Every holiday season, one question: How do you keep Detroit's dollars in Detroit?

Shop Detroit is the branch's holiday campaign to keep community money in the community, and I have worked on it since 2021 and led it since 2023. I have never run it the same way twice. The question is always the same: how do you get a whole city to go out and spend with its own small businesses in the season everybody else is spending everywhere else.

The early years it stayed close to home. We set vendors in a tent outside the branch, poured hot chocolate, and drove traffic to the block. Then we brought it indoors and made it a real in-person experience.

In 2024 I took it to the street. We took over Livernois, the Avenue of Fashion, promoted the businesses up and down the corridor, and ran two shuttles on a set route so people could move shop to shop without losing their parking spot.

In 2025 I built the biggest version yet: a citywide push across all seven Council districts, in partnership with the City of Detroit Department of Neighborhoods and its business liaisons. Shop with a Detroit business any day that week, bring your receipt to our hub at Motor City Java House on December 6, and you were in the prize drawings. I designed the whole thing: the run of show, the prize structure, the budget, and a competition between the seven districts to see which one moved the most money, with an award for the winner at the December membership meeting. I wrote the talking points for our committee chair, brought Councilman Tate out to speak for his district, and lined up health and small-business resource partners so people left with more than a bag.

We did not hit every goal. We could not fully track which stores people shopped, so the citywide dollar total is next year's prize. The machine got built, the businesses got seen, and the model is mine to run again.