The United States government is one of the biggest purchasers in the world. Few people or entities spend more money on more goods and services. Add state and local governments to the mix, and you have a massive market with the potential for a lot of businesses to make a lot of money. The process of governments purchasing from businesses, called procurement, quietly hums with billions of dollars every single day. Yet those billions overwhelmingly end up in the pockets of huge corporations and monopolies instead of the local company in your town, which contributes to your local economy and builds local power for your community. This often happens even if that local company is perfectly poised to deliver the exact goods or services needed with top-of-the-line service, speed, and pricing. The game is just rigged. 

There are many reasons for this. There are also ways to fight it. Enter Paola Santana, whose company, Glass, is working to revolutionize the procurement process in favor of local businesses. Glass’s platform G-Commerce works in many ways to fill the gaps in the procurement process. G-Commerce aims to dismantle the barriers to entry facing small and local businesses. By certifying local businesses and giving them direct access to government purchasers, G-Commerce wants to level the playing field and make small government purchases more possible for local businesses. According to Paola Santana, this is a win-win: local businesses earn lucrative sales, and local governments get better service and even better prices. Paola Santana joins us today on Building Local Power to explain all this and why it’s so important.

For transcript and related resources, see the episode page at https://ilsr.org/articles/blp-the-human-side-of-government-work