Local Economies

The League’s Local Economies initiative explores entrepreneurship and small business support systems in southeast Michigan with the goal of helping municipalities and their communities create more equitable small business ecosystems. In particular, this work focuses on the category of “microbusinesses,” those with no more than ten employees (and often none), which make up the majority of local economies.

In the League’s more than 15 years as a leader in placemaking work, we have seen that locally owned and unique small businesses are a critical part of community identity and participation, which themselves are a foundation of thriving, successful communities. This collaborative initiative aims to provide deeper support to these businesses and their surrounding communities.

By working alongside cross-sector community partners, small businesses, and micro businesses, we help municipalities consider gaps in space, capital, technical assistance, networks, and elsewhere that could be filled to produce more equitable local small business environments.

Much of our work on this initiative has been supported by the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, and so some work products have been focused on the 7-county southeast Michigan region; others are of general application across the state.

Research report: Place needs small business

Our 2022 report, Place needs small business—And small business needs help, identified the gaps between the regional, state, and federal supports available to entrepreneurs, and the on-the-ground experience especially in smaller communities, where those resources were often not visible or accessible. This report identifies the opportunities for municipal government to serve as a bridge to existing capital and technical assistance resources, as well as a critical partner for small business in local networking, placemaking, and access to space.

Best practices for supporting microbusiness

Local communities can support entrepreneurship and very small businesses both through their own policies and through coordination with partners. Our Microbusiness Essentials Guide includes some of the most important process, policy, and partnership steps that a community can take. The longer Comprehensive Playbook offers many additional ideas that communities can use to go beyond those core steps.

One of the greatest needs heard from entrepreneurs in our work is a clear roadmap of the steps to take and the appropriate contacts. As part of the first best practice, we have created a template “How to Open a Small Business” flyer that can be modified for local use as a quick reference for your community’s entrepreneurs.

Local opportunity reports

Over the course of 2022 to 2025, we have been holding intensive on-site conversations with local communities to understand their assets and their microbusiness communities’ needs. Each of these site visits has resulted in an opportunity report detailing our team’s recommendations for the community.

Microbusiness development data portal

Our partners at Data Driven Detroit have created a data portal containing various indicators we have found useful in our local conversations. These include measures of household economic wellbeing, access to childcare, local business mix, commute patterns, and leveraging of certain business financing programs. Depending on the availability of data, some of these measures are provided as the ZIP code level vs the municipal level, and business category data is limited to the southeast Michigan region. To view the portal, visit this link.