A collection of ILSR’s quintessential intellectual and in-the-trenches contributions fostering thriving local communities and economies.
For 50 years, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has worked directly with communities and advocated for government policies to promote and sustain vibrant local economies and a democracy comprised of people coming together to shape their own futures. As we reflected on a half-century of this work, the idea of presenting a set of our 50 most important contributions to the advancement of building local power and fighting corporate control felt like an enormous but worthwhile endeavor.
We hope the following tour of ILSR’s journey, work, and the context in which it all developed helps distill for longtime and newly arriving leaders, partners, and allies in local self-reliance the thinking that has and will continue to shape the trajectory of this and related movements.
In 1974, David Morris, Gil Friend, and Neil Seldman launched the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) in Washington, D.C. The organization’s motivation grew out of the social and economic unrest in D.C. and the country at large, stemming from racial injustice, the scarcity of quality jobs, and skyrocketing food and fuel prices.
ILSR’s first location was a three-story townhouse in D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, and it quickly became an incubator for the founders’ theories about community self-determination and local self-reliance.
The townhouse had rooftop solar collectors, composting, and a vegetable garden they harvested, selling produce to local grocery stores and restaurants. This townhouse seeded the work ILSR would become known for 50 years later.
ILSR pioneered local solutions and piloted their ideas on food production, energy, and waste in their community. As the price of oil quadrupled in the 70s, many of these ideas aimed to curb the United States’ growing dependence on and consumption of oil, promoting decentralized solutions like rooftop solar. ILSR also spearheaded a new concept for sustainable waste management and co-founded the National Recycling Coalition in 1978.
The organization launched the Self-Reliance Newsletter, a print publication reporting on wide-ranging topics, from public banking to recycling to economic development and more. The first issue, released in 1976, focused on decentralization, the myth of bigness, and community self-determination.
“When centralization of power and control robs us of our power to protest and our ability to choose, we must act to reverse the trend towards concentration.”
ILSR’s community-based and human-scale approach to policy design gained momentum in the 1980s — from federal policymakers developing distributive solar energy programs to local communities turning the tide on incinerators.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency marked a stark shift in policymaking away from ILSR’s vision of local self-reliance toward centralization, deregulation, and tax cuts for wealthy individuals and large corporations — triggering the wave of political and economic consolidation in the following decades.
A new chapter for ILSR began when Saint Paul’s Mayor George Latimer envisioned putting the organization’s vision into practice. The city became a laboratory to test cutting-edge ideas and implement local self-reliance.
Over the course of the decade, ILSR further developed its intellectual contributions and practical expertise on the power of cities to address real-world problems. David Morris published two books, Self-Reliant Cities and The New City States, exploring how cities can wield their autonomy.
ILSR increasingly worked on renewable energy and zero waste solutions. Led by Neil Seldman and later joined by Brenda Platt, ILSR played an essential role across the nation in fighting trash incinerators. From 1976 to 1986, the Institute was one of the only national organizations fighting the existence of these polluting facilities. We were directly involved in 35 successful fights across the country to defeat incinerators, losing only two. This success developed ILSR’s reputation as the go-to organization for stopping the proliferation and operation of trash incinerators and developing alternative solutions.
The team produced cutting-edge research on the cities and counties with the highest recycling levels, sharing their successes and lessons learned. They also documented the jobs and enterprises that could be sustained via local recycling and remanufacturing.
“We are at a turning point in history. The opportunity exists to marry local political authority to the advantages of modern technology to make more independent self-reliant communities. Only at the local level can we design humanly scaled production systems that meet our unique local requirements. We can seize the opportunity and potential that comes from a period of rapid social change, and design a society in which we, and our children, would want to live.”
While federal policy continued its departure from ILSR’s approach of distributed and decentralized economic and political power, local policymakers and organizers turned to ILSR for solutions. In response, David Morris launched The New Rules Project with the intent to design local policies and work closely with groups on the ground to implement them.
This decade was a seminal time for ILSR’s Waste to Wealth program. Under the leadership of Neil Seldman and Brenda Platt, the team continued to publish trailblazing reports on product reuse, building salvage and deconstruction, and groundbreaking recycling programs. Their research and technical assistance helped institutionalize curbside recycling and composting programs from coast to coast.
Neil and Brenda were the first to document job creation through reuse, recycling, and composting compared to landfilling and incineration — data that continues to be cited today. They also expanded ILSR’s recycling-based technical assistance in key cities, including Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and D.C.
In addition, ILSR was an early champion of a zero-waste economy, co-founding the Grassroots Recycling Network in 1995.
While Neil and Brenda focused on sustainable materials management, David Morris continued advancing ideas of sustainability in the energy system. Irshad Ahmed joined the staff and led our Carbohydrate Economy Project, which made the case for shifting from an economy based on geology to one based on biology, from one based on minerals, to one based on vegetables. The work included in-depth research into substituting biochemicals for petrochemicals, developing degradable bioplastics and creating a network of farmer-owned biorefineries.
The ripple effects of the Internet and tech boom, growing climate crisis, and global financial meltdown exposed the concrete threats of consolidated economic and political power to shared prosperity and thriving local communities. ILSR, however, had a set of solutions that met the moment, designed to both build local power and rein in the power of corporate monopolies in retail, energy, telecommunications, and banking.
Stacy Mitchell published Big-Box Swindle, illustrating how mega-retailers fuel many of the most pressing problems, from the shrinking middle class to rising pollution and diminished civic engagement. She also showed how a growing number of communities and independent businesses are effectively fighting back. In 2007, Booklist named Big-Box Swindle one of the top 10 business books of the year.
“Our communities are fast becoming colonies once again, subject to a new crop of transnational corporations that exercise an extraordinary degree of power over our economy, and are remaking the American landscape for their own ends.”
During this time, ILSR continued advocating for zero-waste solutions to eliminate the waste disposed of in landfills and sent to incinerators. Brenda Platt launched ILSR’s Composting for Community Initiative — originally called Composting Makes $en$e — which she saw as a major opportunity to expand ILSR’s contributions to local recycling-based economic development and the zero waste movement. Composting is inherently local, supports food system resiliency, and sequesters carbon in soils.
On the utility front, ILSR deepened its research and advocacy on locally owned and controlled solar while expanding its gaze to broadband as an essential service best provided when community ownership is part of the equation.
Under Stacy Mitchell’s leadership, the Independent Business Initiative gained national and international attention by advocating for new rules to break up powerful monopolies like Amazon and Walmart. The initiative’s work showcased the concrete detrimental impacts on small businesses and local economies.
Stacy delivered a TEDx talk where she argued for a new phase in the local economy movement.
“What we really need to do is change the underlying policies that shape our economy. We can’t do that through the sum of our individual behavior in the marketplace. We can only do it by exercising our collective power as citizens.”
John Farrell and the Energy Democracy Initiative continued the legacy of ILSR’s work advocating for distributed and locally owned rooftop solar. The team integrated a deeper analysis of the power of monopolistic utility companies as a key obstacle to restoring people’s control of our energy system.
ILSR worked closely with advocates in Minnesota fighting against energy utility monopolies obstructing the approval and construction of community solar projects. The organizing resulted in nearly 900 community solar applications. After continued community pressure, the State of Minnesota passed a law requiring energy utilities to accept community solar garden projects and process bill credits to subscribers.
As ILSR continued pushing energy utilities to democratize the production of power, the organization advanced a similar agenda in response to telecom monopolies, long recognizing that the Internet would fundamentally change local economies and communities. ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, led by Christopher Mitchell, offered a vision, supported by deep research, of publicly owned and locally controlled broadband networks — ensuring Internet access for everyone on reasonable terms.
The first episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast, ILSR’s first foray into the medium, streamed in 2012 to educate people across the country on the benefits of building community networks. A year later, we launched our Local Energy Rules podcast to show how communities are taking on concentrated power to transform the energy system.
ILSR’s Composting for Community team developed a composting training program that was both rooted in and tailored for the community. Through the years, this program has reached schools, churches, community gardens, cities, and farms. Collaborating with fellow advocates, we are witnessing a surge in the number of community composters, each playing a vital role in reshaping our relationship with food, soil, and waste.
“Sustainable communities are not only those that lower their carbon footprint. They are communities that have a sense of community. And a sense of community comes from thinking and acting for the common good. They are a community that tries to maximize community wealth… It’s a community that makes decisions as transparently as possible.”
The ILSR team and the reach of our work have grown exponentially in recent years. This expansion underscores our increasing visibility and commitment to working with allies, boosting national efforts to rein in corporate power and empower local communities.
The Independent Business team continues to produce cutting-edge research and play a leadership role in coalitions geared toward reining in monopolies, including the Athena and Small Business Rising coalitions. The team also consistently provides technical assistance to local policymakers and organizers to curb the proliferation of chain dollar stores.
ILSR’s Composting for Community Initiative persists in challenging Big Waste while supporting a thriving grassroots network of community-scaled composters dedicated to fostering sustainable towns and cities. Underscoring our reach, the U.S. EPA’s new website on Community Composting features ILSR videos and additional resources.
In today’s digital age, the Internet is a vital lifeline for telehealth consultations, education, and employment. Yet, millions of Americans are left behind, unable to afford the ever-rising costs imposed by monopoly utility companies. Through the Broadband team’s comprehensive reporting and engaging workshops and events held nationwide, we are catalyzing significant awareness and action that treats access to the Internet as a fundamental human right.
For decades, Tribes have been overlooked and defrauded by telecom companies seeking to extract wealth from their communities. In 2021, we launched a series of Tribal Broadband Bootcamps with partners to help Tribes build their own networks and ensure their access to high-quality Internet.
In the early 2010s, solar emerged as a highly cost-competitive option for energy production, presenting a prime opportunity to recenter our philosophy of local self-reliance in debates about clean energy production. In 2020, we initiated a 30 Million Solar Homes campaign aimed at urging Congress to swiftly expand solar energy deployment, thereby generating millions of jobs and mitigating carbon pollution. In 2022, the Biden Administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, incorporating many of the ideas and proposals that ILSR had long championed.
