Pictured Above: Localtopia continued its eight-year run as an outdoor marketplace for local businesses on Saturday.
Annalise Anderson | The Crow’s Nest
By Kristen Boehm
The pandemic didn’t stop Localtopia, St. Petersburg’s annual local business festival, or its drive to become more inclusive.
The one-day outdoor marketplace returned to Williams Park for its eighth consecutive year on Feb. 20. It also brought back its diversity initiative for a second year, although Localtopia organizer Olga Bof had whole-city inclusion on her mind since early 2019.
“I had definitely already heard from some folks, ‘Is this event truly representative of our community?’ ” Bof said.“We’ve always had minority-owned businesses at Localtopia, but are we doing everything we can?”
Bof is the founder and executive director of Keep Saint Petersburg Local, the non-profit that created and runs Localtopia. With these questions in mind, she teamed up with the city’s urban affairs director, Nikki Gaskin-Capehart, other city officials and community organizations to include more south St. Petersburg representation and more BIPOC-owned businesses.
In early 2020, that meant working with a south St. Petersburg economic growth plan, One Community, to sponsor 10 black woman-owned businesses as vendors at Localtopia. These ladies, nicknamed The Collective, opened the door for future growth.
“Localtopia is important to the overall growth of the black business ecosystem in our city,” Gaskin-Capehart said. “Making sure that we are intentional about working with the black business community in St. Petersburg, and, of course, exposing them to opportunities that they might not have considered before.”
For small businesses like The Collective, Localtopia provides opportunities to experience high-volume crowds, a huge boom in sales and far-reaching exposure. Gaskin-Capehart said that these types of experiences could have transformative effects on not just individuals, but entire communities.
In 2020, Localtopia hosted 250 vendors, expanded its grounds by an entire city block, and pulled record-breaking sales for its vendors. It seemed that each year was bigger and better than the last. Then, the pandemic slammed everything to a halt.
“The world changed,” Bof said.
Over the course of 2020, she watched local businesses struggle for survival and saw the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. The nation and the world became even more aware of how important it was to support black communities and businesses.
In December of 2020, Keep St. Petersburg Local was able to hold an event called Holiday Maker’s Market at The Factory, an arts complex that partially opened in late 2020 in South St. Petersburg. Bof made sure that the event kept the diversity and representation initiative going strong.
Thanks to this event, social media and word of mouth, Bof has been able to maintain momentum for Localtopia 2021, even with uncertainty surrounding it.
“For all intents and purposes, we were not able to confirm that [this year’s] Localtopia was actually even able to go ahead until the first or second week of January,” Bof said. “So we’re talking about a month that we’ve known that we can move forward.”
Despite this short notice, the festival is boasting almost 200 vendors, an extensive COVID-19 safety plan and a continued focus on total St. Petersburg representation. Several new black-owned and South St. Pete businesses will be coming to Localtopia, including Red’s BBQ Food Truck and the Three Generations food truck.
Bof said that community outreach and representation is about growing organic rapport and nurturing small businesses.
“The connections were forged and we continue to develop them,” she said. “If you look at our mission, it goes beyond just supporting local businesses… We want to just go beyond telling them, ‘you have to pay this to be a member and you go up on the website, and we’re good,’ you know? We take the time to help them grow.”
