“As soon as I opened Dandelion I said, ‘This is awesome, but there’s something missing,’” says Dandelion Communitea Café owner Julie Norris. “It’s that much larger piece of having a business community. It’s about having cooperation versus competition.”
About a year ago, Norris and Emily Rankin, executive director for the local nonprofit Progressive Local Alliance for Community Enrichment, set about creating a concept to fuel their vision. They called it Ourlando, and they launched it online (www.ourlando.com) at the beginning of 2008. Then, during his January State of the City speech, Mayor Buddy Dyer introduced his own initiative: Buy Local Orlando (www.buylocalorlando.net).
On the surface the two programs encourage the same thing, a sort of new isolationist economics to help the business community weather the recession. But the city had craftily co-opted the “local” rubric used by successful programs in other cities while selectively forgetting that their program doesn’t require businesses to be local or independent, per se, but merely to have a tax ID within city limits. The city was using the term “local” – a term that has gained meaning nationally in the trend toward supporting independent business – loosely.
As it turns out, the two programs couldn’t be more different.
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