Your letters and commitment are helping- thank you. Asheville Grown in partnership with UnChain AVL and the Asheville Music Hall are planning a rally in support of locally owned businesses and the unique culture of our downtown. Feel free to spread the word. November 21, 2015 UnChain AVL Rally Meet Up 10AM Funereal Procession 3PM Asheville Music Hall 31 Patton Ave. Anthropologie is planning to open the weekend of November 21. This is the same date of the holiday parade and Asheville Music Hall has generously offered their space (on the parade route). We will be gathering for a localist celebration with live music by Lenny Pettenelli & Friends, light brunch with a Bloody Mary bar at the Asheville Music Hall at 10:00 am on November 21. We will have a presence at Asheville Music Hall as well as the Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie throughout the day. Volunteers will be sent out from there 4 people at a time as they check in for shifts. After the holiday parade ends, we will have a jazz funeral procession march with members of Empire Strikes Brass and other local musicians around the block, passing by the chain locations. Our goal is to be good ambassadors of Asheville and small business. We want to keep our message clear, concise and friendly when we are addressing the public. We will keep all of our marching on the sidewalks to keep this a free-speech event, eliminating the need to make this a permitted event. We are seeking volunteers to stand in solidarity at the Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie locations downtown and engage the public. If you're interested in signing up for a shift please fill out this form: http://ashevillegrown.com/unchain-avl/ We are organizing this event to raise awareness surrounding the issues and threats small, local, independent businesses in Asheville are currently facing. Our goal is to inform the public and decision makers about the value a thriving local businesses culture brings to a local economy. This is a festive, creative celebration of our community and the downtown we love. If you haven't signed the petition please do so here: https://www.change.org/p/un-chain-avl-save-downtown-asheville We've almost reached 5,000 signatures! Please share the link with friends. Feel free to email me here or Rebecca Hecht at unchainavl@gmail.com with any questions. If you have the ability to lend a hand in any way, let us know. I am attaching an information flyer we will be handing out - feel free to print extras - we need more. Here are some helpful thoughts on the chaining of downtown Asheville: As a community we must ask ourselves how do we design a downtown that works for us? Design solves problems. How does a sense of place relate to the community as a whole? How does place enhance our culture and our livability? There are so many competing points of view. These are some of the problems we are trying to address by standing up in support of a diverse local economy in our downtown. Out of the1,448 businesses in the 28801 zip code 88% have less than 20 employees and 55% have 1-4 employees. The vast majority of these businesses are independent and locally owned. They are also interdependent on each other and the community they live in. They are responsible for secondary businesses like graphic designers, bookkeepers, accountants and printers. Every dollar that is spent in a local business travels 3x further in our community than one spent at a chain. Many of the tourists come here not to go to the mall but to experience something unique, something they cannot get in their town. But more importantly, locally owned businesses create more managerial positions and are more likely to have shared ownership. For every $10 million in sales Amazon creates 14 jobs, a large retail chain 50 and independent record shops creates 110. In turn local record shops will create the space for local artists to thrive and send business to local recording studios. It is not a large corporation’s responsibility to create community, it is their responsibility to turn a profit for their Wall Street investors. These corporations are based on an extractive economy, extracting resources from our community. Because of their size they are able to drive rents up and buy out leases. By having a presence in a popular city they are often able to operate that location at a loss and use it for marketing purposes. They make it much harder for locally owned businesses to compete. They also create a more homogenous downtown and procure much less locally as everything is centralized at headquarters. How do we best serve the various interest and benefit downtown Asheville for years to come? How do we diversify and grow opportunities for our entrepreneurs, worker/owners and employees? How do we build better businesses designed to serve our communities, not Wall St.? These are the questions we wish to raise and ask for the community's help in finding answers to. More here: http://ashevillegrown.com/a-downtown-worth-fighting-for Your devoted localists