The app known for crowd-sourced reviews has officially launched the Black-owned business attribute in partnership with My Black Receipt, a movement whose mission is to empower the Black community with economic independence by galvanizing consumers to spend $5 million at Black-owned businesses from Juneteenth through Independence Day.
The new searchable Black-owned business attribute is free and opt-in only, as the decision to self-identify as Black-owned should rest solely with the business, according to a statement from Yelp.
“This is the first, digital initiative to challenge Black consumers and allies to buy from a Black-owned business and upload their receipt into a platform that publicly displays how individual purchases can make a collective impact,” said Kezia M. Williams, Lead Organizer for My Black Receipt and CEO of the Black upStart. “We know that recirculation of dollars through Black businesses has multiplier effects, just like it did in Black Wall Streets across the country. Black businesses hire Black, create Black products, give to Black causes, and pass down assets to Black families.”
Yelp said in a statement that they wanted to get the black-owned attribute out as quickly as possible due to the increase in demand.
“Over the recent weeks, we’ve received an outpouring of requests from our community to provide an easy way to find and support Black-owned businesses on Yelp,” a statement reads on Yelp. “In fact, this has been our most requested feature during this time, and over the course of two weeks alone, we saw a 35x increase in the frequency of searches for Black-owned businesses across categories on Yelp compared to the same time last year.”
If you are a Black-owned business and are interested in adding the attribute to your Yelp page and appearing in ‘Black-owned’ search results, you can opt-in by following these simple steps:
- Visit Yelp for Business (Business Information tab) on desktop or your mobile browser
- Click Edit next to Known for.
- Select Yes beside Black-owned.
- Click Save Changes
