Philadelphia restaurateur explains how businesses can help the planet while being successful
By: John Dunphy
What does it take to make a successful business? Money? Recognition?
What about a commitment to the earth through practices that both satisfy a business’s need to be profitable while instilling sustainability in everything from the product it produces, to how it treats its employees, to where it gets its electricity?
That business model is something Judy Wicks, owner and proprietor of White Dog Café, in Philadelphia, Pa., has instilled in her successful restaurant.
Since 1983, White Dog Café, at 3420 Sansom St., has grown from a small coffee and muffin stop where customers had to go upstairs to Ms. Wicks’ apartment to use the bathroom, to a world-renowned, $5 million a year grossing establishment through four adjacent Victorian brownhouses. It features not only the 200-seat-capacity café, but also a gift store and is the hub for many community programs, live entertainment showcases and as a place for social activism to ignite.
Ms. Wicks took her message of bringing sustainability to business and beyond to the Bart Luedeke Center at Rider University on April 11. The event was sponsored by Sustainable Lawrence.
Ms. Wicks, 59, who grew up in mostly suburban Ingomar, Pa., told the audience she’d gotten into social activism relatively late. She found out about plans for the 3100 block of Sansom Street to be torn down and turned into a shopping center. "I was outraged," she said.
This led her to join the Sansom Community Group, which developed an alternative proposal for the property, which would incorporate both residences and business to the then-declining area.
Co-founder of The Free People’s Store, now known as Urban Outfitters, Ms. Wicks said she got involved in the restaurant business in 1972 literally "by accident." She had just left her husband, and the business they had founded, only to end up in a car accident down the street.
Without a job, and now without a car, a passer-by of the accident offered Ms. Wicks a job at Restaurant LaTerrasse, where she would eventually become the restaurant’s manager until starting her own.
Since its establishment 24 years ago, White Dog Café has voluntarily participated in several practices Ms. Wicks said somewhat belie the ethos of most business schools one of the more recent being the business’s decision to become the first in Pennsylvania to be 100 percent powered by wind energy.
"Business schools teach ‘grow or die,’ ‘bigger is better,’ rather than ‘small is beautiful,’" she said. "The business ethic model has been: When you’re at home, you teach your children the golden rule. When you go to work, gold rules."
Ralph Copleman, executive director of Sustainable Lawrence, met Ms. Wicks 12 years ago. "We invited Judy here because we want to invite locally owned businesses in Lawrence and the immediate vicinity to think about the important role they can play in moving the community toward an ecologically sustainable way of life," he said.
Sustainable Lawrence, started last year, is on a mission to establish Lawrence Township as a totally sustainable community within 10 years.
"The success of The White Dog Café as it lived and prospered by this approach over the last 24 years is proof that there is a lot to learn from what Judy has done," Mr. Copleman said. "And hers is only one of many businesses across the country applying this business philosophy."
Even Ms. Wicks, the winner of countless awards, including the national James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award in 2005, however, questioned her own success at one time because "I only had one restaurant."
"But, rather than spread my brand, I wanted to spread my model by teaching others," she said.
Despite the mindset that White Dog Café would have to continuously grow to succeed, it has remained a one-location business. Instead of focusing time on franchising the White Dog Café brand out to other locations, Ms. Wicks has worked toward bringing sustainability practices into the mainstream. She is co-founder and co-chairwoman of the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and founder of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN). She also is president of the White Dog Community Enterprises, a nonprofit dedicated to building a local living economy in the Philadelphia region.
During her talks, of which Ms. Wicks said she conducts about 12 to 15 a year, she discusses the business model White Dog Café has employed establishing a "living wage" for entry-level employees; utilizing organic, locally grown produce; buying meats from only humane farmers; and using alternative energy sources, among other practices and how similar practices can and should be conducted in other businesses and communities.
"Business is really about relationships; money is simply a tool," she said. "In larger businesses, CEOs don’t really know who is affected by their decisions."
Ms. Wicks paints a bleak picture of our modern, consumerist culture a technologically advanced but health degrading economy, where overconsuming, overworked, long-distance commuting parents spend little time with their children.
"How can we change our measurement of success?" she asked.
Locally, Lawrence has seen the establishment of many programs, among them Sustainable Lawrence, Sustainable Rider (at Rider University), the Lawrenceville School’s Green Campus Initiative, the establishment of gardens at several Lawrence public schools, and the Lawrence Culinary Partnership, which brings area restaurants and area farms together.
Ms. Wicks said one of the most critical paths to confront the challenge of global warming is organization and the need to become self-reliant. She noted about 70 percent of the toxins that are cooking the planet come from transportation, much of that needless.
"We ship unnecessarily," she said. "If we buy from local farms, that makes a huge impact. The global economy has been set up for import/export. Corporations control everything. The subsidies are so large, the corporations can sell at such low costs."
The first thing groups need to do is to organize and raise awareness of programs and businesses that have established sustainable models, she said. And that starts locally.
"Sustainable Lawrence already has a Local Economy Task Force in place," Mr. Copleman said. "It will be developing ideas over the coming months to explore ways we can further develop what Judy has termed ‘local living economy’ in this region, and we invite business people and others to join us."
Ms. Wicks said, "the first part of social change is refusal to cooperate with an evil system."
"We need community self-reliance," she said. "Community self-reliance is really the greatest wealth you can have. This is what true wealth is about."

