The Organic Entrepreneur

Organic Entrepreneurs respect the soil in which they are planted and work within the cycles of nature to find and sustain success, meaning, and balance in their lives and their business. This book shows you how to become an Organic Entrepreneur. It explores what's needed to find the rhythm that allows a business to grow from within.

A practical and proven guide to foster entrepreneurship and build a supportive community that will grow businesses, create jobs, and bolster the economy in a mere months. Written by the community and civic leaders and social entrepreneurs who used the guide to usher in many of Kansas City's entrepreneur and community successes…thereby fostering large-scale economic growth. "The Organic Entrepreneur Economy depicts how Kansas City, Blue Springs, and Lee's Summit have triggered their growing entrepreneurial communities and economies, in our county. While radical, this economic development approach is framed by highly-experienced practitioners." ~ Robbie Makinen - Director of Economic Development and Government Relations for Jackson County, Missouri Entrepreneurs are sprouting new ventures everywhere, but only a few cities and regions are able to attract high concentrations of these economic accelerators. Is it random chance, or is there a science to building a strong economy? There are experienced experts with theories and suggestive methodologies, but it turns out the proven method still uses infrastructures. The Organic Entrepreneur Economy depicts how little known “social” and “community” infrastructures are the key to fostering entrepreneurship and creating fast-paced economic growth. The book details how to leverage a city or region's community of people to foster and accelerate the entrepreneurial potential in their city or region. There is no magic behind the infrastructures; rather the authors depict how human behavior has led community after community to succeed. Best of all, it does not require massive infusions of governmental or philanthropic funds; just the commitment to make it happen. Authored by a diverse cast of experts with highly sought-after backgrounds in education, entrepreneurship, economic development, venture capital, and public utilities-supported communities; the book dissects the proven social and community infrastructures to depict how and why they work. The Organic Entrepreneur Economy promises readers a thought-provoking experience that, if implemented, will lead to immediate and lasting economic results.

The book shows how to open a small business in an organic (natural) way. It is loaded with uplifting messages intended to inspire readers to make the right choices in life, even under challenging external conditions, as well as cultivate the kind of inner dynamics that would unfailingly support the choices they make.

When the hail starts to fall, Atina Diffley doesn’t compare it to golf balls. She’s a farmer. It’s “as big as a B-size potato.” As her bombarded land turns white, she and her husband Martin huddle under a blanket and reminisce: the one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds; the eleven-inch rainfall (“that broccoli turned out gorgeous”); the hail disaster of 1977. The romance of farming washed away a long time ago, but the love? Never. In telling her story of working the land, coaxing good food from the fertile soil, Atina Diffley reminds us of an ultimate truth: we live in relationships—with the earth, plants and animals, families and communities. A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges as natural as weather and as unnatural as corporate politics, her book is a firsthand history of getting in at the “ground level” of organic farming. One of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest, the Diffleys’ Gardens of Eagan helped to usher in a new kind of green revolution in the heart of America’s farmland, supplying their roadside stand and a growing number of local food co-ops. This is a story of a world transformed—and reclaimed—one square acre at a time. And yet, after surviving punishing storms and the devastating loss of fifth-generation Diffley family land to suburban development, the Diffleys faced the ultimate challenge: the threat of eminent domain for a crude oil pipeline proposed by one of the largest privately owned companies in the world, notorious polluters Koch Industries. As Atina Diffley tells her David-versus-Goliath tale, she gives readers everything from expert instruction in organic farming to an entrepreneur’s manual on how to grow a business to a legal thriller about battling corporate arrogance to a love story about a single mother falling for a good, big-hearted man.

ECOrenaissance provides inspiring tips and tricks for how to live and shop in harmony with nature without sacrificing style or luxury, and how best to benefit from the current renaissance—a global rebirth of sustainable economics, progressive ethics, and green culture—through the wisdom of eco-entrepreneurs, green fashion designers, organic food purveyors, and innovative leaders of this new movement. Gone are the days of boxy hemp shirts and gritty granola—cutting-edge innovation has made ecology as stylish and sexy as red carpet fashion, and everyday people are leading the charge with the choices they make in grocery stores, car lots, at work, in schools, and in their homes. In ECOrenaissance, renowned visionary Marci Zaroff provides a comprehensive guide to help you embrace sustainable living as both a celebration of style and a necessary strategy for maintaining our everyday comforts despite increasingly limited resources. From global warming to drought, genetically modified foods to harmful chemicals in our beauty products, for too long commerce has ignored the health of our planet and our bodies. But now a new age is dawning: one that is uplifting, gorgeous, and accessible. With roundtable discussions from inspiring leaders of the green movement, ECOrenaissance offers you eye-opening and groundbreaking resources to transform your life through supporting companies making significant, practical ecological change. By shining a light on leaders of sustainability throughout the world, Zaroff will transform your understanding of eco-minded products and open new possibilities for you to make a positive impact. Equipped with these tools, you will find new, empowering ways to make “green” elegant in your life, prioritizing current global needs without sacrificing comfort.

Today we imagine green business to be a new thing. This book shows that it is not, and that there were green entrepreneurs who had huge concerns about environmental sustainability, and built businesses that they hoped could address these issues, including Whole Foods Market, Aveda, and The Body Shop, among others.

It's not often that someone stumbles into entrepreneurship and ends up reviving a community and starting a national economic-reform movement. But that's what happened when, in 1983, Judy Wicks founded the White Dog Café on the first floor of her house on a row of Victorian brownstones in West Philadelphia. After helping to save her block from demolition, Judy grew what began as a tiny muffin shop into a 200-seat restaurant-one of the first to feature local, organic, and humane food. The restaurant blossomed into a regional hub for community, and a national powerhouse for modeling socially responsible business. Good Morning, Beautiful Business is a memoir about the evolution of an entrepreneur who would not only change her neighborhood, but would also change her world-helping communities far and wide create local living economies that value people and place as much as commerce and that make communities not just interesting and diverse and prosperous, but also resilient. Wicks recounts a girlhood coming of age in the sixties, a stint working in an Alaska Eskimo village in the seventies, her experience cofounding the first Free People store, her accidental entry into the world of restauranteering, the emergence of the celebrated White Dog Café, and her eventual role as an international leader and speaker in the local-living-economies movement. Her memoir traces the roots of her career - exploring what it takes to marry social change and commerce, and do business differently. Passionate, fun, and inspirational, Good Morning, Beautiful Business explores the way women, and men, can follow both mind and heart, do what's right, and do well by doing good.