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And this year, I just decided this was the time to ask the city and the county for these proclamations. “Tammi and I talked about how there is no recognition of our LGBTQ businesses, and we felt like we needed to do something about it. Vedda said that the idea for recognizing LGBTQ Business Month started a couple of years in talks between him and Tammi Wallace, cofounder, president and CEO of the Greater Houston LGBT Chamber of Commerce. Vedda said North Texas LGBT Chamber officials had “looked at the city of Dallas and the county of Dallas, at the LGBTQ population here and our spending power, along with the number of what we assume to be LGBT-owned businesses and what their economic output is.” In the end, he said, as noted in the proclamations, they determined that Dallas has the largest LGBTQ population of any city in Texas, and that that population has a combined buying power of more than $4 billion.Īnd, he added, the chamber estimates that there are about 4,000 LGBTQ-owned businesses in Dallas with a combined gross output of more than $1.5 billion. Vedda said those figures are a conservative estimate extrapolated from a wide-ranging economic study conducted by the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce and based on surveys of LGBT-certified businesses (businesses certified by the National LGBT Chamber to be majority owned by LGBTQ individuals as part of the chamber’s LGBT Supplier Diversity Initiative). They create more than 1.5 million jobs annually, about 64 percent of new jobs created in the U.S., and they employ nearly 50 percent of all workers in the U.S. … It has been well documented that small businesses are the backbone of any community. Gary Sanchez, chamber board chair and director of public affairs at VisitDallas, said the chamber estimates that LGBTQ-owned businesses in Dallas “contribute more than $30 billion to the local economy. “We wanted to bring a focus to how these LGBTQ-owned businesses support the economy here in North Texas,” Vedda said. The proclamations, explained Chamber President and CEO Tony Vedda, are intended to both honor and urge support for the many LGBTQ-owned businesses that help the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex grow and thrive. TAMMYE NASH | Managing the beginning of September, both the Dallas City Council and the Dallas County Commissioners have issued proclamations recognizing this as LGBTQ Business Month, at the request of the North Texas LGBT Chamber ofĬommerce. North Texas LGBT Chamber gets city, county to recognize September as LGBT Business Month
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(Photo courtesy of the city of Dallas, via the North Texas LGBT Chamber of Commerce) Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, second from left, presented a proclamation declaring September as LGBT Business Month in the city of Dallas to, from left, LGBT Chamber Foundation Chair Clint Thomson, LGBT Chamber Chair Gary Sanchez Chamber President and CEO.