‘Steubenville Stimulus’ website encourages shopping local

STEUBENVILLE -- Back when he was an undergrad, Tom Valentine said it was easy to lose sight of the fact that there were locally owned and operated businesses in town that could have benefited from his patronage.

"Steubenville is not a traditional college town," said Valentine, a 2017 graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville. "In a lot of places it's hard to tell where the town stops and school starts, but Franciscan is off on a hill of its own, so it's hard for students to know what businesses are around."

To fix that, he started a directory, a listing of community mom-and-pops, that he posted online under the aegis of one of the campus groups he was involved in, the Young Americans for Freedom Club.

The idea, he said, was to encourage his fellow students to "shop, eat and buy at the locally owned small businesses in the area."

"I don't want to malign chains, a lot of them are owned by franchisees and contribute to the local economy," he said. "But chains have the backing of a national parent company ... Places like Malta's Pizza downtown, they don't have that sort of budget to reach everybody. That's not to say chains are evil or bad, but there are small businesses here that deserve our support. When we spend money in them, more of that money tends to stay here rather than going to corporate (offices)."

Valentine said supporting small business has never been more important than it is today, after a month in economic shutdown: To combat the novel coronavirus most of the nation's governors, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and West Virginia's Gov. Jim Justice, ordered all non-essential businesses to close, drying up their cash flow and putting countless workers on the unemployment line. Even those that are still open have had to adapt -- restaurants, for instance, were ordered to close their dining rooms, so for the past month they've only be filling carryout and delivery orders.

"I'd kept it at franciscanyaf.com (Franciscan's Young Americans for Freedom Club website), but when the coronavirus hit I decided to relaunch it to hit everyone in the area," Valentine said. He renamed it "The Steubenville Stimulus Project," and moved the directory to a new host, steubenvillestimulus.org.

"We launched it March 20, and within the first 24 hours we had 2,000 visits to the website and some businesses that weren't listed asked me to put them on the website," he said.

"These are unprecedented times and a lot of the businesses we rely on are in trouble. Some are booming, but a lot have had to adapt or lay off staff and people are seeing how important it is to help them get through this. We have to help them get through this valley so they'll still be there when we eventually come out of this."

Valentine, a history major, grew up in northern Fairfax County, Virginia, a suburban area not far from Washington, D.C. He said life in Steubenville wasn't like anything he'd ever experienced, which is precisely why he's so passionate about preserving the way of life here.

"People here know their neighbors and the town has a real identity," said Valentine, married now but still living in Steubenville. "It's a small town, a town where people can live and work in an area where their parents and grandparents have been for generations, where everybody knows everybody and there's never more than one or two degrees of separation from neighbors. People are more invested in their neighbors here than in D.C. Here, there's a mayor you can meet and talk to. There's a culture and identity here and it's surrounded by other towns with their own culture and identity. It's foreign to me, but I fell in love with it."

Here, he said small, locally owned businesses are a big part of what's helped make Steubenville so unique.

"When you spend your money in a local business, that money stays in Steubenville," he said. "If they expand, they're going to expand here, rather than in a new location somewhere else in the country. Local business is more likely to sponsor a Little League team or Big Red or make a donation to a project like First Fridays on Fourth. Local businesses are part of the fabric of a community in a way that chains by their very nature can't be.

Valentine said he's hoping the governor relaxes his stay-at-home order soon and the economy begins its recovery, "but once this all blows over and we're back to normal, I still want to keep the website running just to encourage people to support local small businesses in general."