Support ORRE and our local, independently owned businesses

The Oak Ridge Revitalization Effort works everyday toward improving the historic core of Oak Ridge through activities & events that build community and helps to attract visitors to Oak Ridge. These activities are designed to bring people into our centers who may have never been here before but will be inclined to return to shop with our locally owned businesses.  

ORRE works with  independently owned businesses, both in the historic core and throughout Oak Ridge, to help them find ways that  encourage our citizens to shop our many locally owned businesses.  These independently owned businesses support the economy in Oak Ridge.   Independently owned businesses are the backbone of our community and need your support.

Every time you make a purchase or attend an ORRE sponsored event  you are exercising power of choice. You have the power to strengthen & enrich Oak Ridge.

• By choosing to shop independently owned businesses and support local events, you help to maintain the distinctive flavor of Oak Ridge.  
• Independently owned businesses and locally sponsored events build strong neighborhoods by sustaining communities, linking neighbors, and contributing to local causes.
• Local ownership means that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who feel the impacts of those decisions.
• Your dollars spent in independently owned businesses have three times the impact on your community as dollars spent at a local chain. When you shop independently owned businesses, you simultaneously create jobs, fund more city services through sales tax, invest in neighborhood improvement and promote community development.
• Independently owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
• Entrepreneurship fuels America’s economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.
• Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.
• Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.
• A marketplace of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.
• A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products  or services based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.