Invest tithes and offerings into black-owned businesses
According to the National Black Church Initiative website, the main problems confronting small minority businesses has always been lack of capital and qualified manpower, and the inability to sustain cash flow and market share. The NBCI has developed a program to help small businesses overcome these problem areas through seminars that introduce new techniques and strategies.
But the NBCI initiative doesn’t go far enough. The black church manages financial resources primarily taken from black families and which must be returned to our communities through direct investments in small to medium-sized black-owned businesses.
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This election season, the stakes are higher than usual — and so is the pressure on newsrooms to soften their coverage, stay quiet, or just disappear. Independent reporting, the kind that answers to readers instead of advertisers or political pressure, matters more in a moment like this, not less.
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Newspaper ad revenue has fallen more than 80% since 2005, and local newsrooms are closing at a rate of roughly two a week nationwide. When outlets go under in a moment like this, it's rarely the independent, reader-funded ones that get to stick around.
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