The City of Boston has just launched a new, $2.5 million campaign to promote local Latinx-, LGBTQ- and Black-owned businesses.
“All-Inclusive Boston” aims to do the double duty of helping to reinvigorate business as the city gradually emerges from the COVID pandemic and, as the Boston Globe put it, “dismantle a perception of the city as [solely] a haven for sports-loving, beer-drinking white bros, a notion that came up in the research to develop the campaign.”
“I think this is a powerful way to showcase all that is so amazing about our city. That is already here. That has been changing over time,” said Mayor Kim Janey. “And to see it in this campaign altogether I just think is incredible.”
As for its attention to the LGBTQ community, the campaign’s website says:
As the capital city of the first state in the U.S. to legalize same-sex marriage, Boston stands proud, accessible and welcoming.
The city boasts one of the largest LGBT populations on the East Coast with neighborhoods such as the South End and Jamaica Plain offering a good variety of neighborhood pubs, dance bars and inviting lounges drawing a mixed gay/straight crowd.
We’ve had tourists ask about walking the Yellow Brick Road — we’re sorry to disappoint them by pointing out that they may actually mean the Freedom Trail with its painted red brick line that connects the 16 main sites dealing with the history of Boston and the American Revolution. You may also want to walk the Equality Trail — a self-guided walking tour that follows the route of Boston’s first Gay Pride March in 1971 and offers information about issues and individuals related to this route.
A diverse mix of small businesses worked on this project, including a significant number of Minority Business Enterprises (MBEs), Women Business Enterprises (WBEs), and companies with LGBTQ+ ownership, along with community leaders, including Porsha Olayiwola, Boston’s openly LGBTQ 2019 Poet Laureate.
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