Support Black businesses and the various entrepreneurs within your community.
The concept is simple. Cooperative economics isn’t just something to be discussed during Kwanzaa as the principal “Ujamaa,” it’s a business concept designed to uplift and enhance our community. This concept has been utilized successfully in other communities, but has been woefully lacking in the Black community.
How often do we spend money with people or businesses that don’t spend money with us? Unfortunately, more times that not. If your bank, barbershop, bakery orBaptistChurchis not reciprocating your money back into the neighborhood, you need to stop giving them your money.
In a successful fiscal model, money should change hands in the same community several times – a model that hardly ever occurs in our neighborhoods these days.
For a perfect example of how this should work, look no further than a thriving Jewish community. When they buy meats from the neighborhood butcher, that butcher then gets his teeth fixed with the community dentist, who in turn buys from the baker, who spends with the florist, who uses the tailor, who hires the lawyer that deposits the money with a bank that probably gives out loans to people and businesses in that same community. This, my friends, is how your money is supposed to work for you!
The Black community generates a mind-boggling 900 billion dollars a year. Yeah, you heard me right! If we, as a people, or even just a neighborhood, pooled our resources, we would speak as many instead of mini (tiny). If we acted as a spending entity instead of a sad and sorry single source of non-producing consumers, we could start speaking a little louder and prouder.
Support Black businesses and the various entrepreneurs within your community. We are living in uncertain economic times. It would only make dollars and “sense” to keep your money close to you. Money that stays close has a better chance of coming back your way; this also goes for your Black newspaper. Help us to help you and put your money where your mouth is.
