UPside of Life: Support your local Yooper

You've heard it from every corner of the state, from Gov. Jennifer Granholm's office to local shop owners: Michigan must focus on bringing business back home.

Michigan went through an all-out hemorrhage of jobs over the past few years. Businesses were not only closing doors and struggling financially, but the state was struggling to keep both experienced workers and newly-graduated students within its borders. The grass, it seemed, was indeed greener over the state line.

So how does a state that had placed so much faith in the automotive industry survive in our fragile economic climate? By realizing that it has always had the ability to offer so much more than a Dodge, Chevrolet or Ford.

Michigan is awash with great businesses, people and products--the Upper Peninsula especially so. From the local sub shop downtown to the woodworker the next town over to the engineering firm in the Keweenaw, the Upper Peninsula has more than just mines, woods and water.

Once you realize it, this fact both seems like it's been apparent all along, and feels incredibly refreshing at the same time. Groups of like-minded individuals are beginning to come together and ask the locals to look around them and see what is available right here at home.

For some, this quest to bring awareness of local products and businesses started a long time ago. Take Jason Schneider for example. This central-California native came to the U.P. 16 years ago and fell in love. He opened a business in Marquette. It was there he tried to put out the message: Despite the big box stores and the national products becoming more readily available throughout the area, the best products were the ones made and sold in the Upper Peninsula.

"Marquette just wasn't ready for the message at that time," Schneider says.

But the times, Bob Dylan once lamented, they are a' changing. Schneider's business closed years back and his aspirations took him to the Peace Corps. Upon his return recently, something was different.

"Marquette had changed a lot," he says. "It was completely ready for this."

The "this" Schneider refers to is a grass-roots organization known as "UP with Local." Their purpose is simple: Educating the public, businesses and municipalities about the importance of strong, independent, locally-owned businesses, and advocating for policy to support them.

That's the word UP with Local was spreading when they hosted a meet-and-greet at the Marquette Children's Museum last Friday. There, among tasty bites to eat from the Rubaiyat restaurant and outstanding beer from Keweenaw Brewing Company (which our faithful Second Wave readers will recognize as one of our favorite local enterprises), members discussed the evolving American economy and how local business, people and products play a role in it.

Schneider, who is also involved with a company known as MiUpperHand that sells local products to "displaced Yoopers," says the initiative really sparked when Michael Shuman, author of SmallMART Revolution, spoke in Marquette this year.

"We realized that we couldn't just sit around and talk about a book," he says. "We had to actually do something."

UP with Local is growing rapidly. A few hundred Facebook fans in just a matter of a week, as well as dozens of paid memberships with their first-ever function shows that the community is interested as well.

While no one can predict how successful UP with Local is going to be, it's important to note because it shows the signs of the times and the desire to bring local companies and products into the spotlight. That's one reason why we're writing about it for the first installment of this column.

The column, a new, weekly addition to Upper Peninsula Second Wave, embraces the core values of what groups like UP with Local are all about: U.P. goods, people and places and why it is important to know about them. Second Wave has been about promoting the Upper Peninsula and its growth, innovation and forward-thinking individuals since it first published in the beginning of May. We hope this will bring even more attention to the homegrown endeavors of the U.P.

Check back each and every week for an insight into the Upper Peninsula, the products made right here and the people and companies that have decided to call this wonderful place home.

Sam Eggleston is the managing editor of the U.P. Second Wave and a full-time freelance writer. He was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula. He can be reached via email.