Empowering households and communities to push for clean, locally owned, affordable energy and challenging the excessive power of monopoly utilities ...

*Stacy Mitchell is a Co-Director of ILSR and directs our Independent Business Initiative. Susan R. Holmberg is a political economist and Associate Director for Research on the Independent Business ...

Local Energy Rules is a biweekly podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system. Our audience is researchers, grassroots organizers, ...

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There are only a handful of banks in the U.S. that are behemoth in size, but they currently hold most of the country’s assets. These “megabanks” — including “Big Four” Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of ...

Chain dollar stores are inundating America’s communities. In both small towns and urban neighborhoods, they are edging out locally owned businesses, freezing out entrepreneurs, and shifting profits ...

These stores are not merely a symptom of economic distress; they’re a cause of it. Learn how your community can stop dollar stores and join us in calling for federal action to rein in their predatory ...

A network of community composters building the movement by connecting early adopters, spreading lessons learned, and inspiring new operations. The Community Composter Coalition is a network of ...

Randy Wilson knew you had to start somewhere. Knocking on doors and hanging around retail store parking lots, he and volunteers from the citizen group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth collected ...

Click on image to download the fact sheet. As lawmakers have grown increasingly serious about addressing Amazon’s harms, Amazon has sought to portray itself as beneficial to independent small ...

Big-box retailers’ new tactic to slash their taxes is the latest example of why cities are better off saying no to the boxes and cultivating Main Streets instead. In February, the library in Marquette ...

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance has a vision of thriving, diverse, equitable communities. To reach this vision, we build local power and fight corporate control. Over the past 50 years, the ...