Buying Local Builds Community

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October 11, 2024 by Bruce McDonald

Buying Local Builds Community

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“Community” doesn’t just mean a place with homes, shops, restaurants, and services. It also means people helping one another, building on mutual interests and benefit. Let’s have some of both meanings of the word…

Our Local Business Supporters are part of both meanings of “Community.” When we “buy local” we are strengthening the economic health of the place where we live, and we can get to know our neighbors better, in a way that serves to help each other. It doesn’t take much to realize that the idea of getting to know people better is a good thing.

An article from “Naturehub,” part of the online forum Medium, makes a number of points on why supporting local businesses is so important. The first one, setting the tone for all the other reasons, is that “It shows you care about your local community.”

Going out on your own in the world is a hard thing no matter what you’re doing. Now imagine doing that in this dog-eat-dog corporate world. Small business owners often have had their work cut out for them every turn for years. So, it’s a hard task they take on every single day and they do it to offer the public alternative options that are going to make a difference in the lives of consumers like us.¹

Graphic from whyilovewhereilive.com

The Southern Gables Neighborhood Association relies on local businesses for support, to do much more that we could do with just our members’ dues payments alone — after all, the dues are voluntary and at $20 a year they’re so low! Our annual Neighborhood Night Out, for example, would be just an ordinary picnic without the booths and kiosks set up by our local businesses and organizations, and the money we have available to hire the DJ, provide the hot dogs and other snacks and drinks, and the big raffle prizes would fall short if all we had was the members’ dues payments. In our overall budget, carrying out the goals of the Association, we also support local charitable organizations² ³ ⁴, paying for maintaining neighborhood improvements such as the entrance sign at Jewell & Estes⁵ and traffic safety measures for which Southern Gables neighbors had petitioned the City.⁶

Magill’s Ice Cream booth at Neighborhood Night Out — always a neighborhood favorite.

Support goes both ways. It’s sad to see closed-up local businesses making it necessary to travel farther to get what we want. Businesses need our business, and we need what they’re selling. The way our Business Supporters help us, and we help them, is a project that we start working on each January. We go out and solicit support by signing up businesses and community organizations to participate. And by “support” I mean getting businesses that we know and trust to sign up for a listing on our Local Business Supporters page with a link to their business; inclusion in the “Tote Bag” project that brings special discount certificates, gadgets, and promotional materials delivered to all 1000 or so households in the Southern Gables Neighborhood; and a spot for them to participate in Neighborhood Night Out. As Lisa Huntington-Kinn points out, “It’s a great value proposition for the businesses that participate.” For our neighbors, it’s good in that these are businesses that we know, that we have talked with and dealt with. These are businesses that we know to be good at what they do, good to deal with, and good neighbors.

To sign up as a business, contact us through our Contact Us page, and we’ll get back to you with the details in January. Or, if your business has participated before and you wish to renew you can simply register online, with the button at the bottom of the Dues page.

We’ll be in touch.