Make your own to support local this holiday season
By: Brandi Haskins and Madison Draper
Local business shape and reflect the unique character of a place, create resilient community, and support that community. Online shopping may be bigger and faster than ever, but it not only distances us from the shop owners where we live, it distances us from the very places and communities we live in.
That’s why we created a store locator map of Black-owned businesses around the Bay Area to support our local community this holiday season.
We specifically chose to showcase Black-owned businesses because, with their with long history of discrimination, redlining, gentrification, and predatory loan targeting, Black business owners have a systematically more difficult time starting and retaining a business.
We used data from local sources, such as the Bay Area Organization of Black Owned Businesses, Oakland Grown, and our co-workers and friends to create a list of Black and People of Color owned businesses to support this holiday season (and year around). This is not a complete list, and we encourage you to seek out local businesses in your area. We used the Geocoding API to generate a list of mappable coordinates, and created GeoJSON features which were plotted on a map using Mapbox GL JS. We added custom markers and pop-ups, then built the sidebar with HTML and JavaScript from the store locator tutorial.
Find the interactive store locator here.
You can build your own local business store locator for your area. To get started, check out our Store Locator tutorial for web, iOS and Android. There are a few Black-owned business databases you can pull from here:
Tweet us what you build with #BuiltWithMapbox!
Store locator for Bay Area Black-owned businesses was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.