Episode 163: Why Local Businesses Might Just Save The Planet | Judy Wicks | Entrepreneur & Activist
Judy Wicks didn’t just open a restaurant. She created a hub for community, activism, and sustainable business. As the founder of the White Dog Café and the Sustainable Business Network, she’s spent decades proving that profit and purpose can thrive together. Judy’s story is about more than food; it’s about building local economies, empowering entrepreneurs, and using business as a force for good. We talk about the movement she helped spark, the lessons she’s learned about values-based leadership, and why local, community-driven solutions are essential for a more equitable future. She shares stories from her early days as a business owner, the turning points that shaped her mission, and how she continues to inspire change-makers, activists, and business leaders around the world.
“Everything I’ve ever done has been about creating community, because that makes me happy. Through that I learned how Business is a powerful tool for social change.”
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Follow along using the Transcript
Chapters:
00:00 Work, family, and values
01:00 Introducing Judy Wicks and her accomplishments
03:00 Life after restaurants: new nonprofits and missions
04:30 Profit with purpose: doing good and making money
06:00 Building community through business
08:00 Living above the shop and localism
10:00 The Free People and Urban Outfitters origin story
13:00 Making business accessible: new, vintage, and free products
15:00 Localism vs. globalization and resilient economies
23:00 Walkable communities and human connection
26:00 Shifting from individualism to community
29:00 Feminine energy, balance, and saving the planet
33:00 Heroes and inspirations: Gandhi, MLK, Jane Jacobs
35:00 What’s next: nonprofits and local supply chains
38:00 Realigning life and business with values
43:00 Powerful Ladies, power, and stepping into it
47:00 Lifelong growth and the importance of self-care
49:00 Leading with heart and generosity
50:00 Where to find Judy and her organizations
51:00 Closing reflections and gratitude
There can be an integration of work life and family life. It doesn't have to be separate. I think that's a false noer. Corporations want people to leave their values at home when they go to work. If your family was there, it would be hard to do the kind of things that corporate employees are asked to do in terms of destroying the planet. There's just so many things.
That's Judy Wicks, and this is The Powerful Ladies Podcast.
Hey guys. I'm Kara Duffy, a business coach and entrepreneur on a mission to help you live your most extraordinary life. By showing you anything is possible. People who have mastered freedom, ease success, who are living their best lives and most ridiculous lives, and those who are changing the world are often people you've never heard of until now.
I've shared before on this podcast that if someone inspires you, just reach out to them. You never know who will be a yes to hanging out with you. A client of mine recommended that I read the book, good Morning, beautiful Business. Within the first chapter, I knew I'd found a new woman to add to my podcast.
Guest wishlist and to my heroes list. Judy Wicks has a long list of accomplishment. She's a mom, an entrepreneur, a restaurateur, a multi nonprofit founder, an author, a speaker, an activist, a community builder, a connector, a world traveler. The list goes on. She created the first of many things in the restaurant and local food and local community movement.
And it's amazing to me that everyone doesn't know who she is. Reading her book reinspired me to take on doing it all and to be a louder voice in changing the world when I grew up. I wanna be Judy Wicks, and I think you will too.
Welcome to the Powerful Ladies Podcast. Thank you. I am very honored that you were here today. Not only is it the, we're talking during International Women's Month. Yesterday was International Women's Day. But I just read your book. I have it right here. Oh, wow. Good morning. Beautiful Business.
It was referred to me by a client. I'm a business coach and I, in addition to running Powerful Ladies, and she's you have to read this book like this. She she was so inspired by you, so she sent that book through and it's a book that knocked my socks off oh wow. Thank you. You're welcome.
It completely gave me the new not even new, but the realignment that I didn't know I was needing. To feel empowered to focus on doing more than I was. And so before I keep bragging about how great the book is, I'll pause and let you introduce yourself to everyone. So please tell us your name, where you are in the world, and what you're up to.
Okay. My name is Judy Wicks. I live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, right in Center City. And I'm a retired entrepreneur. I was in the restaurant business for around 30 years and since my retirement I wrote a book and and then I started two non-profits. One is called the Circle, vans and Uncles, and it's a microloan fund for emerging entrepreneurs in Philadelphia that are helping to build our local economy, mostly food and clothing businesses.
And then I have a second nonprofit called Altogether now, Pennsylvania. And our mission is to connect rural and urban communities to build sustainable and self-reliant regional supply chains so that we produce our basic needs as close to home as possible. Yeah, so I've been doing that as a volunteer for the last three years, and now have just raised money to hire an executive director who starts on Monday morning.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
And you just listed a lot of amazing things and you are still very humble because for everyone who hasn't read your book yet, the book is called Good Morning, beautiful Business, and you were such a pioneer and still are in. How restaurants are run in, fair trade movement in the local movement in, clean poly farm produce direct to restaurants and consumers.
You and a previous husband started free people, which growing up in Bucks County and then in Boston, like those stores were like, they made sense to me when I was younger, right? So you, I did not realize how much you had been influencing my whole life. And I don't think many people do that all along the way.
That all these movements that you've been a part of. They came from you caring about your community and they ca they came from you also thinking about how can I be profitable and do the right thing, which like, I want everyone to be able to make those choices. Did that, cho, did that come to you?
Like it just made sense to you, it seemed in the book, and is that how it occurred in real life too?
Yeah. I never, I never once separated, making profit from doing good. It was just came naturally to me. And I remember the day when I was on a panel and an older man on the same panel said that he was advising the young entrepreneurs on the, in the session that before they did good, they should do well that they should make sure that they have profits that they can then give away to charity or, volunteer or whatever.
And so I was shocked at this, and I remember getting up and saying I'm sorry, but I'm gonna give you the opposite advice that you know, making money in any way possible so that you can give away. Your excess at the end of the year or the end of your career has caused most of the problems in the world.
And that we should never, ever separate making profit from doing good, that the two must go hand in hand. If we wanna have a world that works for everybody. So that was the first time that it actually even occurred to me that people purposely separate profit from doing good.
It just doesn't make any sense.
And you're an entrepreneur that I think. Isn't talked about a lot in the media because so often, even when I use the word entrepreneur, a lot of my clients are like, Ew, I'm not an entrepreneur. And it's become this aligned with 10 xing and tech companies and globalized huge movements.
And. When I, from reading your book, it was like, oh no you just started because you wanted to build a community.
That's what I was always my reason for doing anything. Ever since I was a little kid. I started Little Enterprises and, started clubs or, like the, the hiking club or the Explorers Club or whatever.
But it was all, everything I've always done is, has really been about building community, because that's what makes me happy. Yeah. Basically. And yeah, so that's been the motivation all along. And then, as I got into business, I realized what a powerful tool it is.
That it was in my business that I concentrated my creativity and my energy and my time and that and realized that business is a powerful tool for social change. And so then I started to focus on that and how could I. Someone joked one time that I wasn't really in the restaurant business.
What I did was that I used good food to lure innocent customers into social activism. And so I think that's in a sense what I was doing. 'cause I was never a chef. And but I just like to gather people. And then I started realizing that I could I could get people interested in social change by luring them to the restaurant with good food.
And good times. Yeah. And good times. Yep. I love that. Not only did you have great food and have great customers, you also and did activism, but you guys always had fun, like all your parties you were talking about. I'm like, I need more parties in my business. That's a clear ad. I have to make sure it comes back.
Yeah.
Again, that just comes naturally to me. I had an older friend one time that said, Judy, you're such a social creature. If there's no one around, you'd share a nut with a squirrel.
That's amazing. Yeah, that's true. I
shared food with my dog plenty of times. Yeah. But, yeah. And I also I loved that through doing what mattered to you, you just kept creating more opportunities. There's so many people that. We get so afraid to try something or do something or we think about the limitations, but it seems that everything that you have, whenever you've trusted your gut and done, and maybe your heart and maybe both and said no, we have to do this.
It seemed to create a magnet of like more amazing people and things coming to you. Like I think that's part of what was so inspiring about your story is, how, what I struggle with is, how can I do all of it? How can I, have the business that is making the impact? How can I care about all the issues?
And you just kept taking on more and more issues and building teams around it. And I'm like. Okay. I just need to do what Judy does, take it on steam.
Yeah. One of my tricks, so to speak is living above the shop or was living above the shop. And now I continue to work at home and with COVID, you ha have to, but yeah.
I never had to tend to two communities. I always lived and worked in the same community. I don't think necessarily someone has to live above the shop, but it really helps to live in the same place that you work in the same community. So you don't have two communities to engage in and pull can pull yourself apart.
And I think too many people are so intent on separating work from home that they are willing to commute. And I, that takes so much time that when you think of the amount of time that people commute, that's time that they could be using to do either fun things or meaningful things or both or whatever.
So that's one thing I really strongly believe in is, is living and working in the same community. And I think that also is part of my localism a philosophy when we really are knowledgeable about the place where we live and we take care of that place. And I think we're such mobile people, modern days that we're flying all over the place and we might work, far from where we live or whatever.
And so we don't really think about, what does my community need? Where does my food come from? Where does my energy come from? Where does my waste go to? And do I know about these things? Are they being do done right? How can I make them better? Yeah, it's all tied together.
This commitment to place, I guess is what it's all about for me, and I've always been committed to place, I grew up in a small town where I lived my whole life. I went off to college, but then I moved to Philly in 1970. And that's been my place since then. Oh, and I just wanted to add a little something in terms of my first business in 1970 when I came to Philadelphia it was called the Free People Store, but it wasn't it wasn't the predecessor of the current free people.
It was the the first urban Outfitters. Because our, the concept it was to create basically a general store for a certain demographic, which were the under 30 crowd because. Only because we happened to be 23. And as far as starting a store when I was little I used to paint things on scraps of wood and sell 'em from my wagon down by the highway.
And so when my first husband and I were trying to decide what to do, we were in Vista for a year in an living in Eskimo Village and during the Vietnam War. And when we came home and decided, we have to have a career. We couldn't we couldn't figure out who we wanted to work. We didn't wanna work for anybody, basically.
So I said, let's start a store. And I said, all you have to know is you buy something at one price and you sell it for a higher price. And so my husband said, okay, let's try that. That's how we started. And we started with $3,000, which was our stipend from Vista. We each got $1,500.
And it's a, billions of dollars a company now. And my first husband is still the CEO but I left to find my own a adventure. That's a whole nother story that you know from the book. But the the concept of, having a general store for all the things that a demographic needs.
Mixing together a clothes housewares records and books, house plants and all that kind of stuff was not heard of before. It was like probably the first life, what they call now Lifestyle Style store. And it was original in that way. And so I just wanted to say that after I left the store, the Free People Store my husband changed the name to Urban Outfitters.
And then years after that he brought back the name Free People as a second store, which had a different a totally different business plan. Business model. It was just a clothing store and cheap clothing, quite frankly, but it was Urban Outfitters. That was the what our store was the basis for the foundational store.
Yeah. And I, and it always made me happy. I spent way too much time in both of them in Philly and in Boston. But it was one of the first places that also sold new things and vintage things.
And we did that in the first store as well. That was a big part of our business. We would go to the Ragman and he had these bins of clothes, of used clothes that were, like 15 feet or even 20 feet high.
They were in these bins. And Dick and I would crawl into this big mound of clothing and start digging. I'd say, oh, here's a fur coat. Oh, here's leather jacket. Oh, here's a velvet dress. Oh, here's a soak slip. Yeah. So we'd go through all these clothes, trying to find the gems, and then bought them by the pound, which was really cheap.
Because the clothes are gonna be shipped overseas just in bulk, they didn't bother to sort them. And so we picked out the gems and then had a tremendous markup because buy them by the pound, it was like pennies. And then charged, $50 for the leather jacket or something.
So that was a big part for success, was selling carefully curated previously worn clothes. And then at the same time we, we had a free bin when students left they would leave clothes on our front steps and we put them in a free bin because we wanted everyone who came to the store to be able to afford something.
And if they didn't have any money, they could go to the free bin and find something for free.
There's so many things that I, that my, my brain's just like sparking right now of like things to keep talking about because, having the, new products the used products, the free bin.
It's a, it's so interesting to me, and I'm sure this is more clear in hindsight for you than in the moment, but how you kept considering all the levels. I talked to so many clients about making this a value ladder, right? How do you serve everyone at different places so that you can still serve the way you want to and make it accessible for different people?
And before it was even in existence in a marketing structure and at an MBA program, like you were just doing it because it made sense. Like you wanted to be able to say yes to anyone and to include everyone. And it's just more proof that all the. And not all. I would, I'm gonna venture 90% of the business nonsense that people are taught and told that aligns with the profit first global economy orientation we don't need, and we can throw it away and make our lemonade stand and everything will be fine.
I also love that you talked about living where you work. On my grand ideas list that when I get in front of a senator, I'll bring up, one is having a tax rebate if you work within certain miles of your office or place of work, because I agree with you. There's the number one cause of people to be unhappy is their commute time.
And I've even spent time I've lived in the east coast. I lived in Europe for a while, but when I moved to California, there was a period when I was driving to LA downtown la oh wow. And it was horrible. I did it for about a year and I'm like I'm killing myself. I'm killing the planet.
This is so not, none of this is adding up. Yeah. And since I've been able to work from home as an entrepreneur, like everything has shifted because like you said, you get all this time back I was not surprised, as I'm sure you were not either, when people were forced to be working from home, people who could, that their productivity went up.
And they probably were still in their pajamas all day and it was fine.
Yeah. It's, co COVID changed a lot and I think that's one of them when people spend time at home and they realize they don't wanna commute, and that there, that, and I think importantly that there can be an integration of work life and family life.
It doesn't have to be separate. Yes. I think that's a false noer. And I, why I feel like that's been promoted is they, that corporations want people to leave their values at home when they go to work. When, and if you were, if your family was there. It would be hard to do the kind of things that corporate employees are asked to do in terms of excluding others in terms of destroying the planet.
There's just so many things and, if if you bring your values to work it's a very, it would be a very different planet. And I think that's part of separating people from their values is separating work and family. And, when you work at home your family's right there.
And so you tend to talk about your work more. For me, in the restaurant business, my kids were more integrated into the business. They were down there. They saw what I was doing. My, my daughter who's now 42 once told me that it was by watching me, at work that she learned how to value customers.
And she's great at communities at a customer service in her business. And she once told me that she learned that from me by watching me from when she was five years old. And being in the restaurant with me.
And it's a much more natural way. Even just anthropologically, right?
Yeah. Of everyone being together, the farm
family, the old time businesses, whether it was a grocery store or a tailor shop or whatever, the family lived upstairs and so the family was integrated, into the hardware store or whatever it was, and kids worked in their parents' stores and whatnot.
And I feel like things are hopefully going back more that way where we feel an integration of family and a work life. And the values and having the same values in both.
Yeah. It's my coaching journey started helping people with nonprofits 'cause it broke my heart how many start and fail.
' cause usually someone shows up and says, I wanna save puppies. And then. Doesn't know how to use a spreadsheet. And then I, similar to you realizing that there could be, that business had power and being able to make it work meant that we could do the good thing. So I really relate to hoping that more of these small businesses and people doing more of what aligns with their heart can keep happening.
Yeah. Reading your book, I started going down a rabbit hole at Chelsea Green Press of okay, who give me more people like Judy, please. And then I moved on to this book. Local is Our Future Uhhuh, and I'd love to spend some time talking about that because I, you've been such an influence in the local movement and I don't think, I don't think people realize that how much the.
The myth and narrative of globalization has seeped into everything and how much of a negative impact it's really having on our communities and our economy. So if you could speak to that would be fantastic. Yeah.
Yeah. The thing about I'm not against all global trade, my vision is that the global economy be a network of sustainable and just regional economies. So that rather than having the global economy be controlled by large multinational corporations who are basically draining wealth from our communities and becoming super rich and controlling everything that we decentralize our economy to produce our basic needs as close to home as possible to local farms and local small businesses.
And in doing so we accomplished quite a lot. First of all, we're moving wealth and power away from these large corporations to our own communities. But secondly we're developing self-reliance. And in, in this time of climate change this is extremely important because we've seen now how global supply chains are being disrupted. During the pandemic a lot of people couldn't get food. They go into the grocery store and the shelves would be empty. Because the centralized, in this case, just a national nationally centralized food system was imploding and the farmers were pouring milk down the drain or slaughtering all their pigs or whatever, because the supply chains broke down.
Meanwhile, the local farmers were, pivoting and getting food into town. And so we saw it firsthand during the pandemic and then we saw it more recently how the global supply chains were breaking down. Still, they're broken down. There are a lot of things aren't coming through or they're coming through very slowly and, it just makes sense that this is gonna get worse.
As weather gets worse, it's going to disrupt transportation. As panda, we're not done with pandemics yet. We saw how that disrupted their cyber warfare. Just recently, a few months ago, a, a big conglomerate beef industry was attacked by a cyber warfare and they couldn't move the beef along the supply chain and is a huge disruption.
And so these big companies are targets for cyber warfare or terrorism, and, the more we decentralize, the less it is to disrupt. And the more nimble local systems are that they can pivot. Where the big systems are too big to move quickly and recalibrate.
So what I feel is that the work we're doing now to build local self-reliance so that we have access locally to our food, to our clothing, to our energy to our plant medicines, to our building materials, the more we can shore up that self-reliant regional economy the better prepared our children and grandchildren will be to survive climate change.
Because we're not leaving them a healthy planet, unfortunately, we're leaving them in crisis. And the least we can be doing is developing an economy that can support them. And yet, people aren't even thinking about it. They're going for the most part along their merry way, buying stuff from China and not really thinking, where does my food come from?
Or where does my energy come from? Where does my clothes come from? Whatever. So it's a big educational jump for people to get on the bandwagon about this. And time to make a difference because local economies not only reduce the amount of carbon of this long distance shipping, but we're also preparing our communities to face the effects of climate change.
It's almost coming back to what we know has worked right and again. Anthrop anthropologically, and it can, and economically, it's that kind of frontier mindset of okay, what does the town need to survive? We, yeah.
And then, and we have modern technology to help us this time, which which didn't exist before. So I'm not saying give up all the modern stuff. Because technology and our ability to communicate and whatnot to, through ele electronically like we're doing right now with the zoom is so important. So I'm not, it's not like going back to the stages or colonial days or whatever.
But it's a, it's about common sense, and I think an intuitive. A drive for self-reliance. I th I think that seeing people go to the farmer's markets there's reason for that. Like why are farmer's markets so popular? I think one is that they're fun.
You actually get to meet your neighbors and your, in the farmers who bring your food into town each week. But there's also something about intuitively feeling that it's right. And I think that comes from our intuition about self-reliance. That as we, and when we buy from local farmers and help to build their businesses, we're securing our own food security.
And so I think, we now need to do that with other things, with energy and clothing and building materials and plant medicines and so on. Like, how can we. Shift our buying away from the pharmaceuticals to learning how to use locally raised plant medicine. And that's happening now with the legalization of CBD and THC.
And there's other plant medicines that are not as familiar to people that are gradually be going to be recognized and legalized.
Y yes. Yes. Is how I feel. I'm like, can I nod anymore during this conversation? And there's a book that my dad gave me years ago called Bowling Alone about the shift in communities from post World War iii.
I think this book was written in the nineties or early two thousands. Just about how so much of the disconnection that's happened within communities and honestly the craving people have to be a part of something. Know, I my nerdy, I did my thesis in college on new urbanism. And there's a great book Suburban Nation out there, but it talks about how, as you said, all of these parts are coming together for people who don't know. Like, why we just feel we're drawn to communities where you can walk and where you do have small businesses and where everything isn't a chain because you there's soul, there's people, there's interaction. It's things that we want as humans. And I feel I keep choosing places to live that have walkability scores and have that because I know I need it to be healthy.
Yeah. But I think anyone listening can feel the difference of walking into a chain restaurant versus walking into a family owned restaurant right away.
Exactly. And same with the store,
Yeah. It's, we want to be connected and whether it is on Zoom or if it, ideally it's in real life where we can hug people and high five and sit down and have a cup of coffee together because we, I think so many people are missing that and craving it.
And they were even before the pandemic because of. How their actual community is structured.
Absolutely. Jane Jacobs is a hero of mine, and she was, the founder of this idea of the new urban urbanism of walkable communities. And she talked about the sidewalk ballet, in cities of just watching the people go by and so on, and the joy that brings and how the demolition of urban communities and building these high rises destroyed community.
So she was a great I really admire her. And yeah. And in terms of individualism versus community, that is something that is so important that Americans have been really geared towards individualism, that we look up to the lone cowboy, or whatever, and I think capitalism is really about individualism. It's about individual achievement. It is about, dominating and winning and at the expense of others. And that there's only so much to go around and you have to fight for your own and all this kind of stuff. That's really caused the, a lot of the crisis that we're in right now both in terms of the inequality of our.
Societies and in terms of our relationship with the environment. So we really need to move from individualism to community. That I don't, I feel my feeling is that the human species is at a crossroads right now. I think we all see this. Yeah. So there's always constant change. And the question is, which direction is the change going?
And for billions of years, life was unfolding, to become more beautiful, more diverse more complex. And, human beings have now disrupted that, nature constantly creates the conditions for more life. And that's what's been going on for billions of years. And now human beings are doing the opposite.
We're creating conditions for less life. And so the planet is dying, under our, the effects of human beings. We're getting mass extinction. Our resources are being polluted, our water, our air, our water with toxic chemicals. We're getting more and more cancer, all these things. So we're creating, we're the planet is dying, so we either continue that path towards our own extinction which would not be all that bad, except that we would bring with us all the innocent mammals and the innocent people with us or we can start heading in the other direction which is an upward direction.
And the way to get there is to move from individualism to community to move from hoarding to sharing to move from fear of not having enough for ourself. To sharing, to generosity that this is the only way out of this. This is the only way that human beings are going to survive if we raise our consciousness to start acting in these ways with these values.
To be to have a revolution of values as Martin Luther King called for back in the sixties, where we move from a thing oriented society to a people oriented society. And that's what it's called for now. And the price for not doing so is extinction. And so there's every reason why we need to change our values and our, and therefore our economy if we care at all about our children and grandchildren.
I, I had the pri privilege yesterday of hosting a panel of women who, like you are putting everything they care about into how they spend their day and do their business. We had a, an expert who in reproductive rights. A Dr. Sophia Yen who started a subscription like birth control company. We has a woman who focuses on rehabilitating people from jails back into society.
Someone who's all about, voting rights and access, and someone who's also brings together the Latina community. And we kept coming to this space of everything that's on the ballot. Everything that's a social or political or even economic factor seems to impact women so much more than it's impacting our male counterparts right now, based on how society has been set up.
And it seems, it seemed that way in the sense of. Who else is making the choices about food in a family or where the kids go to school or which where the doctor is. And if something breaks down, like we saw in the pandemic, there was record number of women having to quit their jobs to then make a choice.
'cause you, as you mentioned, everything was disconnected so it couldn't keep all existing together. How do you feel, being the powerful lady that you are, how do you feel that feminism has intertwined with the, all the issues that continue to be unsolved, it seems. And do you feel like there's a new wave of women understanding that and taking actions again, or do you feel like you're seeing a repeat of what's happened before?
Interesting question. I do feel that feminine energy is a huge factor in this and it's, and I say feminine energy, not being only within women, although, we have the good fortune of being raised as women and therefore as nurturers and the one that's most responsible for dealing with the children and food and all these things.
And so we're more in a position to, to be generous and nurturing and loving because we've been culturally groomed for that where men haven't. But I feel that the the feminine energy within men is equally as important as the feminine energy within women that we, as individuals need to be ba, have a balance of feminine and masculine energies.
And I had a farmer one time that explained it. That good farming was a balance of masculine and feminine energy. That the masculine energy was more about efficiency and the feminine energy was more about nurturing. And you need to have both. If you if you have too much male energy you're, you might have a successful farm, but you're not gonna have the best tomatoes or the best chickens because you don't have enough nurturing.
On the other hand, if you have too much feminine energy and not enough masculine, you might have happy chickens and beautiful tomatoes, but you're gonna go out of business because you're not looking at the efficiency of how you're spending your time. So it's that balance. And unfortunately, our economy is totally out of balance.
You look at the food system and the horrific conditions of again, all the females, the mother hens, the mother pigs, the mother cows. Are so abused in our food system. A lot of people don't understand that milk comes from pregnant cows. And we artificially inseminate the cows take their babies away immediately and either kill them or bottle feed them to be dairy cows.
And then we humans drink the milk that was meant for the babies. That's an atrocity the way the mother hands are kept in these tiny cages, the way the mother pigs are kept you know, again in these tiny cages, but they can't even turn around. And these are animals that are smarter as a 3-year-old child, smarter than our dogs, more affectionate.
It's just a horrific it's been a big motivator for me, to change our food system in the way we because of the way we treat farm animals. But long story short there's no nurturing in the industrial food system. It's all about efficiency. It's all about masculine energy. We need to.
We need a balance. And the, I believe that we're destroying the world because feminine energy has been repressed. That we need to to lift up feminine energy, to come into balance with the masculine. And I think that, that women for the large part are doing that. I heard someone say that some wise person said that it's gonna be women that save the world, and I, I think that there's some truth in that I think that women do care or not that they care more, but they see more about the future of children and what we need to do in terms of climate change. But I don't wanna diminish the important role of men. It's really about bringing feminine energy into both men and women and therefore into our world and into our economy.
To do away with these things that where there's no law of and no nurturing like the animal factories. And, you can name so many different parts of our economy where people are abused. Where there's the chocolate industry or the diamond industry. There's probably almost every of across the oil industry, how we're destroying the Amazon.
It's just unbelievable when everything is about efficiency and profit as opposed to nurturing and love. And so we have to, if we're we wanna survive, we have to bring in more fun and energy, more love, more nurturing, more generosity, more community.
You mentioned Jane Jacobson before.
Who are other powerful humans that have inspired you along your journey and helped you to get to where you are today?
I'd say the two most that I think about are Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Both males but males with a lot of feminine energy, with a healthy balance of masculine, feminine energy.
But I think g Gandhi was really the the first to call for local economies. He would say to the Indian people stop wearing those clothes that are made in Great Britain. We grow the flax for the linen. You always saw him with a spinning wheel because he was making his own clothes.
He said, let's burn up all those English made clothes. Let's let's take those raw products of the flax and turn it into line ourselves. Make our own clothes, because that will bring us back power. He said the same thing about food, grow the community gardens. So he was the one that saw that local self-reliance had power, and that if they were gonna throw off the English, that they needed to be self-reliant.
And that's where we are now to throw off a corporate rule over our lives. We have to become self-reliant in our basic needs. And so a pa a pattern that's after Gandhi and Dr. King I often refer to his revolution of values. 'cause he saw that was what was needed at the foundation for our survival had to be in a shift in values or is gonna go down towards destruction.
So those are the two that I look to the most in terms of I, around Martin Luther King Day, I take that opportunity. We used to have a Martin Luther King Day dinner at the white dog every year. But I was always took that time to reread his speeches and listen to his tapes.
And 'cause they're so inspiring. So those two more than anyone are my heroes.
And with all the work that you continue to do what are you excited about for 2022, and what are you creating next?
I'm most excited for 2022 about my, the two nonprofits that I'm working with now, and altogether now we just raised enough money to hire an executive director.
As I mentioned it, she's starting on Monday. So I'm really excited about this next chapter for our nonprofit that I'll have somebody to work with in, in partnership as the founder, board chair, and as the executive director. And she's a very values led woman. And I'm, I'm really looking forward to working with her in this next phase and to begin doing even more than we're doing basically it all together now, we're, we have two big buckets.
One is the bucket of. Of supply. How can we increase the supply of local products by working with the farmers and the entrepreneurs? And the other bucket is in demand. How can we increase the demand for local products by educating the public about what the situation is that we're in and how they can get access to local products.
And there's just so many ways in which we can do this work, and I'm just excited to get to it. We're al already planning our events for 2022. Now that COVID has subsided, at least for now. We can be in person again. And so we're planning all these tours. We're planning like a grain tour, go to grain farmers and then to a mill, and then see how local grain is used to make bread, to make beer, to make gin and other distiller, distilled liquors to make empanadas and noodles and whatnot.
So having people understand these supply chains and to actually go on tours to see them. And why should we. Buy. When we're looking at what beer should we choose? We should choose the one that buys local grains, and same with our distilled our liquors and as well as our food and our meat for people to understand it.
The hor horrific conditions of factory farms and how it's it's poisoning our environment and is so brutal to the animals. How we have to stop, we have to shut them down, and we have to support a diversified pastured animal husbandry system. With free range chickens and pastured pork and grass fed beef, all those things.
And so I'm really excited about, these are passions of mine personally. And I am I'm excited about developing programs in these areas in the nonprofit work I'm doing to spread these ideas further and to have collective joy in the work we do together.
And so many people get stuck right in thinking at their huge list.
Like it occurs to me as a scroll that like hits the floor and keeps going down the hallway of things that need to be fixed or repaired or just out of integrity in the world. And, I think, talking about food is one of the easiest areas to make that shift. It's part of why I've chosen to be vegetarian because I can't be eating out of integrity.
I just, I can't it's, I don't know where it's coming from, so at least I can trust that spinach is going to be safer. Because it's, it's not okay. Like, how things are treated is not okay. How do you recommend people start to take an inventory in their business and in their life to start realigning with the values that they have?
I think first of all, to explore where things come from. Take food for instance. Once I found out about the factory farming of animals I stopped eating meat unless I know what farm it comes from. Now I'm not against killing animals to eat. I know some people are and I respect that.
And, but I, I am against the disrespect and the mistreatment and the torture of animals. Yeah. Same. I feel that humans, that at least I feel I am a carni carnivore. I have tried being a vegetarian and a vegan at different times of my life, and I've felt unhealthy. But everybody's different. Everybody's chemistry is different. So we're, and it's, something we're born with part of the world we came from or whatever but I think we should eat much less meat. That meat should be a special occasion. And that we should honor the animal who gave his life for us.
And we should make sure that animal came from a farm that respected the animal as well. And there, there are such things as gentle slaughter. Where an animal is just shot between the eyes and never know what's coming and that they're not transported long distance, and so on.
And I I wouldn't mind going that way when my time came being on a truck, going hundreds of miles and then in a slaughter, all that. Oh my God. So it's scary. I think that it's scary. So I think there is a right and a wrong way to to eat meat. So I think that's the first thing people should do, is to find out where their meat comes.
If they don't know where it comes from, I would not eat it for many reasons. A meat is. From Factory Farms is a, it's full of hormones. They say that young girls are getting breasts too early because of the hormones that are in milk that are making the cow produce more milk. There's all kinds of repercussions.
Antibiotics that's in meat factory farms feed antibiotics to animals continually loosely because they're so crowded they would get infected all the time. That antibiotic is in the meat and we're eating it. And so we're becoming resistant there's super bugs that are resistant to antibiotics, because of this.
So that's a real danger. And there's, there's just a million reasons why not to eat meat from factory farms there for our health, for the health of the planet, and for the health of the animal. But, energy, take energy, so people should ask. Okay okay, here's where my food comes from.
Where does my energy come from? Is it from fossil fuels? If so, change it. Like I just found out about the danger dangers in the, really the atrocities of fracking fracking for natural gas in Pennsylvania. And I'm sure that happens in some of the states where your viewers are living.
But frack gas is really destructive to the environment, to the communities where it's extracted to the communities where the pipelines come through. I was arrested for shutting down a drill rig where a pipe was coming through a farm country. And we put up a fight to try and stop it.
But I think that so when I found out about all this and I realized that I was using natural gas I decided to electrify my house. So I changed my my appliances to be all electric. I put solar on my roof and I changed the supplier in, in, in my in the grid, where I get my electricity through the grid.
You can change your supplier to, in most places, to a third party that that's in my case a hundred percent solar. So the, so I don't, not that the electrons are kept separate, but they're all mixed together. But my dollars only go to pay a solar company for the electricity that I use that supplements the solar on my roof.
And all my appliances are electric, including my Stove. I thought, oh my God, I have to cook on electric stove. How horrible. I found out there's something called induction cooking. So it's electric, but it works in an through magnets. I won't go into the whole process now, but it's the most efficient way to cook that uses the least energy, and you have a great deal of control, which is what you usually lose when you have an electric stove.
It's very detailed amount of control. You can boil water really quickly. You can control the temperature really easily. So anyway, so that's one thing I suggest to people that they electrify their houses and that they make sure that their source for their electricity comes from renewable sources.
And so I just go through the list. Where do my clothes come from? Are they coming from, sweatshops in China, or are my clothes being made in Philadelphia by local designers and local. Small scale manufacturers. And this is an industry that's growing and all these basic needs.
So I think those are the questions we should ask. Where does my food come from? Where does my energy come from? Where does my waste go to? Are you recycling? Are you composting? We need to get the nutrients from our food waste back to the farms, through composting. That can be done in a number of different ways in different cities, depending where you live.
But these are the things we need to be looking at to du reducing our waste as well as, purchasing in a wise way.
Yeah. It's the part of what I loved about your book was being, going from feeling disenfranchised to being brought back into it and no. If Judy can do it, we can all do it.
Cut it out. Because sometimes the hardest thing is having a company called Powerful Ladies. 'cause there are days I don't wanna be powerful. And it was like no. This is what it's for. Let's come back to these conversations, let's come back to reminding everyone that it's not as hard as it feels and it's not as hard as a lot of other sources are telling you that it is.
Which I think it is the key piece to remember both for changing the world and for having a successful business. It's not easy, but it's not as hard as they're making it sound.
Absolutely. And I love that you say powerful ladies, because I think one of the problems for us as women is we sometimes we ab abdicate, we abdicate our power.
And and I do it. And I also at times I. Shrink from it, that we need to step into our power. And I am still working on that. I'm 75 years old. And you've read my book, I've done a million things and so on, but I still suffer from this, from a childhood where I was discriminated against for being a girl.
Okay, girls, you can't do that because you're a girl. You can't play baseball, you can't take shop. So I was so disheartened 'cause these are the things I love to do baseball and building and I couldn't do either. 'cause I was a girl and I bought into that message that you're second class because you're a girl, so get outta the way.
And that still haunts me. I have to confront that and say, no girls are powerful. There's no reason why you should retreat because you're a girl. Step into your power and don't forget that you have it. And because it's a hard thing to keep that up.
I think you'll appreciate that when I moved from Bucks County to Allentown. I moved in the middle of a school year and I got put into a shop class. I was the only girl. Oh, great. And then I got an A and then I was used to shame all the other guys in the class of if she's getting an A, why aren't you?
And I was like, Hey, I still discrimination. But I, we put some points back on the board for you there. I think we ask everyone what does powerful and ladies mean to them? And do the definitions of those words separately change when those two words are put next to each other?
Powerful women.
Powerful ladies.
Yeah. What does powerful mean to you? What does ladies, and if it's powerful ladies, does it change?
Power to me means actualizing ourselves to to do to accomplish something that we set our mind to. And the combination of powerful ladies to me is about something I spoke to earlier, which is bringing feminine power into being and into balancing it with masculine power.
And we're not there yet as a society in the United States or in the world. We have not yet balanced feminine power with a masculine, and that's what's destroying us. So it is so important that we bring more feminine power, into our lives as women and men, both.
So I think it's an a, a really important concept. So I'm glad you don't mean to show that.
My pleasure. We also ask everyone where they put themselves on the Powerful Lady scale, if zero is average everyday human and 10 is the most powerful lady you can imagine, where would you put yourself today and where would you put yourself on average?
That's a hard question to answer. Maybe seven or eight. And average over my lifetime. It's hard to say, but five or six. I don't, I'm not sure. I, yeah, as I said I'm still I'm still learning how to step into my power. So it's a lifelong journey of of reaching one's full potential.
And I think it's such a great reminder for everyone listening because. This question is one of the most controversial questions I ask, and I think at some point I need to give it to a psychology team to go take and do some data with it. But so many people when I've asked them and how powerful it is started was women saying, I'm not I can't be on the show.
I'm not. And I'm like, no, but I'm calling you. If I'm calling you, you are like, you've already been defined. I have knighted you. And it's so interesting for me, like so many people get stuck in, I'm not there yet. And for someone as accomplished as you we can make a very long scroll of all the things that you have done and seen and achieved and stood for, and.
To see that you are the type of personality that's still working, and you're like, no, I'm not cooked yet. We got more to do. It's, it, I hope people hear that is really inspiring because yeah, like you, I wanna keep cooking and I wanna make sure that, it's, it should be the game of how do we keep ever expanding versus achieving the summit and be like, okay, now I'll just, float in the pool for the rest of my life.
And you're like, what? How could you go back to that after you've seen the summit? No. There's another mountain we gotta keep going.
Exactly. I don't understand that, especially in this time of crisis. How people can just go lie on a beach somewhere. It's fine going on vacation, but as a, yeah.
As a full-time occupation. I have to mention like one little thing that's helped me recently, and that is the whole concept of self-care. For most of my life as a an entrepreneur, I always said self-care is for sissies. I'm a doer. I'm out there.
Who cares about self-care? That's like selfish or something. But it's really been in the, during COVID where I was forced to slow down and be a witness of my life in a sense more, more closely of my personal life in a sense that I realized that I wasn't taking care of myself to the point where I was thinking like, do I need to retire?
Am I gonna kill myself by the work I'm doing? I need to retire. And I realized that no, I, I don't, if I take care of myself I can keep working. And so that was a big discovery for me, to slow to allow myself. To slow down a little bit. Like when someone asked me to do something, I'll say I can't do it on this day because I have this on my schedule.
Oh, I can do it on this day. Or in the old days, I would cross crowd as many things I could into one day and just go boom. And I love that exhilaration of doing things and doing them quickly and so on. But now I'm learning to slow down more and take care of myself, partly because I'm a 75 and it's really called for.
But I wish in some ways that I had slowed down earlier because I think I missed a lot of life by going too fast, by always doing stuff rather than just simply being, yeah. And the, someone said you should just take a bath more often and relax. And I thought, oh, baths. That's a waste of time now, if I'm feeling anxious or something, I'll think I am going to take a bath, and so anyway, I just wanna put out that message that self-care is not for sissies that we need to take care of ourselves so that we can continue to care for the planet and each other.
Yeah. Love that. What would you like to leave everyone listening with today?
I hope that people do think about the crisis that human species is in right now and that we do have to raise our consciousness. So if we can model a life that where we are driven by heart, where we, I make my most dec important decisions from my heart as opposed to my head it's not about figuring out in your mind what's the right thing to do.
It's about feeling it in your heart. So we need to be heart driven. And when we're heart driven we, we tend to naturally be more generous more in, in cooperation and partnership in competition. And, to be more in community rather than individualism. So I would say to, to lead with your heart,
where can everyone who's now a new Judy X fan, where can they find you, follow you, and support you and your organizations?
Okay. There's a couple of different places. First of all, I have a personal website, judy wicks.com. And that actually links to my projects and to my book if they wanted to order a book they can order from my website or a bookstore. But then my two nonprofits have their own websites all together now PA standing for Pennsylvania all together now, pa.org.
And the other one is the Microloan Fund, which is a circle of ants. And uncles.com. And that's a really cool project circle events and uncles that could be replicated in another community. It's a microloan fund. So those are my suggestions for keeping in touch with me. And I am planning to write a sequel to good Morning, beautiful business about the work I'm doing now about local self-reliance in a more an updated version.
So I don't know when that's gonna be coming out because I haven't started to write it yet, but I'm hoping in a year or two to have another book out there.
When it's ready, you let me know. We'll have you back. We can talk all about it. Just thank you so much for being the trailblazer that you are and inspiring me and being a yes.
This is another example for everyone listening. I've said it over and over another episodes, but when you reach out to the people who inspire you, you never know who will say yes. So thank you for the impact that you've made on me.
Thank you for inviting me. I really enjoyed your show. Good luck.
Thank you.
All the links to connect with Judy and her organizations are in our show notes@thepowerfulladies.com. Please subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening, and leave us a rating and review. They're so important for this podcast, getting visibility and more people hearing are awesome guests like Judy.
Come hang out with us on Instagram at Powerful Ladies, and please connect directly with me on Instagram at Kara Duffy, or of course, visit my website, kara duffy.com. I would love to coach, collaborate, or work with you in any ways that can help you be more powerful. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
Until then. I hope you're taking on being powerful in your life. Go be awesome and up to something you love.
Related Episodes
Episode 149: Turning Food Waste into Community Power | Monique Figueiredo | Founder of Compostable LA
Episode 165: Building Businesses That Put the Planet First | Kelly Murphy, Jillian Clark & Annie Rouse | Conscious Entrepreneurs
Episode 184: The Power Plant That Could Save the World | Annie Rouse | Hemp Entrepreneur & Environmental Economist
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Created and hosted by Kara Duffy
Audio Engineering & Editing by Jordan Duffy
Production by Amanda Kass
Graphic design by Anna Olinova
Music by Joakim Karud
