Movement Mistakes & Lessons Learned: Organizing Small Businesses
In today’s political climate, right-wing strategists have exploited public safety concerns, economic instability, and the pandemic to recruit small business owners into an increasingly conservative agenda. But small businesses are vital hubs in our communities where people work, shop, play, and live. Earlier this month, GAR invited our member organizations to grapple with a critical question: How can we organize small business owners to align their interests with our working-class communities?
Two of GAR’s organizations are leading this work: the Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED) and the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative (The Collab). Both CCED and the Collab have navigated many challenges in small business organizing and emerged with key insights on building power collectively.
CCED: Building Small Business Power Against Tenant Displacement
CCED organizers Casey and Patty shared lessons learned from small business organizing against gentrification and displacement in LA Chinatown.
CCED is an all volunteer, multi-ethnic, intergenerational organization based in LA Chinatown. Initially focused on residential tenant organizing, their organizing base includes residential tenants, small businesses, and unhoused community members fighting to keep calling Chinatown home. But when predatory developers like Redcar Properties displaced small businesses and relocated shops to Dynasty Center, they stepped in. CCED made a concerted effort to organize Dynasty Center vendors by talking to them about their issues and trying to bring them together to collectively fight against their new landlord.
MOVEMENT MISTAKE
Shifting from organizing residential tenants to include commercial tenants was hard! As the fight against eviction dragged on, CCED organizers found themselves deferring power to institutions like politicians, legal processes, and bureaucracies, instead of cultivating deep relationships with business owners that would build their own sense of power. “We were ceding control to bureaucracies,” CCED Organizer Patty reflects. Waiting for city officials meant playing by rules designed to maintain the status quo. The more they deferred to these systems, the more their collective power fragmented.
Casey of CCED's Small Business Committee saw how this manifested. "Filing complaints individually divided us. The landlord could just fix one tenant's issue while ignoring the rest." What began as a united front risked becoming isolated grievances, which is exactly how predatory developers prefer to operate.
LESSONS LEARNED
To remedy this, CCED shifted their approach. “We needed to slow down and reassess,” Patty says. Making space for reflection allowed organizers to confront hard truths about capacity and realign their approach.
Organizers learned to conduct deeper power analyses to navigate city officials, government agencies, and tenant protection laws. This helped them recognize the limitations of these agencies and that their community demands did not have to be stunted by elected officials’ lack of vision and courage.
Organizers decided to prioritize relationship building in their organizing to ensure that multiple organizers engaged with vendors. CCED trained more volunteers to maintain consistent contact with vendors, ensuring no single organizer became the sole keeper of a relationship. CCED also did work to understand the relationships between vendors themselves and with the broader community. This helped them anticipate challenges and inoculate against division.
As they were building relationships, organizers also learned to create political education that is grounded in helping businesses understand how systemic issues—like city budgets cuts, ICE raids, and corporate greed—intertwine to threaten their community. Small business owners would walk away understanding that what hurts Chinatown hurts them. This dedication and rigor in political education has allowed CCED to move their organized base more nimbly as crisis after crisis has hit LA this year.
The Collab: Building Power in Nail Salons
The Collab’s NorCal and SoCal organizers Vy and Phuong shared lessons learned from organizing Vietnamese salon workers and owners to fight for health, safety, and justice.
The Collab is a statewide grassroots organization that addresses health, environmental justice, reproductive justice, and other social issues faced by its low-income, female, Vietnamese immigrant and refugee workforce. They primarily organize nail salon workers, mostly low-income Vietnamese immigrant women, because recruiting salon owners has always been difficult. Many nail salon owners are also Vietnamese women running single-store operations, often with family members as employees. Despite this shared background with workers, organizers initially struggled to build trust.
MOVEMENT MISTAKE
Early efforts often faltered when conversations turned to politics too quickly. “When we talk politics to owners first before building trust,” NorCal Outreach and Organizing Coordinator Vy shared, “they often don't come back or pick up the phone call.” Many Vietnamese American salon owners hold conservative views shaped by anti-communist narratives from their refugee experiences.
Organizers had not built the necessary trust or understanding with owners, leading to owners getting frustrated and distancing themselves from the Collab’s work. This would make the Collab further alienated from not only singular shops, but the Vietnamese community. This friction taught organizers a crucial lesson: politics cannot be the starting point.
LESSONS LEARNED
The Collab organizers’ shifted by listening. They discovered that owners were more receptive when approached as partners rather than political targets. The work became about building relationships that existed somewhere between friendship and organizing. These relationships would take years to develop but would ultimately create space for meaningful change.
SoCal organizer Phuong described how the Collab has built relationships with owners by meeting them where they are and understanding their material interests. Owners have different financial concerns than workers. When the Collab’s organizers advocated for nail salons to get air ventilators, owners would be on board but not if it came at the expense of their business. Knowing this, organizers helped salons secure county-funded air ventilators, a $20,000 value per business. These tangible wins built credibility that opened doors to tougher conversations about worker health and safety. Organizers have also learned to identify shared priorities where owner and worker interests aligned, like reducing exposure to toxic chemicals. They avoided pushing unrealistic demands that small family businesses couldn't meet, focusing instead on incremental improvements that benefited everyone.
Phuong and Vy also shared how organizers are committed to the slow work for changing owners’ hearts and minds. Political education happens gradually through personal storytelling. When owners criticized social services, organizers would gently remind them: “But didn't food stamps help your family when you first arrived?” These moments of reflection helped bridge ideological divides by connecting systemic issues to lived experience. Change often comes in small steps - an owner who initially resisted worker protections might later attend Know Your Rights trainings and hand out resources to protect their business and workers from ICE raids.
TURNING CRISIS INTO POWER
Small business owners are managing a myriad of crises, navigating natural disasters, ICE raids, and economic recession all at once. Small business owners and their workers are a critical—and often overlooked—group. They’re deeply rooted in our neighborhoods, face many economic struggles, and have the power to shape local change. Yet, while right-wing forces are actively mobilizing them, our movements are not organizing them for the long haul.
The organizing experiments done over years by CCED and the Collab show us that small business organizing isn’t about convincing owners to become activists; it’s about finding where their survival aligns with workers’ dignity. By building trust, offering real support, and focusing on material issues, we can build working-class power with small business owners.
