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High Impact Ideas for Sustainable Community Development

Here are some ideas you can implement that have high potential payoffs relative to the effort and expense of doing them. I'll add more ideas and more detail as time permits.
 
1. Live in a collge town? Promote campus ecology! Visit www.nwf.org and look for the campus ecology page.
2. Promote price adjustments for bids on ecological design projects (EX:  bids on super-efficient building designs are adjusted down by X% to account for their lower oeprating costs)
3. See #2, apply the same logic to fleet vehicle purchases.
4. Campaign for energy effiicient housing design.
5.  Find and participate in community supported agriculture
6. Turn your farm into a community supported agriculture operation
7. Support local businesses
8. Telecommute and stay in your small town
9. Modify your business (or business idea) to make it socially responsible.
10. Make sustainable community development a career via activist organizations, community development corporations, or economic development organizations.
11. Encourage companies, governments, and other organizations to buy from socially responsible companies.
12. Buy locally grown food, especially for institutional use.
13. Be a well-informed technophile. Technology isn't always the enemy and sophisticated "green" technology may be just what we need in some instances.
14. Be a social innoavator - learn about social inventions (see my links!) and become a local champion of one or more
15. Be a social entrepreneur - start a socially responsible business or nonprofit
 
Some Social Inventions (from Global Ideas Bank):
 
> Use buildings as supports for growing plants, espcially vines
> Buy up farmland and reforest it
> Recycle/reuse infrastructure like closed roads and rail lines
 
Some Ideas from Bagelhole.org:
 
> Water power for personal use
> Builidng and operating your own still
> Making biodiesel at home (or as a small business?)
> Use hydroponics in urban agriculture
 

Take some time to look around Global Ideas Bank. I bet you'll find something you can use.