This event, a collaboration of Keene State College, Cheshire Medical Center’s Vision 2020 Program, and the Hannah Grimes Center, was the next step towards building a stronger community and economy and was part of the Keene State College Biennial Symposium: From Local to Global. The goals of the event were to:
- Identify common ground and unifying overarching goals among movements within the Monadnock Region (Are they more connecting than we think?)
- Create an opportunity for open discussion among Keene’s community leaders that inspires creative thinking about the Keene Master Plan process.
- Encourage participants to develop a plan of action within their existing vision, mission, and isolated work plans that contribute to a LLE (What do you want to come out of the workshop?)
Featured invitees included:
- Judy Wicks, a pioneering voice in the local living economy movement over the past thirty years, is the owner of Philadelphia’s celebrated White Dog Café and a founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE).
- Tom Wessels is a terrestrial ecologist and a professor at Antioch University New England in the Department of Environmental Studies. In his book, The Myth of Progress he writes that, “people with a richness of life created through their connections with community, place and themselves have no need to compulsively consume the ‘frivolous accouterments’ that we tend to think of as making us happy, but which really don’t.”
- Margaret (Marge) Bruchac, PhD, is an Abenaki Indian with roots in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, and deep research interests in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and Massachusetts.
- Mike Welsh, PhD, is Keene State College Professor of Political Science and Chair of Keene Master Plan Committee.
Monadnock Complete Economy Project 
