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"BUY LOCAL FIRST!" refers to a commitment to the community. Rather than simply promoting "buying local," the campaign suggests our larger role as stewards. By thinking local first, we can make choices that have dramatic impact on our community, our economy, and our environment. While it will rarely be possible to buy everything we need or use from local independent businesses, we are advocating for people to first think local in order to maximize the impact of daily actions and purchasing decisions.

Compared to national competitors, local independent businesses return more money to the local economy and give greater support to local non-profit organizations. They are better positioned to respond to the special needs of the community and more invested in its future.

Local, independently owned businesses are the backbone of an economy, the lifeblood of a community. By increasing the number of independent, local-to-local economic transactions, we can:

• Support local entrepreneurs

• Sustain family businesses

• Create local jobs that stay in our community

• Have greater control over environmental impacts

• Increase sales and tax receipts to hopefully finance schools, hospitals, police, arts, transportation, and open spaces

• Maintain a unique sense of place, directly contributing to what will keep our home place alive and special in the long-run

• Maximize the economic multiplier (that means every expenditure of a rand generates more than a rand's worth of activity and cascades into a larger number of transactions that enrich the community). Choosing local over non-local has 2-3 times more financial impact in our community, promotes more reinvestment locally, creates quality jobs, and encourages more donations to local charities and causes.
   

The Envirochild Hout Bay Transition Initiative asks the community to be supportive of local, independently owned businesses. This will help enhance the local community, the stability and diversity of the local economy, and support the retention and expansion of independent, locally owned businesses through increasing awareness about the personal, community, and economic benefits of choosing local first.

Why Buying Local Food Is Important

Buying local food strengthens the regional economy and fosters community growth

• Purchasing food that was grown and harvested locally keeps money circulating within the community, keeping wealth in the region

• Buying local food supports organic growers in the community

• Buying organic hugely impacts on your health -  organic produce has on average 70% more nutrition than commercially farmed produce, that travels for miles to get to our supermarkets, long after it was harvested.

• A strong local economy insulates the region from national and global recessions

• Buying local food helps to reduce dependence on foreign oil needed to ship food thousands of miles, thus cutting back on unnecessary expense and pollution.