 Hi everyone, we'll begin in another minute just waiting for people to zoom in. Okay, I think we should begin. People will be zooming in, but I want to welcome you to today's first talk of the semester and we're featuring two people who I greatly respect in the community and Thomas Barr and Kimberlanding are those people. So first, Thomas Barr, he's the Executive Director for Local First Arizona and he is, Local First is the largest coalition of local businesses in the entire continent of North America. He advocates for strong local business community that contributes to building vibrancy, equity, and prosperity across our state. He's a proud Arizona native and a Sun Devil. He leads LFA's business coalition by advocating for economic and cultural benefits provided by building strong local communities. He steers the strategic direction of LFA engaging over 3,000 local businesses across the state and guiding the direction, execution of all of their initiatives and partnerships and collaborates with over 30 staff members at LFA implementing their work in entrepreneurship, small business advocacy, environmental sustainability, Yahoo! and urban development, local food systems, and community building. And then there's Kimberlanding. Kimberlanding is our rock star. She is the founder of Local First and Local First Arizona Foundation. They're two distinct statewide organizations, by the way, and they work in tandem to strengthen Arizona's economy. Kimber is an entrepreneur, a business leader, and community development specialist who works to cultivate strong self-reliant communities and inspire a higher quality of life for people across our state. Her passions, which are seen throughout her work, include fostering cultural diversity and inclusion, economic resilience, and responsible growth for Arizona. Kimber, would you like to take up the banner and begin? Great. Thank you, Lauren. We greatly appreciate being here with you today and welcome everyone. So, Thomas and I are going to tag team the presentation today. We each bring different areas of expertise and I know feel free to add questions to the chat and we'll address questions toward the end of the session. So, next slide please. Am I the one controlling the slides or is somebody else? Great. So, we are an organization that is developing resiliency in Arizona and so it's important when we think about this word sustainability, that in addition to environmental sustainability, that we're also thinking about economic sustainability and many people think of economic development as growth and I submit to you that economic development has to be focused also on quality of life and that leads us down a path of food security, mitigating climate change and all those things that are directly connected to what we would think of as creating sustainability in our community. So, next slide. So, when we started local first Arizona, we really wanted to think about what connects people to this place and I put this slide in here because it sort of gets people thinking about places they love and if I asked everyone right now to close your eyes and think about your favorite city or town where you've ever been, just your favorite city that you've ever traveled to. You might envision something like a tree line street or small storefront or something beautiful that has to do with nature and I often ask this because here in Arizona we specifically in the greater Phoenix area, we don't have a lot of those things, right? I would venture to say that nobody thought of their favorite city as an intersection with a CVS and a Chili's, right? That's really not what attracts us to great places or makes us feel connected and no offense to those businesses intended, it's just not the type of atmosphere that makes us feel very connected. So, this is a true story. I started local first Arizona after standing in line next to a woman that I didn't know and she was actually telling me how great Chicago was and I'm an Arizona girl so I was kind of doing the internal eye roll. If I asked you all how many of you know someone from Chicago that won't stop telling you how great Chicago is, probably the majority of the people listening right now would agree. People, Chicago obviously has more hometown pride than any place else and so this woman was talking to me about how great Chicago was and then she lowered her voice and sort of leaned into me, a complete stranger, leaned in and kind of confidentially said, boy, you guys sure have made a mess out here in Arizona and I thought to myself, wow, that is so unfair and I started to react to that and be defensive about that and so then I was processing that she said, you guys sure have made a mess out here so I said, oh, you guys, I said, you don't live here and she said, no, I live here. I said, okay, you haven't lived here very long and she said, no, I've lived here 15 years. So I said, frankly, well, who the hell is you guys? You're one of us now. You live here now in Arizona and if we have a problem with our education system, you are part of the problem too. So you better roll up your sleeves and get busy. So this led me to think about, wow, this woman has lived here 15 years and she's not connected. So I pushed back on her, I started asking her questions and I found out she had never voted here in Arizona. I found out that when she gave charitably, she gave back in Illinois and it was then that I started to realize this connection of place impacts us economically and that we have a lot of people here who don't feel accountable for this place and really they're sitting at home thinking, well, what do you want me to do about it? I just got here 20 years ago. And that attitude is not going to get us where we need to be. So I did an independent survey of everybody that I could find from Chicago and I just asked them one question, tell me why you love Chicago so much and every single one of them, without even realizing it, every one of them told me the locally owned businesses. They said, oh, I love the chefs and restaurants. They said in Chicago, I had the same barber for 40 years. And they said I banked at the same bank my great grandparents banked at in Chicago or they said things like I used to pull up to my favorite cafe and they'd yell from the behind the you know, in the kitchen, hey, Steve, you want the regular because they knew me. Well, all of those examples are relationship based and how we conduct commerce actually matters. So next slide. So what that means is that luckily it wasn't just us talking about this. It was the Knight Foundation did a study called Soul of the Community that found not only that locally owned businesses play a key role in how people feel about their place. They also lead to having people be more connected and accountable, which means they give charitably more often, they vote more often, they volunteer, they even pay their taxes without complaining. So local first Arizona really was born from a place of believing that the closer money circulates, the closer money circulates to home, the more compassionate, engaged and accountable those dollars are. And conversely, the more globalized those dollars are the less accountable and less compassionate those dollars are. So next slide. So I'm going to hand it over to Thomas now. If you can keep all of those thoughts in your mind, here we are this incredibly large organization headed right into the COVID crisis. We had to really jump in and listen to the needs of the people in our network and create programs and curriculum really to respond to them on the fly. And Thomas really led the charge for all the technical assistance work that we did. And I'm going to hand it over to him to talk about that. Thanks, Kimber. And thank you everybody for having me. I've been with local first Arizona for about seven and a half years doing this work now. And before I talk about our COVID response, which is going to lead into what I know a lot of people were interested in hearing about, which was our Phoenix initiative today. I just kind of wanted to lay the groundwork with not telling you all these numbers to tell you how much work we've done over the years, but really to show you that heading into the pandemic, we had built a lot of trust, years of trust with small businesses with other organizations in the community, and with followers of local first Arizona and our work that looked to us to take a leadership position in providing assistance and aid and innovative solutions to how we were going to help the community get through the challenging times over the last year. So, you know, we work with over 3000 businesses in our program, but we have a wide number of staff running multiple programs. And what we had to do is collectively think as a team, what are the resources that we have? What are the connections that we've made? And what are the outlets that we have to ensure that small businesses get prioritized as in receiving aid? And as funding is made available, we're using every tool that we have in every relationship we've built to ensure that the response to the pandemic is comprehensive to the most vulnerable families and businesses within our entire community. And so what we actually did first is we sat down as a leadership team and thought through what our path was going to be in providing support to businesses and helping really these families that make up the community that we love, how are we really going to steer them toward a path to reviving as businesses through the pandemic? And what we really viewed as the first, I would say three to eight or nine months of the pandemic was a period of triage. At local First Arizona, I would say for the first two weeks of the pandemic, multiple members of our team were fielding multiple calls, I would say up to 20 calls a day from businesses across the state who had never experienced these challenges before, had never applied for a federal aid loan, had never heard of anything called the paycheck protection program and needed guidance, they needed resources, they needed to be navigated to the resources that were being made available in a way that made sense. We had partnered step up like the Arizona Association of Accountants who volunteered hours and hours to consulting with businesses and helping them figure out how to apply for federal aid. And so what we knew we had to do though was look for toward the future. As we navigated businesses to help get through the challenging times, what was recovery going to look like? As businesses began to reopen, they were going to need to completely remodel their businesses, have safety standards, contactless payments. A lot of businesses had to transition to online shopping for the first time ever, something that we don't really think about as consumers but became important overnight. And then as we look towards the future, as we look toward coming out of the pandemic and social distancing and all these challenging times, we wanted to be sure that businesses were on a path to resiliency, that as we look toward reviving truly reviving Arizona's economy, we are not just going back to the way things always were but that we are restructuring ourselves to ensure that small businesses and local ownership, inclusivity in that space is prioritized in all of the plans that are being made through economic development. So I wanted to share with you just a few things that we did at Local First Arizona right off the bat to make sure that our most vulnerable businesses and families were taken care of as much as possible. And what we did is just about, I would say, 12 days after Arizona closed for the first time, Local First launched what we called our small business relief fund. This was a fund that we created specifically for small businesses with less than three employees that we knew relied on their business as their sole source of income and we're at the thinner margins of getting by. And we did this because we knew that while federal aid might be coming that there was going to be a section of businesses that really needed support more quickly and couldn't wait weeks or months for this type of funding to come through. So we were able to raise, I have an older statistic on here, this was actually about six weeks into the program at the time, but we were able to raise over $2 million in private funding from individuals and businesses and people in the community that stepped up and donated. And we turned to those donations into many grants of up to $2,500. We were able to give to hundreds of businesses across Arizona. Now this wasn't money that was going in to help the business expand. This was money going into the business to help them put food on the table for their family to make sure that they could get through the next weeks or months that were coming. And it was incredibly important for us to elevate the need that was there and to make sure that not only we were helping in the moment, but we were raising awareness about this need to our state government, to our federal government, to our congressional representatives in Arizona, so that they knew that more aid needed to be coming down the road. And what this partly led to is local first Arizona being tapped by the governor's office to next after that grants administer a $10 million grants in rent and mortgage relief for small businesses in Arizona that were mandated to close over the summer. And this was really important for us to play a role in. We really believe because of, again, the long term relationships that we built with businesses in every corner of the state. Many times when when aid is released, our urban cores tend to swallow up the lot of it and local first actually represents the Arizona World Development Council and has a wide number of deep relationships in every county of the state. So we were able to we were able to deploy these funds in just a little over three months to businesses that were mandated to close over the summer, making a really meaningful difference for those businesses to sustain themselves. But the other thing that we did is through these conversations, right, being able to help these hundreds of businesses, we identified in April two things. One was that we knew these businesses needed to adapt their business models to be creative and accessible to people digitally that never had before. But we also saw that in April, people in our country and in Arizona were spending more money online than they ever had before in the history of the internet. And we knew we had to do something about it. And so what we did is we worked over several months to create the Shop Arizona marketplace. This launched in November. It's a one-of-a-kind marketplace. It's I've got the website right here. If anybody'd like to check it out at shop.localfirstdaze.com, it has over 100 businesses listed and growing every day. And it's an opportunity for small businesses to be competitive in a digital marketplace, right? If you think about all of the festivals like Tempe Festival of the Arts or our own Arizona Fall Festival that has hundreds of artisans and crafters and boutiques and retailers that depend on those events to sell their items, those didn't happen over the last year. And so this creates a competitive advantage for small businesses online that we're looking forward to helping them carry themselves through as we continue to navigate the challenges that are that are among us. So again, just wanted to share some of the foundation behind the multi-pronged and multifaceted approaches that local First Arizona took to helping businesses. And now I'd like to give it back over to Kimber who's going to share about one of the more unique programs that we initiated called Feed Phoenix. And so she's going to share a little bit about that. Great. Thank you, Thomas. I appreciate that. So before I jump into what Feed Phoenix is, I want to conjure up sort of an image for you in your mind about how the economy actually works. So when you go in and spend your money at a locally owned coffee shop, that locally owned coffee shop owner employs people, baristas who work in that coffee shop. But in addition, they probably hired a graphic designer or a website developer or payroll service provider or media and accountant or bookkeeper. And that keeps dollars moving through the economy. And then maybe let's say that accounting firm then in turn hires, say, a janitorial supply company here locally. And that keeps the dollar recirculating again. And the accounting firm wouldn't be there if there weren't local businesses to hire them, most likely. So this is what we call the multiplier effect. And it keeps dollars moving through the economy. So if you could just remember that smart money comes back to you, the way you're spending your money directly impacts the number of job opportunities that exist in a certain market. So conversely, back to that example, if you spend your money on a latte at a big chain coffee shop, then that big chain coffee shop, they don't hire any local graphic designers. They do not hire any local website developers or payroll service providers. In fact, in 49 other states, they don't hire those jobs. So the chain model as solid as it is for a company like Starbucks, I would argue they're the best chain out there. They still eliminate job opportunities in our community. And so when we talk about supporting locally owned businesses, it's not that we're telling you that we're trying to protect the barista jobs. In addition to those barista jobs, we're trying to protect also the business professional jobs that are in the business network of a local coffee shop, should you choose to support them. So and again, it's not just us talking about this, right? This is a conversation happening all over the world. And we know now that for every 10 million dollars, you spend it locally owned businesses, you create and sustain 110 jobs. And for every 10 million dollars that we spend as Americans in chain stores, we create and sustain only 50 jobs. And as Thomas mentioned, with online shopping, we need to be accountable to the fact that we spend 10 million dollars on Amazon. We only create and sustain 14 jobs. So again, with the local business, you get 110 jobs. With the chain business, you get 50 jobs. With Amazon, you get 14 jobs. So this is not a sustainable model. This is not a sustainable model at all. And so you can see in this study that came out from the Harvard Business Review, those communities that have the highest quality of life are those communities that have focused on small and midsize businesses and investing in those businesses in a sustainable manner. So next slide. So with Feed Phoenix, we took that general idea and we applied it to a single contract. So the City of Phoenix had an opportunity to spend CARES Act money to feed COVID impacted families. And they could have taken that money, and they could have awarded it to say Aremark, a very big international corporation. And they would have supported approximately 20 jobs to create all those meals. And the food would have been sourced from all over the place. And they would have fed COVID impacted families. What we were able to convince them to do, and you can skip through the next slide. We have some images. That is Diana Gregory right there. She does a lot. This is an example of how these companies were creating the meals. So what we were able to convince them to do was to take the exact same amount of money and allow us to run that money through 14 Phoenix-based farms and 45 Phoenix-based restaurants. And when I say running it through, we bought food from those farms who were all completely upside down because they lost a lot of their existing market share when the economy was hit so hard. So we bought the produce they had. We delivered it to the restaurants and required the restaurants to incorporate the local food in the meal. So there were certain requirements for how much local food they had to include. And then we paid them $10 a meal for the lunches. So we took the same amount of money. We ran it through all those companies and jobs to help them stay in business. And at the end of the day, we actually ended up creating more meals than the other example would have. So next slide. So giving you an example, these again, we distributed all of the food through our partners like Native Health Services downtown or UMOM so that we got those meals out to unsheltered women and families. And we had so many restaurants that raised their hand and said, oh my gosh, this contract, we know we can count on this to create 300 lunches every Wednesday for the next six weeks. That is keeping enough cash flow in our business to keep us going. Next slide. So there's an article that came out in Bloomberg that you can look up that is focused on the innovation of this program. With Feed Phoenix, 1.2 million was invested and the strategy was to feed COVID impacted families. Again, we engaged with 45 restaurants, 12 farms. I thought it was 14 farms, but I think it was only 12 in the end. 14 qualified, but two did not participate. And then we had 40 different distribution centers all across the city, compostable containers for all the meals that was required. And we supplied 110,000 meals. Another city, which shall remain unnamed, did a similar program where they hired a big corporation to produce the meals. They did not require any local sourcing. They used one distribution center. All of the families that were COVID impacted had to find transportation to get to the one pickup spot. All of the meals were prepared in Styrofoam and they produced fewer meals. So you can see how going the extra mile and coordinating a program that engages with the community and leverages the multiplier effect really had a tremendous impact. And again, it didn't just impact those jobs that were at those farms and restaurants because they were all local. They also were able to pay the bills for their graphic designer or website developer or accountant. And that kept more people afloat as the multiplier effect reverberated through the entire community. So next slide. So we have a wide variety of sustainability programs at local First Arizona. We also have a wide variety of food programs. We have a website that's called Good Food Finder where you can connect and attach to all kinds of local farms and locally produced foods. And our sustainability program is really interwoven with our food programs because food access and agriculture obviously are as close as you can possibly get to the issues related to sustainability. So our goals with our sustainability program are working with the small business community to help them reduce their operating costs, particularly now more than ever. They're looking for ways to save money. And so we have introduced our sustainability program to a wider variety of businesses than we have in the past. And because maybe people hadn't thought about whether or not their business is sustainable. So again, we have a strategy of meeting people where they're at. And so if the first thing on their mind is saving money, that's okay. We can educate and inform them around sustainability as time goes on. Meet them where they're at, talk to them about cost savings by reducing energy, water, waste, and carbon emissions. Those things are all critically important. So we educate, inform, we do one-on-one technical assistance to help them understand what their options are and then help them prepare for a future with a changing climate. So an example would be a carpet cleaning company that joined local first and they used typical equipment that was guzzling water and they used typical chemicals which are not earth-friendly to clean carpets. And after coming through a few sessions, they decided to change their entire business model. And so they got a loan, they sourced low water usage equipment and they changed to using eco-friendly treatments for the carpets. And then they began marketing to families. If you have a toddler at home crawling on your carpet, you want to know what goes into the carpet cleaning. And they built a whole new green business model after some one-on-one consultation and they realized they were competing just on price in the other realm. And in this realm, people were actually willing to pay more for a sustainably run business. So we run a variety of programs under the sustainability umbrella. So the green business certification program, which we run right in Tempe, allows businesses to first of all have the consultation with us but also see how they stack up and they're also held accountable over time. So it's not like they can just come get the certification and then forget about it. We're constantly checking in with them to make sure that they're staying on top of their commitments. The scale up program is a wonderful program that allows small business owners very project specific support and also resources. So if you had say a small business owner that owned their building and their building had outdated HVAC equipment or maybe it wasn't, you know, there was a lot of leaks in the building. It wasn't energy efficient or it wasn't water efficient. We would actually be able to help them map out a plan to build sustainability into that building and then let them borrow the money at zero or 1% interest while we create a pro forma so that they can actually see over time how many months it will take them to pay that loan back. So then they have a comprehensive plan and idea how they're going to do it and then we measure the impact of the execution of that plan over time. We also have a coalition of higher education businesses and others in the Southern Arizona Green Leaders program. And then we do all of our sustainability campaigns to encourage individuals like yourselves to seek out businesses that have adopted a sustainability model. They need to be rewarded and we can reward them with our dollars. So our goal is to encourage more people to find local coffee shops, restaurants, retail businesses that have implemented sustainability practices into their work. So we help market those out so you can find them. Next slide. Okay, so that's what we brought for you today and I'd love to open it up for questions. I also would like the opportunity perhaps to talk a little bit more about our food programming overall. With Good Food Finder we're working not only with the food producers themselves and helping them implement sustainability practices and resiliency practices but we're encouraging people to eat more local food. Excuse me. So by providing support for those food producers we're helping them manage their overhead costs, be better businesses and also helping them grow their marketplace. Tommy, is there anything you want to add about our food programs? So one of the things I think I just add that made the Feed Phoenix program so we were able to implement it and so quickly was because of a lot of the pre-existing relationships with food producers and farmers that we've been working on through our food program and that we have. So we don't really think of our work in silos as food work over here, sustainability over here, and small businesses over here. It all intersects so much and that's why we were able to come up with the idea to be able to connect the restaurants with the farmers, food producers, out into the community, through the community centers, things like that. So it does look like we have a few questions coming in. Kimber, all read them off and then if you have anything to add please do. The first one is that Senator Sinema just announced she's co-sponsoring bipartisan legislation supported by chef Jose Andres to help cities, towns, and tribes partner with restaurants and local nonprofits to feed families. Sounds like our program has her staff conferred with local first. Do you have any high hopes that the feed act will be signed into law? I do have high hopes for it and I do think that the key is going to be localized implementation because it's all about relationships. I wouldn't call it a consultation but we have had brief conversations with her staff and of course as I mentioned the program is well documented in Bloomberg. So we're very optimistic. We have a great relationship with Senator Sinema and kudos to her for taking on both food security and economic development in one bill so I do think it'll go a long way. Great. So the next question is love local first Arizona but I'm just curious if Starbucks was headquartered in Phoenix not Seattle would you be promoting them as local? Is it really about local or about size and small versus huge? So I can take that one. So at local first we really are looking at the impact of the overall impact of the business right and we try as as as meaningfully as we can to work with as many Arizona focused companies as possible. So part of our membership eligibility requirements that we've had and our board of directors have upheld for many years is that we intentionally work with businesses that are privately held in Arizona. So Starbucks is a large publicly traded company and if you think about that the profits that they make are dispersed to trade shareholders potentially all over the world rather than keeping the dollars in one community right. And so while we're not looking at the company and saying you're bad or you're a poor company we just have a particular focus on supporting and helping businesses that are privately held right here in Arizona and have a really community focus in our area. So those are the types of businesses that we work with. There's lots of large companies in Arizona that have chosen to stay private that have great impacts. Nextiva in Scottsdale has over a thousand employees and serve businesses worldwide but they're right here in Arizona and have stayed a private company so it's kind of the focus that we've taken as an organization. And I would add to that Thomas I think it's this is one of my favorite questions and discussions is just to remind folks that local does not equal small. So I submit that it's important to consider the stock market as part of our overall lack of resiliency and sustainability. The stock market extracts wealth from communities to pay shareholders and it's important to note that often in that transition not only does it exacerbate the wealth gap that we're experiencing in America but even more specifically the racial wealth gap because most shareholders for big corporations are Anglo whereas dollars that stay and recirculate in a certain community benefit a broader variety of life which includes all of us. So it's really important to note that what we're really doing is drawing attention to the fact that the stock market is not the only way to grow your business. We definitely are not saying that bad is that big is bad and so to answer that question very specifically no if Starbucks was still a publicly traded company headquartered here in Arizona we would say they're an Arizona company but they're still publicly traded meaning they're not their profits don't stay in Arizona and the majority of their jobs they would support more jobs here but they still would be paying distant shareholders with their profits so I just wanted to add that Thomas. That's great next question is what is the effect of ASU in campus life on local businesses how could ASU be more local friendly? Obviously being based in Tempe just based off of students and faculty and the infrastructure of having the walkability of Tempe there's a huge impact on local businesses and the surrounding businesses of the campus that are impacted. One of the larger things we're working on as an organization though is how to influence and support more institutions larger institutions that can choose to source more products and services from Arizona based companies so I'm sure some of you will hear soon about a program we're relaunching called Source Arizona that's focused on helping ASU and other larger companies in Arizona source their office supplies their custodial their security services their catering anything that a business would need to source from Arizona based companies and so we're going to be working on on influencing more of that. Kimber anything to add? No I think you captured that really well Thomas thank you. Great next I'm going to ask I'm going to name the next two questions because they somewhat go together how did the City of Phoenix get in contact with local first about the response to hunger and then also someone asking to speak more about the COVID relief funds from the City of Phoenix CARES Act. Do we know of the cities that have or will prioritize additional support for school meal operators and do we know if the impact of the City of Phoenix funding to help school meal operators has helped them maintain operations through the school year? So the let me just back up for one moment so the first piece of that is we have a long-standing relationship with the City of Phoenix and so when we heard they were going to be looking to feed families we reached out and started a conversation it's really just as simple as that and like I said we have great relationships with their office of sustainability and also they're the ones that are focused on food they developed a fantastic food security plan if you haven't seen it it's online and it's great and so when we talk about when you say speak more about the COVID relief funds from the City of Phoenix the CARES Act dollars that were for feed Phoenix were divided between two entities we were the ones that worked with restaurants and farms and then there were we had colleagues who also worked in partnership with the schools so we we actually did not have a role to play with the schools so I can't answer that piece of the question. Next question is how can we help educate people about the local ecosystem of how dollars flow through the community to sustain the community? I would say follow us at local first and get involved have conversations with your family and friends about the importance of supporting local businesses think about the ways that you spend money and think about maybe shifting 10 percent of your dollars to more local businesses it's more than restaurants and coffee shops it's where you get your your nails done your hair done your your oil changed your tires changed your grocery stores there's lots of ways that you can support more local companies even if maybe you have to go to a business that's not locally owned you can look for local products that that business sells and so having those conversations with with family and friends and then if you're interested in learning more about the studies that we've shared or the economic impacts of the local ecosystems we have several studies and reports and information on our website localfirstaz.com that you're welcome to check out and view. Next question how do you see business to business relationships continuing post COVID do you think there's a greater awareness of the need for Arizona to support its own consider the economics of local food system investments capital funding for expansion or incentives to encourage business to business collaboration any inside there Kimber sure so I do think that there's there's so many shifts that are occurring right now Lauren that it's going to be hard to track them all and it's it's frankly hard for us as an organization to keep up with it because what has happened is a good number of companies have just shifted to ordering so many supplies from Amazon quite frankly and they're not considering the implications of the impact on Arizona's recovery much less the long-term implications of losing those dollars and jobs in our local economy and so we're running at that as fast as we can Thomas mentioned you know from a retail perspective we have the shop AZ marketplace but we also have a B2B program called Source AZ that is helping our large companies find and connect to high quality Arizona companies that are still privately held here right in the state so I think there are things that are going to be unfolding over 2021 and 2022 many of them are going to be putting Arizona at a disadvantage we're working very hard to try to mitigate those painful realizations and so for example we have a really large company that we just put an entire proposal together not for ourselves but on behalf of another local company to encourage them to source locally the other thing I do want to identify you know is you know ASU's role ASU is doing a great job of analyzing the importance of local economies but when it comes to implementation they're actually implementing local economy work in other communities around the globe not even in the US and much less here in Tempe so for example ASU still sources from Staples Staples brings Arizona 65 part-time employees and does five to six drop shipments with 18 wheelers a week which is completely an unsustainable model so we would encourage them to consider sourcing from WIS which is a third generation Tempe company that would manage one shipment a week and could completely manage a contract that size we haven't had any success in those conversations but that gives you an idea of what we would call an anchor institution's opportunity to really lead the charge here especially in a time of recovery there's so much opportunity for ASU to think about its purchasing as a strategy for recovery um next question and comments thank you for sharing meals with native health are native american business owners or tribally owned enterprises active with your network do you want to touch on that kimber sure yeah it's a great great question so we have several different ways that we interact with the tribes we have a two tribal board members and we have partnerships with partnership with native americans and we've worked with them in a number different ways um samantha zaw on our team has done extensive research and work on food ways with the tribes and she's issued some fantastic reports that are also available online and then we are the fiscal sponsor for native women entrepreneurs of arizona which is a network of all different types of native women owned businesses and so our role is to help provide infrastructure and support for them in whatever way that we can during the distribution of funds when we did our small business relief fund we connected with a gentleman in navajo that works with navajo and hopey primarily women but mostly artisans and we were able to provide direct uh capital to about uh i think it was about 68 different artisans up in the northern part of the state um we also are partnered with um food and farm uh organization in cells arizona which is part of tahana automation um oh and then finally we just finished a food security survey for san carlos apache where we're looking at strategies to increase local food production and consumption in the grand county san carlos apache region and that's in partnership with na u so it's just a few things we're doing there great um next is uh i spoke at the beginning about how supporting local businesses incentivizes people to volunteer donate pay taxes locally have you come across research or evidence that examines a similar effect regarding people who practice sustainability or participate in the circular economy i don't know of any maybe you do kimber but i i will add that um that's um part of the goal behind us building our green business certification program is to actually build a directory of green certified businesses that people can support um so that we can show that we know we actually we actually do know we're talking to businesses and consumers all the time that people want to support more sustainably uh sustainable businesses um and so if we can influence more locally on businesses to tell that story and to get in front of more people um we'll actually see more results of of those people that want to support them too um so i don't know of any studies though kimber do you i don't yeah not yet but i bet they're coming yeah um next sprouts is a favorite it's local but public um are there any privately held local grocery stores that you recommended phoenix um bash's family food stores is our our largest grocer arizona based they also have aj's in food city that you can support there's also lots of smaller uh grocers um throughout greater phoenix that you can support um if you're looking for international food um there's there's many small grocery stores that you can you can find um i also know there's a small store in tempe called eco mended eco mended that sells shampoos soaps laundry detergents all in and you bring in you reuse the containers that you fill up in so if you do a little bit of research look look around you can find a lot of the products you would get at the big stores in small places too um next is Samantha saw did great work on indigenous food waste for the city of tempe before she moved to local first her findings are here um we have another crossing that lauren that's great i didn't have the link candy so thank you that is very much worth reading everyone and then someone's just making another comment um jill from the city of tempe's office of economic development um thank you for all you do to help out tempe businesses especially launching the shop local marketplace um someone's asking home improvement stores that are local um there is a um there's a hardware store over on rural and ray i think it's called ray's hardware uh those are the local hardware store there um if you ever go up to flagstaff there's a incredible um local hardware lumber store uh kimber what's the name it's it's i'm drawing a blink right now home co is uh flags i mean it is it is remarkable if you ever want to learn about how to rate run a great company that that company has almost run home depot out of their market um very very well run excellent customer service great supply of stuff and it really reminds you that yes it is still possible um while we're on that topic i do want to mention looking at the structure of the business is also important so if i had if you had to go out and buy a faucet and i had to put those things in order not in terms of good to bad but in terms of local economic impact the the most impact you could have would be to find a locally owned privately held uh you know hardware store and find an american made faucet right that's going to give you the most impact next on that list is going to be to find a true value because a true value has employee ownership opportunities um it is you know the the model keeps more dollars with the the diverse owners that are here in the community next on the list is an ace which is a franchise a franchise model is still going to have a local owner even though they're not going to hire like a new graphic designer and so they're kind of a hybrid model and then significantly down on that list is going to be a home depot or lows which are completely publicly traded not owned locally and and they don't source any business services locally and then the final would be the least impact if you just went online and uh and and bought that thing from amazon so that kind of gives you an idea of the choices that you have and the impact and of course people aren't going to be you know 100 um buying local but we ask people uh to to buy local when they can i always joke we're not local only arizona we're not local always arizona we're simply local first arizona so it goes to the next comment somebody made what are your thoughts on winco as an employee owned company we're heavily supportive of employee owned business models and we're doing actually a lot of work helping businesses think through the strategies to maybe restructure themselves to be employee owned or new businesses starting to to start employee owned as well so we work a lot in that space and then the last question i have here is has local first supported the independent restaurants act um and can you share an update on the status of the federal support um maybe kimber you can do that i would touch on really quickly that we were hugely supportive and and did a lot of advocacy and support of the save our stages act which was passed in the last in the last congressional bill which will provide much needed to support um for independent venues event planners um special events businesses and a lot of the businesses that have had completely zero business for the last 10 months but kimber i don't know about the restaurants act yeah the restaurants act um i don't have the latest update um we're waiting for it though daily because there's so much coming out of the biden administration as you can see we are very very supportive of that and um you know dan yeah leone here locally has worked to put together an arizona or a phoenix based um coalition around that and so we've helped in terms of getting the word out about it and providing support for it so it's very much needed and unfortunately i just have not heard the latest news the um save our stages made it through which were really optimistic about it because of our work around the state we've been able to alert small theaters of all kinds in small little towns across arizona so when the independent restaurant act goes through we will be doing the same last question here can you talk about partnerships with other business advocacy organizations um we're really connected and have been for years with one community um who's uh advocated for uh for rights for lgbtq workers um and people throughout arizona and have stood alongside them um especially through the sb 1062 legislation that um was was not signed into law several years ago um we also work very closely with um partners throughout the state and and nationally through the national community reinvestment coalition which is a group um ensuring that the community reinvestment act that sets the standards for banks to invest in their communities is upheld and um and specific standards are held for the bank so that um they cannot just profit but also um are held to standards to give back to their communities uh kimber not sure if any others come to mind uh well around this state because we are statewide we have tons of partnerships with chambers of commerce and rural areas i'm certainly in urban areas too but um those partnerships can't be understated um we are an organization with partnership at our core and that collaboration is actually uh uh one of our core values so um yeah tons and tons of relationships across arizona um someone is asking what's local first doing this time during the pandemic to continue supporting struggling restaurants um we're doing a lot we're making sure we're doing a lot of technical assistance um coaching restaurants on how to um best market themselves and get the word out about the safety standards that they have um we're making sure that they are up to speed and up to date on having proper um curbside pickup and to go options and things like that um you'll see that we just recently announced um for those of you that that know um the annual culinary festival we put on called devour we've actually shifted that to be an at-home experience this year and so we're working with about 20 chefs and on 20 February 27th and 28th each day there will be the opportunity to purchase meals from those businesses and have a great dining experience at home but through that event we're raising awareness that um you know if you want these great restaurants um that make our communities great to still be here when the pandemic is over that we have to continue supporting them um so we're we're providing them tools and resources but we're also sharing information and making sure that the community is aware that they need additional support um and then one just came through how do you view the governor's refusal to close indoor dining um during the pandemic um we've been advocates for safety uh for our restaurants um as much as possible and through the different mandates that have come through we've just stood alongside our restaurants as much as possible and continue to advocate for people to support them um along the way um and part of our role in that was administering the 10 million dollars of rent and mortgage relief um that was given right back to those restaurants that were mandated to close this summer um Kimber do you have anything to add there? No I think you covered that one. So I guess in closing we really appreciate the opportunity to share with you a lot of the work that we're doing if anyone is interested in getting more involved please reach out to us and and I'm sure Lauren can share our contact information and if you'd like to stay in the know you can follow local first Arizona social media subscribe to our newsletters and we just encourage all of you to continue supporting the businesses in your hometowns and in your neighborhoods they really do continue to need our support and a lot of them are working really hard to keep you safe while you're doing so so do that and then also check out our shop Arizona marketplace if you're interested and share that with some family and friends. That's great and Lauren if you wouldn't mind typing in localfirstazfoundation.org as well where they can learn more about our food programs. Okay that's local first foundation localfirstazfoundation.org. Very good thank you so much everyone it's always a highlight in our programming when Kimber and Thomas come to speak at ASU I know if we had everyone in person we would have had an amazing meal cooked by a local restaurant and we would have all celebrated your accomplishments and I know these are very trying times and my heart goes out to all the staff and members of local first for doing so much to build our economy rebuild our economy and stop this transmission as well thank you. Thank you for having us it's great to be with you thank you so much. Thanks everyone. Have a great day everyone. Bye bye.