Attendees at a 2023 mobile workshop talk with a beauty salon employee about how the construction of Maryland's Purple Line light rail is impacting the neighborhood, which is majority immigrant. Hosted by the Purple Line Corridor Coalition, the workshop visited small businesses and community organizations along the rail corridor in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. (Photo by Sarah Silbiger)
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It was Sheila Somashekhar’s turn to share during a recent webinar when she mentioned that her organization — The Purple Line Corridor Coalition in Maryland — was concerned about the survival of legacy businesses that contribute to the identity of the community. Immediately, someone else on the webinar chimed in to say they had the same worry in their own city.
“I was struck by how similar some of the challenges we’re all dealing with are,” says Somashekhar.
Leaders nationwide can feel alone when working to protect small businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods. But it’s realizations like these that are part of why the webinar’s organizer, the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network, or SBAN, brings together organizations across the U.S. and abroad that are concerned about what happens when small businesses in BIPOC and immigrant communities are displaced. They view these businesses as key to the social, cultural, and economic health of neighborhoods, and they worry about business owners who operate on thin margins.
Connections are not uncommon among SBAN members, who often find each other at the organization’s events, such as its upcoming in-person conference, taking place in College Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., from Nov. 12-14.
Redevelopment doesn’t only affect residents
Willow Lung-Amam, a professor in the Urban Studies and Planning Program at the University of Maryland, founded SBAN in 2020 because conversations around gentrification needed to go beyond affordable housing.
In her research, which focuses on redevelopment politics, Lung-Amam saw small businesses as integral to economic development in communities of color, and they’re increasingly at risk when rents rise and once-reliable clientele leave the neighborhood.
“If those residents are displaced, the small businesses will fail,” says Lung-Amam. “If the small businesses fail, the residents are more likely to leave that neighborhood.”
It’s a downward spiral that SBAN organizes against by creating space for policymakers, nonprofit advocates, technical assistance providers, real estate developers, financial institutions, scholars and small business owners to connect and find common threads in their work.
“Ultimately, we are about keeping our small businesses local and in place,” says Lung-Amam.
A growing network for belonging and strategizing
Since its founding, SBAN has grown to over 175 member organizations. Its first in-person event in 2023 was pivotal for many of the attendees who spoke about finally “finding their people.”
To Lung-Amam, “finding their people” is “recognizing that the conversations they are already having in their communities are larger conversations that not only are other folks having, but we could and should be having at the national level.”
Mileyka Burgos-Flores, the founding executive director of The Allapattah Collaborative (TAC), a community development corporation in Miami that centers land ownership and small business investment as an anti-displacement strategy, realized that her organization’s mission would be amplified when part of a broader community of people doing difficult, unrecognized work.
“I needed to leave Miami and connect with national organizations that understood this displacement conversation,” says Burgos-Flores.
Ground-level stories: the work in action
Elijah Davis was in the process of creating the Historic African-American Neighborhood District Summit (HAANDS) in Birmingham, Alabama around the same time that SBAN was organizing its first digital summit in 2020.
“I think that at the time, there was nothing quite like it, and there were obviously synergies between what we were doing at HAANDS,” remembers Davis.
D.C. native Angel Gregorio talks with SBAN senior leader Bobby Boone at the 2023 conference about her business, The SpiceSuite, and the programs she created to incubate Black businesses and provide affordable commercial space. (Photo by Jelena Djakovic)
The digital spaces that emerged during Covid-19 made it easier for otherwise separated policy advocates to connect with one another and share ideas.
“[The] awareness of other models helped us to advocate locally for policy innovations,” says Davis.
When Davis attended the 2023 in-person conference, it was refreshing to have a space focused specifically on small businesses.
“It’s always a topic among other topics, but to have focused content around small business development for folks of color and both policy and strategy interventions in a niche space was great,” says Davis.
Burgos-Flores shared the same enthusiasm when she discovered SBAN. She wrote a case study for the network on how TAC built trust-based relationships through bilingual communication and customized technical assistance to empower immigrant entrepreneurs who are trying to overcome systemic barriers and build sustainable businesses.
Burgos-Flores also spoke at the first conference, which provided her with a community of people doing the same kind of work.
“I get the goosebumps. It was reassuring,” says Burgos-Flores. “This is not something that you’re going to go to college to study [or] find in the newspaper.”
For Somashekhar, the conference provided actionable insights that she took back to policymakers in her own community, like how small businesses benefit tourism.
“I remember hearing a presentation at the last conference from some folks in New York City who really shifted their thinking on the role of economic development during Covid, when they realized that [people love visiting NYC] because of the small businesses,” says Somashekhar. “[It] helps me think about the case that I would make to our leaders about tourism making great places.”
Looking ahead: from ideas to movement
For its members, SBAN has evolved from a resource hub to a movement shaping national conversations about equitable development. The upcoming conference will feature panels on how small business advocates can navigate the current political landscape, community-ownership models, how banks can better serve small businesses, and other topics.
Lung-Amam is energized by the mobile workshops planned in the surrounding area.
“We’re going to bring folks out to different neighborhoods in D.C. and the D.C. suburbs that are rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, and … meet with small businesses and communities [so participants can] learn from them on the ground,” says Lung-Amam.
Conference registration is now open on the SBAN website.
This post was originally published on Next City.