Chapel Hill and Carrboro recently celebrated Black History Month with a week of intentional and collective spending at local Black-owned businesses. A partnership between The Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce, the Black Business Alliance, and the Town of Carrboro, the first Community Spend Week also highlighted Black history and legacies in the community.
The week kicked off on Feb. 16 at Carrboro’s Flying Pierogi. Along wIth their order of sandwiches, subs, and pierogi, community members were encouraged to register for the collective-action event and pick up a bingo card that would help direct their dollars to various BIPOC-owned spaces in the community, including Rumors, The Back Nine Golf, and Midway Barber Shop.
Community Spend Week bingo cards encouraging intentional spending at BIPOC-owned businesses in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
Like the pierogi restaurant, there were also pop-ups at Carolina Car Wash and Tonya’s Cookies. Helping organize the celebration, the chamber’s Business Success Navigator Taylor Gay said each of the featured businesses were selected to represent different eras of local Black history.
Despite its physical location being one the youngest of the participating businesses in Spend Week, Tonya’s Cookies helps to highlight the longstanding legacy of the Council family and its roots in the Chapel Hill community. The southern cooking spot is owned by Tonya Council, one of the granddaughters of Mildred “Mama Dip” Council. In addition to its bakery items, the restaurant also serves dishes paying homage to the beloved Mama Dip’s Kitchen that operated on West Rosemary Street for nearly five decades.
“That also ties us back to the history portion of Black history,” Gay said. “So that business was selected as a legacy, sort of family here, and then the Flying Pierogi was selected because they’re a newer business. So we wanted to take snapshots of the different times.”
Gay said the event is a natural way to uplift Black businesses during Black History Month, as the collective spending helps create a more immediate economic impact. And she said the week is not only about retaining existing ones, but making sure more feel encouraged to start here. And she said part of that means making sure spaces are visible to the wider community in the first place.
The chamber’s Business Success Navigator Taylor Gay holds first pop-up at Flying Pierogi on Feb. 16.
Flying Pierogi’s owner Jaysen Wilson said the week presented an opportunity to bring more foot traffic to the spot. Specializing in Polish and German street food, the restaurant operated as a popular food truck for more than half a decade, but its brick-and-mortar location only opened in 2024.
“I just hope that with the added promotions and publicity, that people just get to know that we’re here,” Wilson said. “Because I think that’s been our biggest issue, just people not knowing we exist yet.”
During the pop-up at Flying Pierogi, Chair for the Black Business Alliance of Chapel Hill-Carrboro Donna Bell said she hopes the event can become an annual one for the towns.
“We would love every year to be able to highlight businesses and show that you can bring money through the door, that has a big impact on their success,” Bell said. “But even being here, we can also see that there are already people in the community that already value this organization, so we’re just really happy to be here and support them.”
According to Gay, the spend week naturally fits into the chamber’s ongoing efforts to celebrate local BIPOC-owned businesses, and it is another way to ensure that community conversation about intentionally spending dollars at Black-owned businesses continues year-round.
“Beyond BIPOC, beyond Black, beyond Latino, really just supporting your local businesses, really thinking local first,” Gay said. “That’s a given, and we always have shop local weeks, but just making sure that you’re having conversations with the business owners. You’re saying, ‘Hey, like, I’d like that. I’d like to see this.’ If you don’t see what you’re shopping for, mention it because you want to spend your dollar here in your community.”
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