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Praise for Good Morning, Beautiful Business

“Judy Wicks’s brilliance redefines what a business can be. The White Dog Café models what commerce will become if we are to create a livable future. This is business as spiritual practice, business as kindness, business as community, business as justice, joy, transformation, leadership, and generosity. There is nothing here you will learn in business school, because the White Dog Café is not in the business of selling life; it’s in the business of creating life. How blessed is Philadelphia and the world for her presence and prescience.”

—P AUL H AWKEN , author of Blessed Unrest

“Judy Wicks is one of the most amazing women I have ever met. She ran the legendary White Dog Café with passion, heart, common sense, and financial success. And she continues to blaze new paths on the road to a truly sustainable people-centered economy. This is a must-read book.”

—B EN C OHEN , cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s

“Wow. What a woman, what a book. In it, you enter the life of someone who, even as a child, learned that she could create—that she could make things and make things happen. We need Wicks’s confidence and courage now more than ever. So read it and you’ll get some. Her spunk is contagious.”

—F RANCES M OORE L APPÉ , author of EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want

“Judy Wicks set out to create a business that expressed her values, served her community, and fed her family. She ended up leading a national movement to build local economies that are inclusive and resilient, provide green job opportunities, and conduct business sustainably and responsibly. Good Morning, Beautiful Business is an inspiration—a living, breathing tale of the new American dream in action.”

—V AN J ONES , author of Rebuild the Dream

“Guided by her own powerful activist sensibility, Judy Wicks beautifully conveys the important influences that a restaurant, or any business, can have within a community—politically, economically, and socially.”

—A LICE W ATERS , owner of Chez Panisse and author of The Art of Simple Food

“Beware. This is a business book like no other. It will change how you see the world, America, business, and the economy and should be required reading in every school of business and department of economics. Judy Wicks teaches us how to succeed at business while managing from the heart, having an outrageously good time, and measuring success as contribution to healthy communities and a world that works for all. Those who take Wicks and the White Dog as their model change the world one beautiful business at a time.”

—D AVID K ORTEN , cofounder of YES! Magazine and author of Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community

“Judy Wicks is one of our great leaders and visionaries, and this book makes clear why. She thinks about traditional subjects—‘business,’ ‘economics’—in fresh, practical, real, and powerful ways. Read it and then live it yourself !”

—B ILL M C K IBBEN , author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

“If there ever is a Nobel Prize in planet-saving, Judy Wicks deserves to be the first recipient. Besides creating one of Philadelphia’s most popular restaurants (the White Dog Café), her legacy includes Pennsylvania’s local food movement, America’s fastest growing network of independent businesses, and entrepreneurs worldwide—especially women—whom she has inspired to make business the leading edge of social change. In this riveting, funny, and moving autobiography, Judy also reveals herself as a superb storyteller and a sharp policy critic. Her life story, which unfolds from the Arctic to Chiapas, shows how one passionate person really can bend the arc of history toward justice.”

—M ICHAEL S HUMAN , author of Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity

“Judy Wicks’s journey is potent medicine for a culture that falsely separates personal life and work, self and community, business and environment, and entrepreneurship and activism. Anyone who wants to engage their full entrepreneurial vision, and find their own unique path that may combine seemingly disparate goals, can take heart: this remarkable story is a visionary beacon and joyful read.”

—N INA S IMONS , cofounder of Bioneers

“Judy Wicks is something rare, invaluable, and essential in our time: a visionary artisan of cultural renaissance. Read this book. Learn what she’s done and, even more important, how she became who she is. Let her story inspire you more fully into your own cultural artistry.”

—B ILL P LOTKIN , author of Soulcraft

Good Morning, Beautiful Business

The Unexpected Journey of an Activist

Entrepreneur and Local Economy Pioneer

JUDY WICKS Chelsea Green Publishing

White River Junction, Vermont

Copyright © 2013 by Judy Wicks.

All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs copyright © 2013 by Judy Wicks.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Editor: Joni Praded

Project Manager: Patricia Stone

Copy Editor: Eric Raetz

Proofreader: Eileen Clawson

Indexer: Shana Milkie

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America.

First printing February, 2013.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 14 15 16 17

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative ( www.greenpressinitiative.org ), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Good Morning, Beautiful Business was printed on FSC ® -certified paper supplied by Maple Press that contains at least 30% postconsumer recycled fiber.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wicks, Judy.

Good morning, beautiful business : the unexpected journey of an activist entrepreneur and local economy pioneer / Judy Wicks.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-933392-24-0 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-60358-499-9 (ebook)— ISBN 978-1-60358-505-7 (hardcover)

1. Wicks, Judy. 2. Restaurateurs—Pennsylvania—Philadephia. 3. White Dog Cafe (Philadelphia, Pa.) 4. Community development—Pennsylvania —Philadephia. I. Title.

TX910.5.W47A3 2013

647.95092—dc23

[B]

2012043523

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

http://www.greenpressinitiative.org

(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

http://www.chelseagreen.com/

For my children, Grace and Lawrence

And in memory of their father, Neil Schlosser

Contents Preface

1. My First Place: Growing up in Ingomar

2. A Culture of Sharing: Life with the Eskimos

3. My First Business: The Story of Free People’s Store

4. It’s Not the Coin that Counts: Learning to Do Business My Way

5. The Blooming of the White Dog Café

6. A Table for Six Billion: Finding an International Perspective

7. Living above the Shop: Lessons of Place and Community

8. Basta! We Have Had Enough: Coffee and the World Revolution

9. What I Learned from Animals: Building a Caring Economy

10. Pursuing Small Scale on a Large Scale: The Founding of BALLE

11. Setting the Table for Six Billion

12. Good Night, Beautiful Business

Acknowledgments

About the Author

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then we’ll have peace.

—Jimi Hendrix

Preface IT WAS 1983 when I first opened the doors to the White Dog Café on Philadelphia’s Sansom Street, then a collection of somewhat run-down row houses that had just been saved from demolition by its residents, including me. From the first time I saw the Street, some ten years earlier, it had captured my imagination. Its lively sidewalks and graceful if neglected buildings invited me. Its characters fascinated me. It was a place that I had found myself lying down in front of a bulldozer to save. Yet even as I lay spread-eagle on the pavement and wondered just how close the huge earthmoving machine would come, I hadn’t remotely suspected that Sansom Street would become the epicenter of my life. Or that the act of saving our community from destruction to make way for a mall of chain stores would become a lifelong passion.

I would have been as surprised as anyone to learn that I would someday start a restaurant there and raise my family in a home above it. And I would have been even more surprised to learn that the restaurant would gain international acclaim as a socially responsible business serving farm- fresh local food, take me to political hot spots around the world, and play a powerful role in building what has come to be known as the local living economy movement.

Even by the time I was adjusting the blue-and-white checkered curtains and welcoming my first customer, I felt like a more-or-less accidental restaurateur. As a girl, I had vowed never to cook, and as a young college grad I had eschewed the concept of profit. But I was absorbed by the challenge of creating an outstanding restaurant on the block I had helped to save and intrigued at the prospect that it could be used as a meeting place for the community and a vehicle for good works.

Perhaps that’s why, several years after I opened my restaurant, I hung a sign in my bedroom closet in my home above the White Dog Café—right where I would see it each morning. GOOD MORNING, BEAUTIFUL BUSINESS , it read, reminding me daily of just how beautiful business can be when we put our creativity, care, and energy into producing a product or service that our community needs. I was just beginning my journey. I didn’t know then what I do now: that when you connect head and heart in business, you can transform not just business as usual, but the economy in general. You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions.