Redefining local: how our values are surfacing in the decisions we’re making during the pandemic
What do you get for a one-year old who has all she needs, in the middle of a pandemic? As my niece’s first birthday approached, I found myself asking this question. I didn’t want to get her more clothes, toys or books, because she has plenty. I did want to support our local businesses. As the warm days are arriving, and as we are reviving the simple pleasures from our own childhoods due to the pandemic, I had an idea: a sprinkler for her and her older brother to splash around in!
Idea firmly rooted, I placed a call to our local hardware store. After a few rings, Sarah picked up. I remember her name because we talked for several minutes. On hearing my need, she set the phone down and wandered the aisles until she found what I needed: an oscillating sprinkler! I gave her my credit card details and she directed me to come to the back of the store before 4pm.
When I arrived at the back of the store, I parked, put on my mask, went to an outdoor table, and gave my name. Seconds later, I had my sprinkler and was driving away.
I had a similar experience when collecting flowers for my birth mother as a celebration of her wedding: I called the florist, had a long talk with her about why I was in Connecticut not San Francisco right now (and why her daughter was in Connecticut not New York City), and eventually ordered an arrangement of hydrangeas, which I picked up parking-lot style.
Are these kinds of experiences on the rise, and what makes them so delightful?
As part of an exploration of ‘living local’ during the pandemic, a team of designers dug in to find out more. We’re part of a collective called Creative Collisions, a group of designers born of the pandemic to observe, encourage, and foster creativity.
In a week spent looking at different examples of living local, we uncovered a series of interesting changes that are bubbling up during the pandemic.
Here, we take a look at a few of them.
Rethinking suppliers: the emergence of intentionally-designed, personal supply chains
Dan Soltzberg used to go on walks in his small town, stopping to pick up coffee and a cookie from the local bakery. With everything closed, he realized he needed a new routine. Missing his caffeinated and calorific treats, he started experimenting: he found a series of small roasteries and bakeries across the country and began placing online orders, in essence creating his own personal supply chain of breakfast delicacies.
Kate Piper did something similar with her food supply chain. Instead of leaning on a large grocery store to check off her entire grocery list, she’s now turning to local specialist suppliers for different parts of it. For instance, she’s connected with local farms for fruit and vegetable boxes, which are both more reliable and offer more consistent quality. Through this hacked system, she’s noticed a gap: local milk delivery. This has her asking the question: where IS my milk coming from, and do I want that?
This emergence of the personal supply chain had been percolating (no pun intended!) before the pandemic, but the disruptions of our routines have caused many of us to be more intentional about how we source the products that fuel us, and also more curious about where our products travel from.
Reflecting on businesses who have created local supply chains in the past, I was reminded of a ‘disloyalty card’ hatched by a group of independent coffee shops in London a few years back, encouraging customers to try local baristas. When they had purchased from all 10 coffee shops, customers earned a reward at any one of them. It seems a lovely model for many proprietors now, and could work equally well across industries (imagine a collaboration between produce farms, cattle ranches and dairy farms to help Kate and others get all their food needs met more easily) as within the same industry (a disloyalty card for coffee and cookies would address Dan’s morning temptation needs).
To lean into this trend, here are some questions to explore:
As individuals, how might we understand the origin of and curate the acquisition of the supplies that feed our lives?
As communities, how might we support and boost local supply chains?
And as businesses, how might we think differently about partnerships as ways to strengthen our businesses and increase access to new customers?
Rethinking the definition of local: from geography to humanity
When one of my favorite photographers, Jamie Beck, realized her income had all but dried up due to canceled commissions and art shows, she got creative: she documented the quarantine and produced one photograph per day from her residence in Provence. Recognizing that the uncertainty of the pandemic means people didn’t want to spend a lot, she offered her work at an accessible $50 for a poster, instead of selling it as high-end photographs with a price tag to match. And she donated 10% of the proceeds to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts COVID-19 Relief Fund.
I’ve purchased from her, and I also bought hand-sewn clothes from another small Provençal business who kept their seamstresses in work through selling pre-ordered shirts. Besides loving the products, I appreciated the creativity these small businesses were exhibiting in navigating the pandemic, and I wanted to support the people behind them.
In fact, we noticed many examples of ‘living local’ were less about physical proximity and more about an intentional choice to support businesses that were small and contributed to their communities. For instance, new choices emerged to help consumers support independent bookstores, whether or not that shop was actually down the street. Bookshop.org sends proceeds back to independents, and Libro.fm does the same with proceeds from audio books. Our colleague Tracy DeLuca has switched from Audible to Libro.fm as a result.
In each of these cases, it was the human connection, in addition to the good or service, that drove the purchase. ‘Living local’ is as much about supporting the humans behind the businesses as it is about purchasing the products those businesses offer.
To lean into this trend, here are some questions to explore:
As individuals, how might we identify and support businesses that are strengthening their local communities?
As businesses, how might we get creative about how we meet our customers’ needs in new ways?
And…how might we highlight who we are and what we’re doing for our communities as a way to create engagement?
Rethinking local community: serving our neighbors
Some kids in my neighborhood painted faces on rocks and placed them along the walkways. A particularly fertile area is on our property, where there’s a large rock face filled with little ledges. We noticed that the ‘face-rocks’ keep moving within the boulder, and yesterday, we caught the kids in the act! Each day they’re moving the anthropomorphized stones to new homes. So, after they left, we moved them again, to keep the ‘conversation’ alive.
And when the pandemic first began, a small group in my neighborhood offered up grocery shopping services for the elderly and immunocompromised.
Both of these exemplify how we are building community in places where it had been lost: the immediate vicinity of our homes. Many of us across the world could confess to not really knowing our neighbors, not even their names. We’ve seen a dramatic shift in that reality as we’ve all stayed closer to home.
But, we now know more than their names: we know what fat content they like in their milk (or whether they’re lactose intolerant) and what their go-to comfort food is, as we help each other with grocery runs. We know who is good at the little yard repairs and who are the social connectors and who are the artists.
In essence, we’ve developed physically-distanced community (community created outside at a distance) with our evening passagiatas (the Italians have always had a word for taking a walk near home in the evening) and our adirondack parties (the ubiquitous chair of summer relaxation, amongst others, being pulled out to the streets to socialize from a safe distance with neighbors). And something we’re calling ‘asynchronous community’ (community built of people interacting with shared spaces at different times) has blossomed as well, exemplified by that game we’re playing with the painted rock-faces, and in reports we’ve heard of people using their own yards to host art galleries anyone can enjoy.
To lean into this trend, here are some questions to explore:
As individuals, how might we use our talents or interests or spare time to offer something to our neighbors?
As neighborhoods, how might we take advantage of this time to foster the kinds of communities our parents and grandparents had growing up?
…
Reflecting on all of these stories and the question we posed asking what makes them so delightful, a trend emerges: each one of these speaks to people considering both their needs and the needs of those around them, and experimenting with bespoke solutions to meet those needs.
From Jamie Beck suspecting people needed to consume art as much as she needed to create it and my colleague Dan supporting independent roasteries as a way to forge a new tradition, to the kids looking to entertain themselves and as a consequence starting a community ‘dialogue’ through painted rocks, each of these stories celebrates people.
What makes these stories of living local delightful is the humanity that underlies them, this idea that we know the people who are caring for us and for whom we are caring. The needs being served with these early pivots and local ‘hacks’ are all highlighting our fundamental needs. For those who are lucky enough to have roofs over our heads, this is what’s emerging as critical: food to feed our bodies, books and art to stretch our brains, gifts to celebrate those we love, and social connection to feed our souls.
Much like the hardware store which retooled its business by identifying the most important needs in its community, we’ve started to identify what really matters to us, and put our energy there. And it’s only taken a pandemic. And who knows, maybe this resurgence of living local will mean main streets thrive and neighborhoods overflow with community for a long time to come.
This is the first in a series of articles about the positive opportunities stemming from the pandemic. Please share and sign up here for our Curiosity Club if you’d like to receive regular updates.
Amy Bonsall is the founder and CEO of Nau, a business focused on increasing the humanity in workplaces, building on the principles of design thinking, mindfulness, and behavior change.
Creative Collisions is a collective of designers, founded by Amy Bonsall and Kate Piper, focused on surfacing the beauty in the evolutions the coronavirus pandemic has created.
Special thanks to Creative Collisions teammates Dan Soltzberg and Tracy DeLuca for their stories.
