Locally owned businesses build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors and by contributing more to local causes.

Dana Eness, of Stay Local!, a citywide initiative for creating a strong economy based on locally owned and operated businesses visited the Covington Rotary Club recently to stress how the organization works to encourage shoppers to buy from locally owned businesses in order to help independent businesses compete more effectively. From support of locally owned restaurants, hardware stores, contracting companies and grocery stores, among others, Eness said a diverse and distinctive flavor is kept alive within communities. There are 100 chapters in the five-parish area, including St. Tammany Parish, she said.

Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.

Shopping locally enhances a community'€™s assets was the theme of the Covington Rotary Club'€™s recent meeting. Standing, from left are: Candace Metz, Elizabeth Van Sant, Reed Falconer and speaker Dana Eness of Staylocal.org and the Urban Conservancy. (Photo by Leslie Ackel)

Dollars spent in locally owned businesses have three times the impact on a community as dollars spent at national chains, she explained. When shopping locally, citizens simultaneously create jobs, fund city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.

“Dollars continue to circulate within the community, encouraging collective marketing,” she said.

With this, the locally owned businesses can also provide better wages and benefits than chains do, because Eness explained, local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.

A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based on the interests and specific needs of local customers also guarantee a broader range of unique product choices, increases local entrepreneurships, fueling local prosperity and can serve as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

Local stores, she said, help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers, which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss and air and water pollution, as well as ensuring innovation and low prices over the long-term.