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How BALLE Began
In the early 1980s, Judy Wicks was living on a leafy Philadelphia street in an old brownstone she had saved from the wrecking ball, and thinking about what business she could run that would allow her to stay home with her young children. She opened the White Dog Café in January 1983 as a take-out coffee and muffin shop on the first floor of her house.
She soon expanded the menu to include soup and sandwiches made in her upstairs kitchen, then added a charcoal grill out back for hot food, and seating 
in the house and backyard. Dishes were washed by hand in a sink in the corner of the large dining room, the public restroom was upstairs in her house, and waiters went through the basement to pick up the food.
When the next winter's cold weather forced the closing of the outdoor kitchen, a friend provided the capital to install an indoor bar and grill. Then a bank loan allowed work to begin on a main kitchen in the basement, as well as a central hall connecting the original house to a second row house. By 1989 the White Dog had grown to a full-service restaurant seating more than 200 customers, with a menu inspired by fresh local produce from the family farms of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
In 1998, after reading about the cruel treatment of factory-farmed hogs, Judy told her chef to take all the pork off the menu until she could figure out something better. Looking around for a source of humanely raised pigs, she found that one of her vegetable suppliers knew Amish farmers who kept pigs - in a meadow, with enough space to move around and live a natural piggy life. But he couldn't take meat in to the city in his pickup truck, so Judy gave him a low-interest loan for a refrigerated cargo truck and told a few friends in the restaurant business about her new source of pork, and a new market for pasture-raised pigs was born.
But she didn't stop there. What else was on her menu that needed the same treatment? Gradually she worked her way through every item, scouting sources, visiting farms, making introductions, loaning money, until the chicken, the eggs, the beef, the dairy products also came from humane and sustainable local sources, along with the already local organic produce. What she couldn't source locally – coffee, sugar, chocolate – she bought from fair-trade suppliers. She grew a nice niche for the White Dog, the only restaurant in Philadelphia with an entirely local/fair-trade menu.
And then came a major decision point: hoard or share? Sit alone in her niche, or throw it open to every restaurateur in Philadelphia? Being the person she is, she threw it open, and built an informal citywide network of Philadelphia eateries that buy from local and fair-trade food suppliers as much as possible.
That could have been the end of a satisfying story of building a local food system and reviving a whole Pennsylvania industry of local meat production, but it wasn't. Judy turned her attention to other parts of the Philadelphia economy – what else could be sourced more locally, more sustainably? Clothing? Building materials? Energy?
She began meeting with other like-minded business owners in the Philadelphia area and talking up her vision of a sustainable local economy until she had built another network, the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, founded in 2001. Today SBN Philly has more than 300 members representing the seven main building blocks of a local living economy – sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, green building, zero-waste manufacturing, independent media, downtown retail, and community capital - plus another 20 or so building blocks that the network has identified. By offering educational programs and networking opportunities for local businesses, SBN strengthens member companies and helps build a strong Philadelphia economy.
With SBN Philly, Judy reached another hoard/share moment: Could she spread this framework for building a sustainable local economy to the rest of the country, the rest of the world? Through her involvement with the Social Venture Network, a community of company founders, private investors, social entrepreneurs, and key influencers who share a commitment to building a just and sustainable world through business, she met Laury Hammel, owner of the Boston area's innovative Longfellow health clubs, and other people exploring the idea of a new organization to promote sustainable local economies.
In late 2001, soon after September 11, they formed BALLE, which has since grown to include 51 other local business networks encompassing more than 15,000 entrepreneurs in the US and Canada.
“The deep issue is democracy,” says David Korten, author of The Great Turning and When Corporations Rule the World, who serves with Judy on BALLE’s board. “Do we really believe that power should be rooted in people and community – decentralized – or should it be centralized either in government or in large corporations?"
To learn more about Judy's work in Philadelphia, click here.
