After 12 years helming the Asheville Grown Business Alliance, founder Franzi Charen is stepping aside. Her role will go to Sherree Lucas, who has served on the alliance’s steering committee for two years.

After 12 years helming the Asheville Grown Business Alliance, founder Franzi Charen is stepping aside. Her role will go to Sherree Lucas, who has served on the alliance’s steering committee for two years.
In the first weekend of March, said Explore Asheville’s Marla Tambellini, hotels throughout the county were at roughly 90% occupancy. By March 27-28, only about 15% of rooms were filled, and the average price for those accommodations was approximately half its usual rate — $80 instead of $160.
Franzi Charen, founder of Asheville Grown Business Alliance, reflects on the ways Asheville showed its support of local businesses in 2019.
Along with Morganton’s Industrial Commons, Mountain BizWorks is hosting an educational workshop on cooperative, worker-owned businesses on Wednesday, Aug. 23.
City Council appointed Franzi Charen to the Downtown Commission and Barry Bialik and Laura Collins to the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee at its Jan. 26 meeting. Council also passed a “Ban the Box” measure, meaning that applicants for most city positions will no longer be required to answer questions about past criminal convictions on their initial job applications.
Local business owners have banded together under the mantra UnChain Asheville in an attempt to sway the public toward shopping with small businesses rather than chains.
There’s a crossroads between Buxton and Banks avenues, even though they don’t intersect. These blocklong, parallel, South Slope streets are lined with places to buy things, eat, drink and make merry: a chocolate factory, a doughnut shop, three breweries, two bars, a beer-and-wine store and the newest barbecue joint in town, among other businesses. The […]
Perhaps not surprisingly, topics of discussion mirrored the diverse mix of folks who came together for the daylong event at A-B Tech’s Enka campus: small-business owners, investors, employees and assorted individuals with an interest in collective prosperity.
It all began with a picture in a shop window, but as the Asheville Grown Business Alliance has developed from a poster to a loyalty card to a web of interdependent local businesses, the goal has always been, well, growth.