By Steve Owad

When Kazimierz Jaworski lost his job as an electrician in 1981, his options appeared limited. Fired by the communist regime for his involvement in the Solidarity trade union, he and his wife, Bogumila, and daughter, Barbara, moved from their rented home in Chmielnik (pronounced "Hmyelneek") to Bogumila's parents' nearby farm.

The southeastern Polish region was (and is) among the cleanest in Eastern Europe, with lush rolling hills, crystalline spring water and fertile soil, but at the time it had no telephone lines, few roads, no local school and few businesses apart from the family farms that dot the bucolic landscape. The average monthly salary was well below the national average of USD$300 per month.

"Bogumila held a job," says Jaworski (pronounced Yavorski), "and I worked the farm with the family." He also kept active in Solidarity, and when communism ended in 1989, his flair for energetic straight talk got him elected mayor of the local group of villages. His ambition since then, to help create rural Chmielnik's infrastructure and free-market economy virtually from scratch, is not surprising, but the steps he has taken toward that aim are.

Rather than seek government handouts or costly bank loans to develop the area, Jaworski and other local leaders have launched low-cost cooperative projects to build infrastructure from within and to provide small producers with the kind of advisory support and resources that can usually be found only in large corporations.

The results so far: new services, including a modern, locally-owned telephone network, more efficient farms and companies, and the lowest rural unemployment rate in southeastern Poland.

The first step in the self-development plan was to establish the telephone exchange, which would ease communication during future initiatives. In 1991, mayor Jaworski set up meetings with farmers and leaders from three neighboring communes and proposed building their own cooperative telephone network. Finding grassroots support was not easy.

The New Style Co-Operative: From The Grass Roots

"The government was liquidating cooperatives," says Jaworski, "because cooperatives were 'communist.' But we held a lot of local meetings, and in the end, the need itself was the main thing to convince people."

Stanislaw Obara heads the Strug Valley Association, a loosely associated group of leaders from the four local governments. "We were starting with no phones, no sewage systems and many other infrastructure problems," he says. "The main thing was to convince people that infrastructure would help producers and create jobs."

While phone service in a valley without sewers or (in some places) electricity might seem to be a luxury, it has had a strong multiplier effect in everything from health care to the sale of eggs. But first Jaworski had to pound the pavement to win support for it.

Four thousand homes in the Strug Valley, a region of 37,000 people, each paid the equivalent of USD$90 for a share in the system. The Strug Valley Governments contributed an equal amount, and a bank loan covered the final third of the start-up costs. To secure the loan, Jaworski and four other local leaders put up their own houses and land as collateral.

For the network's hardware, Jaworski had to shop abroad. Telekomunikacja Polska, the Polish monopolist, had neither modern technology nor an inclination to cooperate with a budding competitor. Canada's Northern Telecom provided the best deal on equipment, and the National Telephone Cooperative Association (NTCA), an organization of rural telephone exchanges in the United States, provided training and technical know-how.

Call-Waiting and Electrocardiogramss

A part-time technical staff of 18 and a supervisory board of 20 volunteers now run the resulting network, which is the most modern local service in Eastern Europe, with features such as call waiting, caller identification and a "Telecardiomat." The latter feature allows users to have Electrocardiogram tests performed over the telephone.

"The network has cut down on the number of trips to the hospital," says Jaworski, "and all local calls within it are free, which is important, because the lack of a 'payment barrier' won people's interest in the first place." Small monthly user fees and long-distance charges help the cooperative break even. The network has now linked every school in the region to the Internet, but more importantly, it has given the cooperative's members (there are now 7,000) an important communication tool and instant access to Jaworski's next brainchild: a resource bank for the struggling family farms.

"The people in the Strug Valley have always lived off the land," Jaworski says, "so development here means making the most of traditional, ecological methods of farming."

With that in mind, he and other Strug Valley leaders established the Foundation for the Promotion of Telephone Co-ops. Despite its narrow-sounding name, the foundation runs social and economic projects ranging from courses on how to farm more efficiently to community meetings on how to fight alcoholism. A volunteer staff of local teachers, business managers, engineers and priests runs seminars, publishes brochures, and helps local free-market novices draw up business plans and seek financing.

Self-Help to Farm Efficienctly and Fight Alcoholism

Finding the volunteers took plenty of networking and detailed explanation of the foundation's goals and methods. What it did not take was money.

"High-priced specialists are not necessary (to run training courses)," says Jaworski, "but energy and the will to change things are. There are people out there who are willing to work for the community as well as for themselves."

Having volunteers helps keep costs down. The foundation's funding comes in the form of donations from Strug Valley governments, large companies with local interests and the NTCA. Because of the cooperative's success and his role as mayor, Jaworski hit few roadblocks in the initial hunt for money.

"Once we had the cooperative up and running and had farmers and businesses believing we could help them, sponsors were willing to support us," he said."

So the foundation launched Helping Ourselves, a program that helps small producers define their business ideas, analyze risks and possibilities, and look for financing. Funded by Strug Valley governments, village associations and, now, some of the companies it helped to develop, Helping Ourselves is staffed solely by volunteers.

Central to the program's ethos is the belief that the Strug Valley's natural assets provide the best foundation for successful, eco-friendly small businesses. It is also important that the businesses help the community as well as themselves.

One such enterprise is Chmielnik Spring, a joint venture majority-owned by the Chmielnik local government. The company, which grew out of guidance and planning from Helping Ourselves in 1997, first went into business as a bottler and seller of local spring water. Since then it has grown into an alternative market for any farmer with a telephone, buying meat, vegetables and dairy products from the farms and delivering them straight to households in the nearby urban areas of Rzeszow and Lancut.

"The way it works," Jaworski says, "is that Helping Ourselves gets the farms to improve their operations, and Chmielnik Spring buys their products for 20 percent more than the supermarkets would pay and takes them straight to the consumer."

The higher prices stem from higher production costs and are unavoidable. The family farms produce small quantities of a variety of products, which means they cannot compete with larger, more-specialized producers. Consumers, however, have been willing to pay up to 10 percent more for eggs and potatoes "straight from the farm."

More than 200 Strug Valley farms and businesses now sell to Chmielnik Spring, which in turn sells to more than 30,000 households in Rzeszow (pronounced Zheshoov) province. Both numbers have more than tripled in the last two years.

As with the telephone cooperative, Chmielnik Spring's modest start-up funds came partly from the local governments and partly from a loan secured by using local leaders' houses as collateral. The company now employs 240 people and turns a small profit. All orders are made and all deliveries are coordinated via the telephone network.

Clean Air, Clean Soil, Clean Water – And Cities

The European Union has taken an interest in the model and plans to send a team to study it for other countries. But Jaworski cautions that the venture will not work everywhere.

"Three conditions are absolutely vital," he says. "You need a clean environment with good soil and unpolluted water, a local population steeped in farming tradition, and the proximity of large urban centers." The latter condition allows for fast and cheap produce pick-ups and distribution.

Jaworski points to Chmielnik Spring as an example of core infrastructure and local cooperative action making economic development work, but Chmielnik Spring is not a cure-all for farmers. "Many farms still have to get by on alternate sources of income," says the Strug Valley Association's Obara. "If you have only one hectare of raspberries and you have three generations of family in the house, you're going to need the grandparents' pensions and maybe other sources of revenue as well. But if your product is, for instance, flour, we can give you advice on how to go about selling bread instead."

To make such expansion possible, the infrastructure ventures continue. Local leaders have applied the telephone-cooperative model to other infrastructure projects. With guidance from Helping Ourselves, villages are building roads and sewage systems. Some have pegged electricity lines as their most pressing need, while others are drawing up plans to build their own schools.

Money is the main stumbling block. Locals and valley governments may be willing to foot part of the bill, but completion funds for, say, a village sewage system are still hard to get.

"We look for money from the European Union and from other foreign and international organizations," Obara says. Sometimes the money does not come, but when it does, feasible plans are in place and ready for execution.

Not all of the projects are geared toward selling more potatoes or bringing producers higher profits. Jaworski stresses that economic success cannot occur in a vacuum. Social ills must also be addressed.

"In order to develop, people need faith in the region," he said. "More jobs and higher wages are important, but younger people around here still feel they have to move to the big city to make a living."

The region has a high rate of alcoholism, and few locals have studied beyond high school. To address such issues, the foundation devotes as much effort to social projects as it does to commercial ventures such as Chmielnik Spring.

And After Work, Learn to Dance

"We've organized workshops on alcoholism," says Jaworski. "During the last parliamentary elections, we held mock parliaments in schools. We've also created recreational alternatives for young people."

He adds, however, that reasonable people tend to support reasonable plans. "When you have success, and when you talk straight to people about that success, they usually want to get in on it."

The "Helping Ourselves" Message Is Spreading

The same goes for other agricultural regions in Poland and abroad. Jaworski would like to spread Helping Ourselves into Ukraine and Slovakia (three regions in Poland are already in the process of copying it), but money, again, is the main issue. The foundation touts Helping Ourselves through brochures, pamphlets and word of mouth in government circles, but an association of Ukrainian villages, for example, has so far failed to find start-up funds to launch its own program.

For now, Jaworski says, the foundation can provide such regions with the Helping Ourselves methodological framework and advisory support: "We invite local leaders from other regions to come visit us and see how to put their own programs together," he said. Those leaders then have to generate support at home for the self-development concept. That can be hard to do, but the underlying message is clear:

When you're starting from zero, there's nothing to lose.