When: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 @ 7:00pm
Where: Nasher Art Museum Auditorium, 2001 Campus Dr.
Free admission, open to public

Together with the Alliance for Community Economics, a local chapter of the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, Duke is bringing Michael Shuman to campus this fall. Shuman, a nationally acclaimed author of Going Local and the newly published, The Small Mart Revolution, will address what local communities can do to create vibrant, self-reliant, community-based economic networks in the age of skyrocketing oil prices.

Shuman's book, The Small-Mart Revolution: How Small Businesses Can Beat the Global Competition argues that locally owned businesses are the main source of prosperity for a community. At a time when communities are experiencing economic hardship due to the outsourcing of jobs, his research offers a solution with refreshing relevancy. Corporate decisions to move operations abroad or to another state have cost US workers and communities some 75 million jobs since the early 1970s. Shuman's alternative to chasing after the big guys is to (re)build self-reliant, locally owned, community committed business networks, which turn out to be much more reliable generators of good jobs, tax revenues, community wealth, sustainable economic development, charitable contributions and social stability.

In his previous book, Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, Shuman writes, "Going local does not mean walling off from the outside world. It means nurturing locally owned businesses that use local resources sustainably, employ local workers at decent wages, and serve primarily local consumers. It means becoming more self-sufficient and less dependent on imports."