Willmar’s New ‘Buy Local’ Strategy

By Lee Egerstrom, Economic Development Fellow, December 13, 2011 at 2:30 pm

Since our founding, Minnesota 2020 has encouraging holiday shoppers to buy local, both to help small businesses and boost local economies.

Taking a different approach this year, our annual Made in Minnesota report highlighted immigrant and minority entrepreneurs. In some communities and neighborhoods, these business owners are reviving economic development, centering themselves in the buy local movement.

No group makes this point more obvious than the Willmar Area Multicultural Market (WAMM), founded in 2003 by the area's minority business owners. It currently offers west-central Minnesotans a convenient directory of about 50 ethnic-owned businesses and services in Willmar, Spicer, Kandiyohi and areas in between.

In my youth, Willmar was the big city in west-central Minnesota with about 10,000 residents, a large percentage of whom were second and third generation children of Swedish and other Scandinavian immigrants. Willmar now has a population of almost 20,000 and WAMM notes the new businesses and their owners reflect Persian, Somali, Latino “and even Celtic” origins.

As was the case three generations ago, new Minnesotans are building and rebuilding neighborhoods and communities. This is worth remembering for our shared economies when we dedicate some of our holiday season shopping to a buy local strategy.

Posted in Economic Development | Related Topics: Minnesota Cities  Buy Local  Small Business