I invited another business to move to Winchendon a little while ago. I just received a very nice reply from them explaining why they couldn't move here, which is what the last business I invited to move to Winchendon did. I made strong pitches in both cases, even though I knew it was a long shot. It's nice that the businesses were so gracious about it. They gave it some real thought and took the time to explain the barriers. I'm still disappointed.

This Wednesday I attended the latest HEAL Winchendon meeting, talking more about setting up a system for making healthy food available to Winchendon residents. I sat with the "Producers" breakout group--farmers, gardeners and so on--because that's an aspect of this project I feel strongly about. I think local food production is extremely important and we should be doing far more of it. But during our discussion we talked about the business side of producing food. We agreed that for this whole project to really work, it has to be making money and paying wages to the people working hard to run it. Volunteers just can't do everything. And more than anything else, the farmers and gardeners producing the food have to be able to make a living at what they do and receive fair market rates for their product.

To encourage businesses to come to Winchendon, we need to convince them that they'll make money here--enough money to live on, enough to make their investment worthwhile. To transform our community--for Winchendon to "reinvent itself" as one of the groups at the HEAL meeting imagined--we have to be willing to pay skilled, professional people to dedicate themselves to the job. We can't simply ask people to donate their lives and livelihoods out of the goodness of their hearts.

People in Winchendon often are generous and open handed to folks in real need. That's a wonderful thing to see. At the same time, I think there is something drastically wrong with a society which compels hard-working people to rely on crowd-funding and benefit concerts to pay their medical bills. I guess I'm a hopeless radical, but I believe that an "economy" is meant to serve the people who are part of it--not the other way around.

Local businesses that provide what their community needs; communities that buy locally; communities that produce their own food and even their own electricity; these will make us resilient, self-sufficient and strong. But for these to work, people need to be able to support themselves on what they do, and businesses need to be supported by their communities. This isn't a game, after all. This is real life.

Inanna Arthen