Are you supporting Black Owned Businesses?
By Ronda Watson Barber
Publisher
OhioMBE – December 1, 2014
What are you doing to support Black owned businesses? For the past few years, OhioMBE has issued a challenge during the holiday shopping season. OhioMBE encourages Black business owners to support other Black businesses. During the 2014 holiday shopping season, please pledge to spend at least $50 with a Black owned business. We collectively need to patronize and support businesses owned by African Americans. Black people buy a lot of stuff. It is estimated that we spend over a trillion dollars on goods and services. Recycling our dollars back into our community only helps the community. It’s a no-brainer that supporting Black owned businesses is vital to the continued growth and economic development of our community. A lot of what is wrong with our community can be fixed by our community. Black owned businesses should consciously hire Black people. Those pay checks aid Black households and Black children. Black children need to see their parents and caregivers either employed or operating their own businesses.
I have repeatedly said that “Our votes and dollars have power.” I applaud the efforts of www.BlackCoalition.org and their collection of social media outlets. The local company, founded by Sherri and Butch Hamilton are using the power of social media and the internet to activate and encourage Black people to “Buy Black”. They are calling for an economic revolution. They issue a weekly challenge to “Buy Black” on Fridays or abstain from any purchasing.
The group worked closely with the activists in Ferguson, Missouri after the Michael Brown shooting and ongoing protests. “I am so glad the Blackout movement made national news the past few days. We worked really hard to connect with the organizers in Ferguson to link the economic protests to protests on the front line. It’s working!” said Sherri.
Wall of Shame grows
For the past few months I have contacted most of the school districts in Central Ohio inquiring about their purchasing policies and what Black vendors they used. If the public school districts were graded on their procurement opportunities for Black owned companies, they would receive failing marks. With the exception of Columbus and Gahanna City Schools, no district was willing to send a representative to the OhioMBE Procurement Fairs. The goal of the monthly OhioMBE Procurement Fairs is to introduce small and minority owned businesses with purchasing opportunities.
These school districts have students of color on their attendance rolls and they receive millions in local, state and federal tax dollars but are unwilling to participate in no-cost good faith efforts to diversify their vendor pool. So what’s going on in the suburbs? It appears that the schools districts want the tax revenues generated from having students of color attending their schools, but they don’t want to do business with Black owned companies. Just doesn’t seem right!
Visit OhioMBE.com to see who made the Wall of Shame!
Just my thoughts…rwb
