A Practically Real Podcast
Ithaca Local
Economy Lab
What would an economy look like if it was designed to take care of people?
One small city has spent 30 years finding out. The Ithaca Local Economy Lab tells the stories of real experiments in doing business differently: a medical practice with no insurance companies, a town that printed its own money, baristas who bought their coffee company, a store purchased with no bank in sight. Not theory, not utopia. Just experiments, with results, receipts, and instructions your town could borrow.
Free guide: Health Care Without Insurance. Join the newsletter and get one honest experiment report per episode.
Latest Episodes
All EpisodesThe Carbon Offset You Can Actually See – Sustainable Finger Lakes Climate Fund
There is an immigrant family somewhere in Tompkins County who bought their first home in the United States and spent the winter wearing their coats inside. There is a single…
Grounds for Change – How a Cup of Coffee Makes for a Better Economy
Most people walk into Gimme! Coffee and order a latte. They don’t think about who owns the espresso machine, who voted on the charitable donation policy, or how the packaging…
Ithaca HOURS – The Most Important Economic Experiment You’ve Never Heard Of
What If Your Town Printed Its Own Money, and It Actually Worked? In 1991, as the U.S. economy stumbled through recession, a community organizer in Ithaca, New York did something…
Your Host
Meet Dia
Dia hosts the show from Ithaca, where she talks with the people actually running these experiments: a nurse practitioner who dropped insurance billing, a farmer who built a fiber collective from two goats, baristas who bought out their own coffee company.
Every conversation asks the same question: what did this cost, what worked, and could your town do it too?
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Independently produced. Your support keeps the conversations going.