One Hand Washes the Other
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“Community” doesn’t just mean a place with homes, shops, restaurants, and services. It also has another meaning: people helping one another, building on mutual interests and benefit. The two meanings of the word intersect right here in Southern Gables, with our Selected Business Supporter program. If you have our BIG YELLOW MAGNET 1, you might have put this together and found out some of the benefits. Let’s go over it again…
Our 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.2
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 organizations3 4 5, paying for maintaining neighborhood improvements such as the entrance sign at Jewell & Estes6 and traffic safety measures for which Southern Gables neighbors had petitioned the City.7
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 our Business Supporters Directory that brings special Neighborhood Deals and Discounts; and a spot for them to participate in Neighborhood Night 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.
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- We gave out the BIG YELLOW MAGNET in April. It connects to out Business Supporter page, with Neighbor Deals and Discounts. If you didn’t get yours, contact us at sgna.lakewood@gmail.com and we’ll bring it to you.
- Why You Should Support Local And Small Businesses
- What Do the Dues Do? April 19, 2019
- Helping the Community December 11, 2020
- Thanks… and Giving November 26, 2021
- The Rock of Southern Gables July 24, 2020
- Pulling Together December 10, 2021