Advocate for Local Businesses

Build community awareness & support for local businesses

• Shift citizen and institutional spending to local businesses through highly-visible awareness campaigns, including Eat Local Season and Buy Local Season.
• Launch public awareness campaigns to encourage citizens to support business districts and micro-districts with a high density of local-independent businesses, and celebrate existing local-independent business districts.

Support policies & development that level the playing field for local businesses

• Eliminate red tape for starting and/or operating a local-independent business, especially by finding and exploiting opportunities to streamline standard approval and permitting processes.

• Collaborate with commercial real estate brokers, landlords, and developers to increase availability of right-sized, affordable commercial spaces for local-independent businesses.

• Encourage local municipalities to procure from, source from, and otherwise contract with local-independent businesses.

Empower local businesses to start, grow & do good

• Support emerging minority-owned businesses through business education, mentorship, and relationship-building.
• Promote triple bottom line business models (People-Planet-Profit), including Benefit Corporations and ‘Highroad’ business practices.

• Improve hiring and retention outcomes for our local-independent businesses.

Tell your business's story:

We invite you to share your business's story with our team at any time. If you prefer to write your story, you may use this form. The information you share will be kept confidential unless permission is provided to share the story. Your input guides the work we do and the focus of our advocacy priorities. Thank you for sharing!

How we advocate:

We work to level the playing field for local-independent businesses as our sole focus. As a 501c3 organization, we do not endorse any political candidates. We do highlight the positions of candidates or elected officials on issues pertaining to our mission. Our membership contains incredibly diverse perspectives and we’re made better by that diversity. Our annual Advocacy Priorities are informed by surveys, member meetings, our Policy and Advocacy Committee, and our Board of Directors, who approve the priorities annually.

Questions? Contact us:

Jacquie Berger, Executive Director: jacquie@lowcountrylocalfirst.org
Jordan Amaker, Director of Advocacy & Communications: jordan@lowcountrylocalfirst.org
843-801-3390