Local First Indiana aims to support local business

Growing up, Una Winterman and her friend Katie used to hang out at the local pharmacy for fun. In her small town of Tuttle, Okla., the young kids would gather at Star Pharmacy to slurp the joint’s famous Salty Frog iced drink, and the old men would congregate to shoot the breeze. Sparky, Katie’s grandpa, was a regular.

“In a small town, you have to take what you can get when it comes to hangouts,” Winterman said.

But her hometown hangout is closed now. And it wasn’t the only “cool” local business she saw shut its doors. As a “child of Wal-Mart,” she said it was amazing to see franchises settle in her town and witness the effect on local business.

So, when she came to IU in 1991 to study journalism, Winterman said she loved the thriving downtown Bloomington offered.

Twenty-one years later, Winterman is still passionate about sustaining local business, but she is no longer a bystander in the process. She is co-founder of Local First Indiana, a Bloomington nonprofit organization whose goal is to support and promote independent, locally owned businesses.

It started on a couch in February 2009 when Winterman met with co-founder Amanda Nickey, now executive director at Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard, to talk about forming a networking organization for locally owned independent businesses.

Both women had unknowingly and separately been formulating ideas for a group like Local First for years, and their husbands brought them together so they could tag-team the effort.

In November 2009, the women launched the organization with a fundraising event at KRC Catering, which offers its space for free to nonprofits. Oliver Winery and the Upland Brewing Company donated drinks, and the bartenders at the event were so excited about the group’s mission, they donated their tips from the evening to the cause.

Now, almost two and a half years later, the organization has grown to a membership of more than 100 locally owned, independent businesses. It is a dues organization, so members are asked to pay $10 per year per full-time employee and $5 per part-time employee.

Local First uses this money to aid local businesses in developing working relationships and providing networking opportunities.

Once a month, the members meet at a locally owned, independent business to socialize and share business strategy.

The March networking event was at Oliver Winery on Thursday. Attendees tasted wine and learned about the winery’s exceptional employee benefits and policies.

“We’ve created a network of local, independent businesses,” Winterman said. “Hopefully they are seeing themselves as a network because it gives them a way to define themselves as local and independent, and we provide consumer education to why it’s important to buy local.”

Recently, Winterman was a guest speaker in Jim Devereaux’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs class, Living on the Edge of Chaos, in which students study health hazards and adaptations to severe weather and climate change. Devereaux said one aspect of the curriculum is talking about the economy on a local basis and dealing with diversity in a small community and sustaining it.

He heard of Winterman’s work with Local First through Leadership Bloomington-Monroe County in IU’s continuing studies program.

Devereaux invited her into his class to demonstrate a healthy economy simulation she made using Monopoly money. She created two economic outlines that revealed the flow of money when it is spent at a franchise and when it is spent at a local, independent business. She said the students were excited and shocked by the path their money took.

“They held in their hand how much Monopoly money they had, and they found the bottom line was that you have a stronger local economy when you buy local,” Devereaux said.

Winterman based her simulation off a study published in 2008 by Civic Economics and Local First West Michigan.

It determined that for every $100 spent at an independent, locally owned business, $68 stays in the local economy — but the same amount of money spent at a non-locally owned business injects only $43 back into the community.

But Winterman said Local First strives to keep the peace among businesses in Bloomington without pitting franchises against independents. However, businesses that join the Local First campaign must meet criteria the organization modeled from the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies’ independent business definition. The definition can be found on the campaign’s website, localfirstindiana.org.

The organization currently has no office or paid employees, but Winterman said it’s something she strives for.

For now, Local First will continue to give tours of local businesses during Going Local Week in the fall and educate the community about the value of buying and selling in the local economy.