As with the other pillars of recovery, economic supports for small business are slowly appearing, beyond what has been offered by the Federal government.

Groups are appearing online, such as Help Small Business on Facebook, which was created on March 19th and is just gearing up. There are others as well, and more coming on line regularly for Canada and elsewhere.

Facebook itself has said it will help also: Help for businesses, from Facebook

Local small businesses need all the dedicated, loyal, supportive customers that can manage to buy locally, to do so. In good times (i.e., with no world wide pandemics, for instance) local businesses are continually asked for support via product or funds for community fundraising as well as other events. Inevitabley if they can do it, they always will. Now it’s our turn to give back and shop locally as much as we can.

One category of small business that is key to helping support the ongoing nature and identity of a small town and/or rural areas, is a community newspaper. Nowadays there are still a few that are independantly owned and operated.

The Valley Voice, operating in the West Kootenay, is one of these. It has a distribution normally of 7600, has won (well deserved) awards, and runs on a shoe string.

It is continuing to publish and help keep that web going of sharing information relevant to the local area. Very recently they have been reminding people the paper can be read online, which is great.

But having that hard copy to open and read, then read again, whilst pondering the ” Voices from the Valleys” (aka Letters to the Editor) and how you might respond in kind is a good thing. We are lucky to live in a country where everyone can have their own opinion and have it be heard (or seen) and that is not something to be taken for granted.

When you do the math it sometimes seems physically impossible for those few people who work for the paper to have reported on so many meetings that they have managed to attend over a large geographic area in short time spans – but it has been happening for a long while and we are the beneficiries of all that travel and hard work.

However, with few businesses operating at the moment, the source of most newspaper revenues has dried up . A small town newspaper is a valuable type of business to help keep running for the sake of community – whether it be this newspaper here or another, elsewhere – to help in keeping up with our world and how it continues to go round. If you can make a donation, even a small one, it will go a long way to keeping that “voice” going, and will help too in maintaining some continuity throughout this pandemic.