Kathryn, Lisa and Hajeera have never met each other, but they all share something in common. They all want to progress economically, but they want to do so in harmony with their local community and its environment - not in conflict with them. Our existing practices of economics and business development are so distorted in favour of selfishness, exploitation and ecological abuse that unless you make a real personal effort, or are lucky enough to have a community economic group nearby, your personal efforts to make progress will often end up contributing to the destruction or impoverishment of communities and ecosystems elsewhere on the planet. The simple T-shirt you bought for your kid involved acres of land being sprayed with pesticides, where the cotton growers have an increased risk of incurring cancer. Even your phone company lays workers off as it invests in new technology, instead of moving everyone to a four-day week.
Economists have an easy explanation for it.
Think of every business, every bank, every farm and multinational corporation, each acting selfishly to maximise their own personal gain, and it's easy to see why the world is in a mess. Not my responsibility. It must be their own fault. Community economic development starts with a very different premise. It starts by saying 'we care', and then extending that to the local community, the region, the ecosystem, the world.