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Good Morning, Beautiful Business: The Unexpected Journey of an Activist Entrepreneur and Local-Economy Pioneer
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About Good Morning, Beautiful Business: The Unexpected
Product Description It's not often that someone stumbles into entrepreneurship and ends up reviving a community and starting a national economic-reform movement. But that's what happened when, in 1983, Judy Wicks founded the White Dog Café on the first floor of her house on a row of Victorian brownstones in West Philadelphia. After helping to save her block from demolition, Judy grew what began as a tiny muffin shop into a 200-seat restaurant-one of the first to feature local, organic, and humane food. The restaurant blossomed into a regional hub for community, and a national powerhouse for modeling socially responsible business. Good Morning, Beautiful Business is a memoir about the evolution of an entrepreneur who would not only change her neighborhood, but would also change her world-helping communities far and wide create local living economies that value people and place as much as commerce and that make communities not just interesting and diverse and prosperous, but also resilient. Wicks recounts a girlhood coming of age in the sixties, a stint working in an Alaska Eskimo village in the seventies, her experience cofounding the first Free People store, her accidental entry into the world of restauranteering, the emergence of the celebrated White Dog Café, and her eventual role as an international leader and speaker in the local-living-economies movement. Her memoir traces the roots of her career - exploring what it takes to marry social change and commerce, and do business differently. Passionate, fun, and inspirational, Good Morning, Beautiful Business explores the way women, and men, can follow both mind and heart, do what's right, and do well by doing good. Review Publishers Weekly-Restaurateur and activist Wicks has been an inspiration and a model to her fellow Philadelphia businesses and to adherents to the sustainable-food movement for several decades. This charming memoir follows Wicks from her bucolic small-town childhood to her youthful disillusionment, short-lived marriage to her childhood sweetheart, and early adventures working with him for VISTA in Alaska, where she was struck by the community-focused value systems and vowed to replicate them in her own life. Back in Philadelphia, she and her first husband opened a store selling counterculture products, but, to Wicks’s chagrin, her husband ultimately did not have faith in her abilities. After their divorce, and other restaurant experience, she remarried and had two children, whom she raised above the restaurant she founded―the White Dog Cafe. The Cafe gained international acclaim for its socially responsible business, serving farm-fresh local food and building the local living economy movement. Though its audience is likely to be limited to those already sold on the local food movement, this book is a touching and passionate story of an activist who turned her values into a sustainable and financially solvent endeavor. ForeWord Reviews- "Wicks first opened her restaurant, White Dog Cafe, on Sansom Street in Philadelphia in 1983. The restaurant became a beacon in the struggling neighborhood and known internationally for its commitment to farm-fresh, fairly traded, organic food―long before such eating habits were in fashion. Readers will be engaged and invigorated as they watch Wicks succeed with her innovative ideas; they’ll also be inspired as her perspective on the world grows in scope from her restaurant to her city to the whole world. Wicks’ memoir begins far before she opens White Dog Cafe, when she built a fort in the woods at age nine. Readers who are expecting strictly business advice and activism information will wonder why she begins here―but the more literary reader will see that she is examining the power of a sense of place. As a child she felt a strong connection to the woods near her house; as an adult she feels a strong connection to Sansom Street, and eventually the world beyond. Wicks’ memoir does a fantastic job of sharing how she’s
