City Councilmember Robert Cornegy (D-Bedford-Stuyvesant, Northern Crown Heights) this weekend hosted the Sharing Economy Expo with a kick-off at Bed-Stuy’s Restoration Plaza.
The initiative derived from Cornegy’s experience in a fellowship with the Massachusetts Insititute of Technology (MIT) abroad in Mondrigan, Spain. While there, Cornegy noticed that Spain is unencumbered by labor laws like the ones that exist in the United States and that parts of the country were able to flourish business-wise by helping one another through successful work/life balance concepts.
He saw the success there and felt that the concept could be replicated here in New York; specifically in Brooklyn where businesses and the demographics are changing rapidly.
The initiative was developed solely through his office to incorporate a culture of economic democracy through partnerships among brick and mortar businesses that have long existed in the community and tech-based partners who benefit most from use of the changing demographics in the community.
Partnerships with participating platform-based businesses like Uber, Lyft, Citibike, Airbnb with businesses like Sincerely, Tommy, Bed-Vyne Cocktail and Cheri’s Bed-Stuy have allowed members from the community to receive discounts from the apps used that are redeemed at the businesses they visit when using said apps.
The council member admitted that while there is more of a trickle-up effect from the partnerships where most of the profit is funneled into corporations, he still feels that if viewed from a different perspective there are lucrative opportunities for business owners to increase visibility among community members, increase traffic, and even create jobs that help consumers to structure their lives better with supplemental income.
According to Maggie Anderson’s The Empowerment Experiment, the Asian dollar is circulated 28 days in the community, the Jewish dollar 19 days and the Black dollar, while valuing 1.2 trillion in buying power, only spends about 6 hours in the community.
Cornegy hopes that through his initiative the black dollar will circulate at least 7-8 times more before leaving the community as a start. In order to measure the success of this initiative, staff members will help substantiate the program by getting data from each of the companies by counting the amount of times codes were used and the number of rides that were made through the program.
With plans to repeat the model Cornegy hopes to target the next holiday season in order to capture the dollars that are usually spent at an exponentially higher rate.
