Local Biz Collective

Gentrification and soaring rent increases have made it nearly impossible for New York City small businesses to stay open. The ones that are still open are barely making ends meet. They don’t have enough revenue to spend on new marketing strategies. To conserve costs, business owners have to wear many hats to run their establishments, which can be very lonely sometimes. They don’t have a team with which they can share their challenges or from whom they can get feedback.

How might we empower small business owners to connect and work together to help one another?

Local Biz Collective is a supportive network that helps NYC small business owners to build an alliance in their neighborhood. This service has two offerings: a toolkit and a website. The toolkit offers a framework of workshops that empowers business owners to solve their biggest challenges. And the website enables business owners to connect and provides the tools they need to start working together.

For this category, the website is connecting business owners within a neighborhood and the toolkit helps them to realize that they are not alone, that other small business owners’ struggles are not far from their own.

Local Biz Collective was created to empower small business owners to learn from each other, improve their business together and build a strong neighborhood community.