From the Bottom Up

Building a Healthier Tomorrow – From the Bottom Up

Gwendolin Schemm

ENGL 336

FROSTBURG- Professor Kathleen Powell handed out name tags to create a sense of familiarity in the audience for the first lecture of the Appalachian Festival’s symposium. Members of the crowd mingled with one another as others grabbed breakfast in preparation for the day to begin.

Opening Remarks

Professor Kara Rogers Thomas, festival director and associate professor of folklore and sociology, opened the Friday events of the 12^th Annual Frostburg State University Festival, 3 days of celebrating the uniqueness of the Appalachian region. She thanked Dr. Ann Bristow and Powell for their participation and contributions to making the even possible. She then showed her thanks to Senator George Edwards for his dedication to Western Maryland, especially in a time where the area is politically divided.

Edwards promised the audience, and all of the region to do what he can to get “jobs that pay a living wage so they [young people] can stay here and raise a family”. His words were received with a warm response from the audience.

Following his piece, Thomas introduced Rebecca Ruggles, a member of the Environmental Health Network, who spoke on the importance of localizing ideas and applying them to western Maryland.

Both Ruggles and Edwards set the premises for the ideas the main speaker, Anthony Flaccavento, prepared to present. Thomas thanked Flaccavento for taking the time to come to the festival and providing his innovative ideas on creating a better economy.

Anthony Flaccavento

With 20 years of small scale farming and 30 years of studying economic initiative tactics, Flaccavento has dedicated himself to creating a healthier tomorrow for the American people.

He opened his presentation, “Building a Healthy Economy From the Bottom Up” with a startling statistic, followed by an even scarier question: The economic growth is three times the population growth in a period spanning from 1980 to 2016. If this is the case, where has all the money gone?

An attentive audience hung onto his words, hoping it would lead to an answer. Flacceavento continued identifying economic deficits American people face every day. In today’s economy, productivity has doubled, but the wages have flattened. The money goes to the top one percent.

This led Flaccavento to the central point of his presentation – an idea he coined ‘Bottom Up Economics’. This idea is the basis of his most recent book, Building a Healthy Economy From the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experiences for Transformative Change. He wrote this book when he ran for Congress in 2012 despite falling short in the General Election. The book introduces the role active citizens can play in initiating change and sustainability efforts.

‘Bottom Up Economics’ is built from 4 essential parts: building local capacity, overcoming estrangement, shifting from problem solving to solving for pattern and using the language of action more than abstraction. For each part, Flaccavento provided real-world examples that locals can implement into their own communities. For example, a program called Keep Growing Detroit has created over 1800 community gardens in the city while a program in New Mexico named La Monañita has grown from a few members to a massive community owned food chain. He ties this back by emphasizing that in rural communities “the environment” is about livelihood.

Photo by Gwendolin Schemm
Anthony Flaccavento responds to audience's questions at the
end of his presentation.

Before concluding his presentation, Flaccavento opened the floor to questions and insights from the audience.

Powell felt as if the problem was being “framed as a social welfare problem, rather than economic” and as a social worker she was tired of “picking up the pieces”. Powell continued by agreeing with Flaccavento’s methods to building healthier communities.

One local spoke out on the idea of overcoming estrangement and the role the Internet has played. He noted that, “the autonomy of the Internet and the communication devices allow us the operate separate of each other”. Another local agreed by pointing out that a society “can’t be connected in a world that has been unplugged”.

Flaccavento agreed that the dangers swarm but concluded his presentation by reminding the tentative and engaged audience that the "purpose of the economy is to serve us". 

Photo by Gwendolin Schemm
The Appalachian Festival celebrating Appalachian culture.