The rainfall was rolling slowly down the windows, looking like teardrops on her face - crying for her. Conrad Hall framing IN COLD BLOOD couldn’t have done it better.
What had Jen Villa misting up? Was it the cancelled weekend’s Love Local Fest that had her upset? Or did talking about Love Live Local’s early days bring it out of her? Reminiscing about her baby’s first steps & words … Had she been digging too deep and inadvertently plucked a heartstring at the bottom of one of those crates?
Jokes - Jen beams a mouthful of white teeth and spits her business origin story like a 1994 model Marshall 313, marketing in soundbites. We’d never met her before, but she gives off the impression of someone constantly flexing her chiclets.
Love Live Local’s co-founder & its originating force, she’s consistently, unconsciously?, belting out their mission but manages to never repeat herself; you’re reminded of that Hagar story about Bob Weir’s knack for playing endless inversions of an E chord.
This conversation happened a couple of days after her 47th Love Local Fest had to be postponed a week due to an alleged September Nor’Easter. On the bright side, pushing the event really just involved sending a couple of emails between naps, right?
“Moving the entire Fest back a week was a big undertaking, but our vendors, musicians, sponsors and volunteers rallied to make it happen. And the community showed up! Seeing people come out to shop, enjoy the music and support our local businesses after all that uncertainty was very rewarding.
For us, this 47th Love Local Fest (!) was a reminder of what these events are all about: bringing people together and turning that love for Cape Cod into support for the small businesses that make it special.”
And I’d say that short-sells how much of an undertaking it was to move the mountain with approximately 1,387 moving parts down the road a week - but again, as always, Jen’s comms muscle is in 5th, holding steady at 4500 rippems. In addition to heading up the org side of Love Live Local, she & her Ops Director, Tiffany Maxey, run the retail shop in the office AND She’s also owned & operated The West End restaurant with her husband, Blane, since 2017. It’s the quaint 230+ seat restaurant in the 100 year old building on the rotary next door to Melody Tent. Between naps, right?
Craigville General Lore
A Mass native, Jen grew up spending summers on the Cape by Craigville Beach with her grandparents, who were living there year round. After college in Connecticut (photography & theater), she took a 7+ year trip out west and spent time on the southern coast before deciding to put down roots and make a more permanent life for herself. That’s when she decided to move back East and chose Cape Cod; she, like all of the sane among us, has that magnet in her marrow making this lovely peninsula our own Hotel California.
On the timeline, we’re in 2009 and Jen is both cutting the ribbon on her own Little Beach Gallery and also starting a Hyannis residency at 539 South Street that is still running the meter at 18 years and 3+ businesses under the same roof. The Little Beach Gallery, featuring local artists & jewelers & clothing designers etc, ran for 8 years. While she got to know the makers and the customers, the real value - and the connection - available to us all when we buy our essentials from our own locals revealed itself to her like a vision at Lourdes.
“I realized the power and the impact of connecting with your local artists, makers, community members, and how enriched your life can be when you know the people that are making your jewelry, for example. It’s just more fulfilling. When I had the art gallery, I would say, now you have something hanging on your wall that has meaning to it, and you have a story behind it. It just is that much more special, it’s a deeper connection to your community and a fulfilling life. I found an exponentially richer life when I started really tapping into that. And Love Live Local's really born out of that concept.”
Taking a step back, our own HyperLocal Cape Cod was born from many of these same instincts: we were on the hunt for the best foie gras or spicy calamari, good musicians and the top live-music venues, dope Mid-Century Modern homes we could see from a kayak, and burgers & pizza - and the people who power it all. We felt & feel strongly about Local, but we didn’t run reports and pull numbers. Thankfully, Jen did.
She found out that if people would redirect 10% of their normal spending (ie. that money’s going out the door anyway) to buying local goods or services, it’d generate more than $110 million dollars annually for the Cape’s economy.
“It's incredibly powerful when you think, ‘Oh, is this something I can just shift? Can I go to Snowy Owl instead of Starbucks?’ How many examples there are just like that. ‘Can I change that behavior?’ And, you know, the impact is really powerful.”
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But we’re jumping ahead - Love Live Local didn’t drop the gate and storm the beaches waving a 501c3 flag. In response to the 2013 narrative that there wasn’t much happening on Cape Cod, Jen and her co-founders, Kate Sheehan & Amanda Converse, launched the business with a monthly email. They covered events that excited them and profiled locals, telling the fascinating & singular-to-the-soil stories they stumbled across. Even now, almost 7 years after the pivot from local lifestyle guide to Non-Profit Mission, there are still shades of the personal in their guides and motives.
It was also in 2013 that the first Love Local Fest took place - 13 years & 47 festivals back. Jen doesn’t say it explicitly but any tea leaf reader worth their weight can see that their instinct in organizing a festival to feature the community at the center the shindig itself was on its way to something higher minded. It took a few years (and for Jen another business or three), but the three-time a year festivals, print guides, and economic reports led them to pursuing Non-Profit status - which hit at the top of 2020, just in time for a global power down.
When Life Gives You A New Business, Make New Business-Aide
When Love Live Local turned the corner into the top of 2020, Amanda & Jen were running the shop together as Executive Director & Marketing Director respectively. Their 501c3 clears the books with four months to spare before Black Friday, March 13th 2020, hits.
“A little less deep storytelling. We were still talking about the importance of shopping local and highlighting small businesses, but a little bit less like, ‘We're your guide to Cape Cod,’ and more like, ‘We're small business champions.’
“It was terrifying for all of us but what was exciting is we immediately went into action and we had a platform to raise awareness and fundraise, and we launched the Cape Cod Resilience Fund. We gave out tens of thousands of dollars of grants to small businesses in need during the pandemic. So that instantly put us to use, able to do good with being a non-profit.”
By design, they already had a homey HQ on South Street, ready to serve as a resource hub for Cape Cod Covid. They published “What’s Open on Cape Cod” on their site and focused on being a reliable source of information at a time when people felt helpless. They stepped up as a conduit, keeping the community connected with updates on what was going on, who was open, and when.
As an organization that now represents 8,000+ businesses and is connected to many more, Love Live Local really assumed their throne at this moment. They could have crumbled, packed it in, or plead for relief out of Non-Profit status, they ran into the storm, putting their platform to work and launched the Fund to get grants to small businesses in need.
“That's kind of been our role: this big, overarching connection. And we are not membership-based, so we represent all small businesses.”
Now we’re tickled by another feather in their cap: Love Live Local does NOT work on a membership basis, they simply represent all local businesses down here doing work on the floor. The key word, and binary caveat, here is local owned: finna sell yer mom & pop to some out of town sugar daddy org? Good luck to you both but don’t let the door knob hitcha where the good Lord splitcha - “they no longer serve our work.”
And doesn’t that just warm you from the inside out? Obviously it stands to reason that a larger parent organization with bigger bills, and likely more of them, could find its way to Love Live Locals coffers in exchange for preferential promotion. But Jen & Co’s heels (or power pumps or maybe vans) are dug firmly into the sand. So in exchange for holding that hard line, they need to give a little back. And I spy it to be that Love Local Card - something that made HyperLocal’s founder curse his doorman (in the most elegant French, bien sûr) for falling asleep on duty for letting Jen read his diary.
The Love Local Card is the Shop Local badge and jump off point for realizing one of Jen’s mountain movers: the Shift Local Pledge. In an effort to get local folks to move that beloved magic number (10% of their spending) over to local shops, she’s compounded the incentive by enlisting businesses. They discount their prices by a percentage they determine in order to keep that money in the community’s ecosystem. The card runs $30 a year and she’s got about 150 businesses involved.
“it's not just about brick-and-mortars and products, it's about your service providers. Choosing a local service provider or a local fitness center over an online or a corporate version is just as powerful as shopping local and buying a shirt at a local store. It's your lifestyle choices: how can you shift your spending to local in a way you aren't even thinking about. TurboTax versus a local accountant? Your insurance agent: is there a local agent you can be investing your hard-earned dollars into as opposed to someone online where the money goes completely over the bridge?”
Uht ohh, do you hear that? That deja-vu thumping on the drums. That’s a Brad Conant call back & intro into live music x Love Local Fest.
FADE TO BLACK
LIGHTS UP, CLOSED CURTAIN
TITLE CARD ON AN EASEL:
Not Just Surviving, Thriving
The last we saw one of our brand favorites, Brad Conant was just launching his event dance band, The Cape Connection, an assembly of top shelf musicians hellbent on keeping wedding or shower or bar mitzvah band money on Cape and not shipped over the bridge to Boston or, worse!, New York. The Cape Connection has been killing since they formed but, before even that, Brad had been working with Jen to lead the live music end of the Love Local Fest, booking bands and playing himself. It only makes sense that the Keep It On This Side of the Bridge Crew would fall in together.
And generally that’s how it seems to work: this peninsula is a small collection of less than 15 towns and, let’s be honest, living out here isn’t always so easy. Jobs are finite, housing is finite, and the money circulating through the ecosystem is finite. It’s a rough realization that it may be a zero sum game but … it may just be a zero sum game. With that in mind, if we’ve only got so much water to fill the pool, we should stop trying to soak the folks on the outside and keep the good swimming for those of us already in it.
So if you want to spend your time out here and be a thread in the fabric, (for the most part) it takes a determination and love that will test your dedication and devotion in very real ways, and likely often. The effort Love Live Local puts into their goals can allow those tests to be graded on a curve. If played properly, their enterprise can truly impact the value of the Cape Cod dollar.
Sit down in a quiet room and consider that for a few minutes. Behind all of the pearly whites, the branded t-shirts, and the easy spoken slogan-esque quips, what you’re actually dealing with, when it comes to Love Live Local’s mission and their ultimate ambition, is the ability to impact the local economy and culture in a way that will matter more and more the higher the prices of gas or eggs or booze may go. There’s an actual path to the land where two plus two can equal five in local tender. Show me the way home!
•••••
These dozens of Saturdays in the park always had the grumblings of groundswell. When the clock strikes 2027, Jen is excited to bring back a grant program to give direct funds to small businesses, appropriately called the Cape Cod Small Business Support Fund. They’ve been fundraising all year for it and they’ll start awarding & allocating next year. “It’s businesses in times of need but mostly times of growth, helping them go to the next level to help them be more sustainable, not just surviving, but thriving.”
This comes across like the real motivator for Jen, the Nth time business owner who knows what a little push and self-made luck can do for an entrepreneur.
“What can we help with? Whether it’s a new website, an upgrade to their POS, or a physical facade, we provide technical assistance and direct support in addition to funding. We walk business owners through their projects, connect them with local experts like web designers and graphic designers, and help monitor progress. We’re not just handing them a check; we’re providing guidance, too, to help make the project as effective as possible. We’re here to help make sure it’s successful.
“It’s something we’re really proud of bringing back. We just have to continue fundraising and make sure we have a great pool to pull from every year. We haven’t determined the grant sizes yet. We want them to be substantial, but we also understand that sometimes a micro-loan or micro-grant can make a real difference for somebody.”
Before she wraps up, Jen proceeds to rattle off a litany of sponsors and partners that have stepped in to help & work with Love Live Local over the years: Cape Cod 5, Cape & Coast (Bank), Cape Cod Chamber, Hyannis’ Main Street BID, CapeTide, CCYP, Amplify POC and many more …. This drives home the circular logic & practice of LLL. They got help at every step along the way and now they’re doing everything they can to take their insider knowledge and experience and pass batons off in every direction to push ambitious & driven business owners further on up the road.
And while she’s doing that, she’s also working on an introduction to another prime suspect for her cause, Pizza Spinello in Wellfleet - something our own finest facilitators are happy to help with.
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To learn more about Love Live Local check out their site and follow them on Facebook & Instagram.
To find out if they can help your small business - dig into their Resource pages.
