then we’re just continuing our work of providing support to any other policy that comes up that advances composting at all levels and supports that distributed investment throughout the sector.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Thanks Sophia. Katie, what are you looking forward to?
Katie Kienbaum:	One thing that I haven’t mentioned yet that we’re steadily working on and are hoping to work on throughout this year is an update to a report that the director of the energy democracy initiative and co-director of the organization, John Farrell, released several years ago called advantage local, which took a look at what the benefits and the value of this local ownership and local governance of renewable energy and solar energy is. So we’re looking at doing an update to that and I’m really excited. We’re going to kind of pick out where that instead of having our energy owned and controlled by these large utilities, like what would it mean for more of it to be controlled by households, by individual businesses, by communities, and what that could mean and what the current barriers are to having more of that. So that’s one thing coming up in the next year that I hope it’s coming out. We’ll see. Reports, sometimes they take a little longer than you expect, but I hope to see that coming out in the next year.
Jess Del Fiacco:	I’m hoping to hear conversations on each of the things we mentioned today on future Building Local Power episodes. So excited to see the progress as they move along over the next few months. And I know we talked about a lot of different things, so for listeners who are like trying to follow all the threads, you can find links to all the reports and the resources and the policies we talked about today on the webpage for this episode. So lots more there to check out. With that, thank you everybody for sharing so much about your programs today. Appreciated having you on.
Katie Kienbaum:	Yeah. Great to hear what everyone else is doing.
Sophia Jones:	Thanks, Jen.
Susan Holmberg:	Great to be here.
Katie Kienbaum:	Yeah. This has been super cool. Thanks Jess.
Jess Del Fiacco:	Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find links to everything discussed today by going to ilsr.org and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s ilsr.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on social media. We hope you’ll also take the opportunity to help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and supports the research and resources we make available for free on our website. Finally, we ask that you let us know how we’re doing with a rating or review on Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by me, Jess Del Fiacco, and edited by Drew Birschbach. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Jess Del Fiacco and I hope you’ll join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

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