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Gardening and preserving season is underway! City Folk’s Farm Shop is once again supporting home gardeners, cooks, and chicken keepers with a slate of classes and supplies for every age and price range.

Join the fun at 4760 N High St in the Clintonville/Beechwold neighborhood of Columbus to expand your skills and be part of the active urban homesteading movement. Our classes are taught by a variety of experts including a veterinarian, environmental scientists, urban homesteaders, an herbalist, and farmers, all of whom receive 100% of the registration fees to fuel their projects.

Upcoming classes include:

Naturally Neat! Homemade cleansers for home and body – May 14

Attracting Powerful Pollinators – May 15

Soaking and Sprouting Workshop – May 21

Benefits of Collecting and Catching Rain Water – May 23

Swap & Save Seeds – June 2

Climate Change in Ohio and the effects on your garden – June 6

Solve Garden Problems Naturally – June 11

Fermented Tonics – June 13

Composting with Worms – June 18

Preserving Basics – July 11

Makin’ Bacon – July 14

Find more details at www.cityfolksfarmshop.com or register by calling 614.946.5553 or emailing shawn@cityfolksfarmshop.com.

The Shop also expanded the number of local seedling vendors this year. They are carrying certified organic starts from Swainway Urban Farm, sustainably-raised herbs from Sunny Meadows Flower Farm and perennial favorites from Como Yarden.

About City Folk’s Farm Shop:

City Folk’s Farm Shop was created to connect city-dwellers to goods, services, information and other people who are interested in city farming. Owners Shawn, a former marketing professional and backyard gardener, and Gerry, a builder interested in green design and alternative energy, opened the store in their Clintonville-Beechwold neighborhood. They stock the store with gardening tools and supplies, backyard animal feeds and equipment, and homesteading products from local and small businesses wherever possible.

Contact:

Shawn Fiegelist: shawn@cityfolksfarmshop.com

CityFolksFarmShop.com | facebook.com/cityfolksshop | twitter.com/cityfolksshop

4760 N High St. Columbus OH 43214 | 614.946.5553

On High Street just south of 5th Ave., they cater to students looking for a good place to study with free wi-fi and plenty of outlets to plugin. It also is a great place to work or hold a meeting. The conference room can be reserved online.

Travonna has an extensive selection of coffees, teas, sodas,  smoothies and the ever necessary Red Bull.  The menu features a selection of treats from a PB&J sandwich with raspberry jam to BBQ Chicken Flatbread Pizza and several vegan offerings.

The walls at Travonna are covered with art by local artists and their stage hosts poetry and rants alike. Check travonnacoffee.com for schedules of their poetry, open mike and rant night.

Earlier this month the Travonna announced that they are under new management.  The official word on their facebook page is that “Travis is no longer actively involved in the day to day operations”.  We hope the fresh management means Travonna will be getting even better.

www.travonnacoffee.com

Could this be the future of local development?  Will citizens invest in their local neighborhood? Is Internet-based crowd funding in the future for your business? Check out this article about a new development in Washington DC and let us know what you think.

Gina Schaefer says she loves her new neighborhood, and she’s putting her money where her mouth is. Schaefer has lived in Washington, D.C., for 22 years and recently invested in a new property being developed close to her new home — if she ever wonders about the return on her investment, all she has to do is take a walk.

“There is a lot of development going on in my area and I want to be able to walk by and say ‘hey that’s partially mine’ or ‘I’m an investor in this property’ or take my friends to the business that is going to go into that building and help support that building as a patron,” she says.

Schaefer, who runs hardware stores across the District, uses online-crowd equity platform Fundrise to invest in local real estate. The website, which was launched in August 2012 by brothers Ben and Dan Miller, allows local residents to buy shares in neighborhood development projects.

“We take a building and we take it ‘public’ so you can buy a share of the company that owns this building, the way you’d own a share of Apple of IBM,” says Ben. He says share pricing is based on demand, with some shares selling for $100 and others up to $25,000.

“When you own a share of the company that owns this building you get cash flow from the rents, you are like a landlord, so you get rental income every year, you get appreciation if the building appreciates, if the neighborhood grows, the value of the stock grows with it.”

It was published originally in Business Insider on Feb 18, 2013.

Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle.
The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won — for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).

The chain stores won not only because they flung money around — sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials — but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. “We Want Bargain Shopping” was their rallying cry.

The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn’t that a bargain, though?
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/scale-implosion-2013-2

That is what ECDI does.

How do they do this? They do this by investing in a job a day and a business a week.

How can you help? Donate!

Follow this link to the direct ECDI page.

Every donation brings ECDI that much closer to bringing the $150,000 grand prize home to the state of Ohio where they will invest, educate, and innovate with local small businesses.

Columbus has a job-creating powerhouse it can be proud of. Since 2004, the Economic and Community Development Institute (ECDI) has been creating “a job a day, a business a week.” This isn’t just a slogan. This is their track record — proven over eight years!

The core of ECDI’s mission has been providing growing businesses with access to capital programs, such as business lending and grants, and instruction on how to use the money wisely. In just 8 years, ECDI has helped start more than 2,000 businesses creating and retaining over 4,000 jobs. That’s why ECDI has been selected as one of the finalists in the Huffington Post JobRaising Challenge. The project is an effort to tap into the job-creating potential of nonprofits to raise money, raise awareness, and help put Americans back to work. ECDI has been given a Crowdrise page to raise funds and spread the word about their cause. Please share this site with your networks to help ECDI make the most of this exciting opportunity.

Together we can make Ohio a national leader for job creation and small business development! For more background, read Arianna Huffington’s description of the JobRaising Challange here.

Read ECDI President Steve Fireman’s blog post and find out Steve’s interesting recommendation to those who aren’t happy with their work!

Consider making a donation! ECDI is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and donations are tax deductible.

Access our one stop financial information center by clicking on the logo.  Or, use the links below for specific content: Credit Counseling – our CUNA partner offers information about your credit Fraud Prevention – our CUNA partner offers consumer protection information Budget Blueprint - use this convenient on-line budget calculator tool to develop your household spending plan.

Save the Dream Ohio: Ohio’s Foreclosure Prevention EffortStruggling to make your house payment due to involuntary loss or reduction of income? You may qualify for assistance  through the Restoring Stability program. Visit www.savethedream.ohio.gov  to learn more about options for assistance and eligibility criteria.

Our local credit union, Kemba Financial, offers free advice and resources.

To learn about investing your money in Main Street rather than Wall Street, visit www.moveyourmoneyproject.org

Anyone with a minimum of $1000 can now invest locally and know that 100% of their investment is going to support our local economy.  The fund returns 2% annually on investments for 3 years and 3% annually for investments left in the fund for 5 years.  This is well above the average money market fund that is invested in multinational corporations.  Even better, ECDI informs investors where their loans are made locally, affording the opportunity to shop or use services from those companies.

Interested in the Invest Local Ohio Fund? Contact Steve Fireman, General Counsel and President of the Economic and Community Development Institute. He can be reached at 216-912-5662 or email sfireman at ecdi.org.

Get a closer look at the people involved and their mission to help new and growing local small businesses. We can all be a part of this opportunity to grow our local economy!

Learn more about all the ways to invest locally.

Great food with a social twist!

Go to FoodQuest.com on any mobile device or desktop computer to explore, rate and comment on dishes from over 60 local restaurants. After all, Seeing is Believing.  The site is filled with great photos of each dish rated by other diners.  Find food by dish, by neighborhood or by style. Search their new eateries to explore.  Finally you can search for your friends on the site and see the dishes and restaurants they have rated.  All on your mobile device, no ap to download.

The company is a Columbus independent business so you are in supporting local restaurants and a new local tech start-up as well. Use FoodQuest.com for your next dining adventure!

A few of the visual delights from the site.

Just in time for the holidays, the Co-op has a new section full of great gift ideas They have new books from local authors Del Sroufe and Mary Lou Shaw, soaps from local soap-makers Oh, Lather,  hats and dryer balls made from the wool of local sheep, chocolates made in Athens, OH from O’Chocolate.

Visit for aisles of sustainably produced food and gifts that keep on giving to our local economy.