Updated 2023-06-20
The project was originally designed to cater for Victoria and has been extended to accept businesses from anywhere in Australia.
In addition to classifying businesses by their treatment of customers and the community, they are also able to be identified as “locally owned” and whether or not they accept cash as payment.
Project overview
The goal of this project is to provide a freely available, searchable list of businesses to assist the local community and visitors decide which businesses they should support or should not support.
Mandates will come and go but we believe we should continue to support the businesses that have been there for us during lock-downs, lock-outs, and government-ordered discrimination. Hopefully, by supporting them when we do have other options, they will still be operating if/when we really need them in the future.
We found ourselves wishing a service like this was available every time we were in an unfamiliar town. We would rather buy a coffee from the shop that supported the community than give money to the one next door that was actively discriminating against some members only months earlier.
There have been other effort to organise this information but they have been hamstrung by issues such as;
- * being locked to a particular social media platform,
- * limited searchability,
- * only covering a limited area,
- * not widely known about,
- * relying on businesses to submit (often requiring payment),
- * or only listing either the poor businesses or the good ones.
This project has been designed to remedy all of these short-comings.
Local community group volunteers will be empowered to decide which businesses deserve to be added to the “naughty/nice” list so the businesses are not required to be involved, and with no costs to the business or the community. The local community benefits by visitors support businesses that deserve it and hopefully they will do the same when they visit other communities. The ease of use and ability to cover the entire state (or even the whole country) will hopefully aid in community uptake and spreading the word.
The website will be available to anyone with an Internet connection, and is geo-searchable by location and by criteria such as type of service or treatment of community members. Anyone may leave a review and give a star-rating to assist others make decisions but this will not change how the business has been initially categorised by the community volunteer.
It is not aligned with any particular political or activist groups. The website is designed using relatively neutral language (not attacking) so as to not put anyone off from sharing it with others – although community volunteers managing local business listings and anyone leaving public reviews may choose use stronger language.
Content
Content is entirely generated by community volunteers and public website users. Free expression of experiences is encouraged, but content that is not relevant to the stated goals of this project, is out-of-context, unnecessarily offensive (such as swearing), illegal or not lawful may be removed.
Concerns, queries and requests can be raised via the Contact page.
Privacy
Our privacy policy can be found here: Privacy Policy