SERIES: More Than a Transaction • 3 of 6
Researchers at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business went into Roxbury, Massachusetts—a historically Black community with a substantial Latinx population—to understand what local business owners were actually doing. What they found surprised even them.
These business owners weren’t just running shops. They were simultaneously investing in their communities in four distinct ways:
• Financially—through wages and local purchasing
• In human capital—through mentoring and hiring people others overlooked
• Socially—by building relationships and serving as connective tissue between neighbors
• Culturally—by preserving identity and reflecting the community back to itself.
They saw their work as giving back—and they did it with a deep understanding of community needs and aspirations that no outside institution could replicate.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has come to describe small businesses as an “untapped opportunity” in community health—almost entirely overlooked because health policy tends to focus only on large employers. But local businesses hire locally, which reduces unemployment and the chronic stress that comes with it. They generate tax revenue that funds public services. They serve as informal hubs for healthier community offerings. And they donate 350 percent more to local charities than national chains do.
Public health researchers are now explicitly calling for health initiatives to partner with pro-social small businesses that are genuinely embedded in the communities they serve. The reasoning is straightforward: if you want to improve community health, you need to work with the institutions people already trust and already gather around.
The health of your neighbors and the health of your business are more connected than most policy conversations ever acknowledge.
See you next week for the fourth article in this series about local businesses and why they’re important.
