Black Lives Matter Started A Website To Help Support Black Businesses

The ladies behind Black Lives Matter are here to help out with your last-minute shopping frenzy. The organization recently launched a website to help find black-owned businesses in your neighborhood.

Announced on Instagram, Backing Black Business allows users to input their address, city, state, or zipcode, and a list of shops closest to you will appear. You can also filter by category, search for nonprofits, or even add a business to the map. Right now, the website only has about 300 businesses on the site while, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are around 2.6 million black-owned companies in the U.S. But, it’s a work in progress and this is just the beginning.

An Instagram post on the BLM account explains that the long-term intitative was established “to support the growth and performance of small Black businesses nationwide. In a time when the Black community is under attack, it is more important than ever to buy local and buy Black. Small businesses provide jobs and economic security.”

We already outlined ways to give back this season, and this is a smart way to keep that going. Just like Black Lives Matter, black businesses and black dollars do, too.