The shops, salons, and studios on our streets are what make this place feel like home. When one of them grows, we all feel it — more jobs, more life, more reasons to stay local. When one quietly closes, we feel that too.

Right now there's a salon owner in our community doing everything right — great at her craft, loved by her clients — who's never had access to the kind of branding, marketing, and operations help that would actually let her grow. Not because she didn't earn it. Because that help is priced for companies ten times her size. It stays out of reach, so it doesn't happen, and good local businesses stay stuck.

The Lift Up Local Fund exists to change that.

We take a local business, put it through a Growth Sprint — real branding and marketing work — and support its early months of operations. Then we do it again for the next one. The more people back the fund, the more businesses we can lift at once. We don't wait for one to "make it" before we help the next.

You choose who we lift next.

This isn't our list — it's the community's. We picked the first businesses to prove the model works. After that, you decide:

Nominate a local business you believe in — your own counts. Just drop the business name and city in the comments on this page.

Back and vote — every backer gets a vote on who's lifted next.

We lift the ones who rise — votes don't decide it alone. Each nominee also gets a growth diagnostic, and we weigh your votes against that score, so the business that needs it most rises — not just the one with the biggest network.

You'll see exactly where this goes.

Every month — a public tally of every dollar raised, allocated, and available.

Every round — we announce who the community lifted, and how votes and the diagnostic chose them.

Every business — a published before-and-after, once real results are in. Not before.

How to help:

Give once, right here — every contribution launches another business's shot at growing.

Nominate a business you believe in — drop the business name and city in the comments below. The bigger the pool, the more we reach.

Share this — reach is what turns one push into a permanent engine for our local economy.

The Lift Up Local Fund is run through Zipline Creative — a local brand-and-marketing business, a neighbor, a community supporter. Every dollar is independently reconciled by a fractional CFO. Contributions are business revenue, not charitable donations, so they're not tax-deductible. And because we're just starting, there are no headline success numbers yet. Back the fund now, and you're part of that story from the start.