Think Imaginatively About Local Entrepreneurship

I appreciated Maryann Feldman and Alaina Kayaani-George’s “Cultivating Mastery in Place” (Issues, Summer 2025). I spent a summer in a small town in Oklahoma during my undergraduate research program in plant breeding. Locals showed me the movie theater that had burned down, leaving people who wanted to see a movie having to drive to a different town an hour away. I wondered about the impacts if the town’s single coffee shop were to close.

Like rural communities, small ethnic communities rely heavily on local enterprises that provide cultural foods, clothing, and places where people speak your language. In Rochester, New York, where I live, a Caribbean grocery store and a barbershop served local clientele for decades, before being forced out of business by a road renovation project that made access difficult. Because we keep kosher, my family felt the impact when the city’s only kosher restaurant permanently closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Feldman and Kayaani-George discuss “failures of imagination” around such locally rooted enterprises. Indeed, many policymakers seem to operate under an assumption that small businesses outside the tech start-up world are interchangeable. In the places these leaders mostly know, if your favorite coffee shop closes, you go to one up the street. But that’s not true in a small community or rural area, where job losses can create an echo effect. If the movie theater closes, then the bank, then the grocery store, it gets harder and harder to stay in place.

Failures of imagination can operate in efforts to aid business development and in efforts to restrict potentially harmful practices. As an example of the former, an entrepreneur friend in an underserved area applied for 2020 Paycheck Protection Program funds intended for small businesses, but had difficulty navigating the complex paperwork requirements. The funds were gone in 13 days—too quickly for my friend and many other small businesses that lacked existing relationships with banks and administrative staff at the ready.

As an example of the latter, lawmakers missed the unintended consequences that California’s “gig worker” bill AB5, viewed as targeting companies like Uber, had on small businesses and the communities they serve. Among its mandates, the law greatly narrowed the circumstances under which translators and interpreters could work as independent contractors rather than as employees. Even as this hit translators of common languages such as Spanish, few employers could justify hiring a specialist in a language like Persian, Tagalog, or ASL to meet occasional needs, and many independent translators and interpreters lost their incomes. In response to months of activism, the state eventually changed the law to exempt language specialists.

These missteps seem to stem from viewing small and locally rooted businesses with assumptions taken from larger businesses. In the case of AB5, regulators may have also been operating from a paradigm in which independent contractors are interchangeable workers, similar to how a company like Uber sees them, rather than seeing their potential as entrepreneurs offering unique skill sets. As the authors suggest, part of the solution here will be to recognize and support “broader, more inclusive frameworks” for what entrepreneurship looks like.

Ilana Goldowitz