By ROBERT JUMPER
One Feather Editor
Several years ago, a group of independent retailers got the idea of generating an advertising campaign around the term “Buy Local”. It eventually became multiple independent campaigns on a worldwide basis. It reminded shoppers of the benefits of buying things in their own communities instead of going out of town to buy their goods. The effort came as large malls and outlet centers began to dominate retail. And you can bet that with the economy in the dumps, you will start seeing it more prevalently in our society again.
It is interesting, and a bit sad, that we don’t automatically think local when it comes to buying our “stuff”. After all, those businesses who function on the Qualla Boundary are either locally managed, leased, or owned by our people. Literally our people. Cherokee people.
I found a piece about this subject in the Adirondack Almanack (thank you Google) about the history of the Buy Local movement. Here is a quote (Lawrence P. Gooley, 1/26/2015) “A sense of community is important to most of us. We join clubs, sports teams, civic and arts organizations, historical associations-groups that represent our interests. There’s strength in numbers and satisfaction in knowing that we’re part of something significant. The push to buy local, heightened recently by an economy where average Americans still struggle, is another example. Supporting small local businesses helps your neighbor, keeps money in the community, and benefits us all.”
When we have plenty to spend, we don’t tend to think local. Our first thoughts are “get me what I want and get it to me now”. If you need proof, just look at the rise of the behemoth Amazon. It is like we have forgotten how our communities survive and grow. Or social norms have distracted us from what makes our community great.
Many moons ago, the EBCI Travel and Tourism office (later renamed Destination Marketing by an outside group who later came in to “manage” our tourism effort) tried to organize the business community into a retail business chamber. From the Tourism office side of things, we thought it would be helpful, critical, to have a central voice for the business community so that we (the government) would know how to support the businesses, and to know how to gain their support for certain efforts of Tribal Tourism. From the onset, as we engaged key partners to formulate this business organization, we were clear that it could not be operated by Travel and Tourism, because then it would become just another arm of government. It needed to be autonomous from EBCI so that it could be a real voice for businesses.
For a while, the idea of a Cherokee Chamber of Commerce seemed a workable idea. A common structure was agreed upon and business participation was solicited. A board was established with Travel and Tourism representation, but one of the things we insisted upon was that the Executive Director and Chairperson not be government officials. The structure was like that of other municipalities in our region.
One of the sticking points was that since most businesses on the Boundary capitalize on tourism, that is what the leadership of the newly formed Chamber wanted to do, the job that Travel and Tourism was already tasked to do by the government. This created abrasion and conflict between the two entities. True Chambers do more than tourism promotion and management. They are about all businesses in a community, offering support and incentives for all. A chamber’s strength is in its local membership. The driving force and motto of a thriving chamber is that simple slogan of “Buy Local” and support those local businesses.
Most Chambers of Commerce are funded through a combination of member dues, marketing tools, and government support. Some chambers do contract services for the government through their tourism offices to supplement their budgets.
While the new Cherokee Chamber of Commerce created a structure for membership dues, there was not enough buy-in from local businesses to support the needs of the chamber. The marketing tool, which consisted of a visitor guide, only made enough to pay to produce the guide itself. And the government hasn’t had an appetite for providing funding for a chamber that they do not control directly, and that seems to continue to be the situation today. One of the common concerns heard as the Cherokee Chamber tried to gain financing for a legitimate operating budget, was that they cast the net too far in getting advertisers for their chamber visitor guide, accepting ads from businesses that were not on-Boundary. For a time, the Chamber stayed afloat with various small grants they could acquire. But they could not be an effective or forceful entity because they lacked the budget and the leverage to engage enough of the on-Boundary community to make significant change for the business community.
The Cherokee Chamber does still exist today, using “exists” in the broadest sense. They have a website with contact information, and I believe, at least until recently, have been able to produce a visitor guide. They list an executive director and a contact person on their website, but there is no mention of a board of directors or bylaws. They so infrequently attended tourism organizational meetings of the government (their seat on the Greater Cherokee Tourism Committee was infrequently filled). But I can find no record of regular chamber meetings in recent history and when I have inquired about the proposition of a Cherokee Chamber revitalization, there were mixed feelings about the benefit and impact of a chamber on the Boundary.
Current EBCI Commerce leadership has their hands full with current strategic initiatives and concentrating its limited manpower on those initiatives. At current, even allocating resources for evaluating the potential for a functional Cherokee centered chamber of commerce is difficult for leadership. Some even question if a true Chamber is practical on trust land.
As the EBCI Commerce Secretary Chris McCoy so accurately put it, “We don’t know if the business voice of a traditional chamber of commerce would empower local business or provide the type of services that a business owners and potential business owners on the Boundary would need. (paraphrased)”.
Secretary McCoy added, “We are currently evaluating and prioritizing the needs, real and perceived, of our local economy. There are many areas to address including infrastructure, policy and process, and incentives that will require extensive study and capacity to develop. Our strategies include supporting the current and future businesses of the Qualla Boundary for long-term sustainability. A chamber, or some form of the services they provide, is a part of that strategy.”
Currently, only minimal attention is being provided to the issue of a Chamber and Chamber services because of gaps in management structure and staffing. Indeed, the small number of services that the existing Cherokee Chamber of Commerce provides cannot sustain either the Chamber itself or the needs of a local business community that desperately needs to reassert its voice.
We need innovative thought and enough labor force as a tribe to analyze and put forth solutions to the need of engaging the business community’s voice. Our tribal government must think outside the box and outside the Boundary for a sustainable economy. But they also must support and enhance the existing infrastructure of the local economy. Buy Local doesn’t just apply to us in the community who go get groceries and sundries every week. It applies to our government and the local businesspeople who provide the opportunity to keep dollars made on the Boundary in the economy of the Boundary. We do not need people in leadership positions whose mentality is “it won’t work”. We need leaders who will work toward what will work. And we need those leaders like yesterday.
So that was a long rabbit chase to get back around to the point of this letter to the Qualla Boundary community. I know that we lack in some basic retail people needs and wants, and there are times that we must go outside our community to buy goods and services. But, for the sake of our community, we need to first think “Can I buy this at home?” And we need to do this across the board. The idea of buying local. Government needs to think local when entertaining businesses for on-Boundary space, local businesses need to think local when setting hours and prices for their products and services, and we consumers need to think about the benefits to our community when we buy local. The longer we keep money circulating in our local economy, the better it is for us. Money in the local business pockets funds local jobs, which in turn, funds local business and provides for local housing and services. Even those on-Boundary businesses that are leased on tribal ground by other than tribal members pay levy, and some pay privilege tax, which are dollars used to support local, governmental services. And they pay a tribal member, or the tribal government rent for their space on the Boundary. And they pay us for local services like water and sewer. If we can get it here, we should buy it here, and that goes for online purchases too.
It seems like a small, insignificant thing. But if we all work together as a community, buying local will have a significant impact.
