Essential businesses recognised

A sticker initiative, to say ‘Thank you’ and support local retailers’ doing it tough is adorning Mullum shops, owing in part to efforts by resident Angela Bambach.

She told The Echo, ‘I have always had a real appreciation of the unique combination of creativity, commitment and resilience required to be the owner of a small business’.

‘People who answer the call to open a business are a special type of courageous in my mind, and even more so these last 12 months.

‘A few months ago, a few friends and I posed the question, “What can we do as a community to celebrate and support our local businesses after such a tough 12 months?”.’

‘And… the Essential Business Sticker idea was born’.

She says an informal group have been visiting local businesses, and saying, ‘Thanks for being the human beings in the heart of our town, who keep your doors open and the wheels of our community and our social networking alive’.

‘It all happens around our thriving town centre and our brilliant and unique mix of businesses, the vast majority of which are independent stores springing from an individual’s creative concepts and dreams’.

Angela says, ‘We see each business as an integral part of the fabric of our community and we wanted to acknowledge that publicly.

‘They’re essential to us, we’re essential to them, like we’re in a symbiotic relationship with these people, and we want to let them know that it’s the community that shows up for each other in these times… bringing it back to shopping local and bringing it back to the awareness that we need to constantly show up for our community.

‘You know the statistics… 80 per cent of small businesses fail in the first 12 months… our local business owners are heroes to us!

‘They say it takes a village to raise a child – small businesses – and the people that run them, are at the centre of communities’.

A short video of the project is at https://youtu.be/RjNzYoLFbPg. To get involved, email [email protected].