SBAN’s Toolkit & Viet Place Collective Featured in UMD’s Maryland Today
Jenn Tran admits that her favorite childhood memory of Eden Center, a strip of Vietnamese shops in Falls Church, Va., is controversial. Of the many snacks offered at the grocery store where she shopped each week with her mother, she always beelined to durian, the spiky fruit revered for its creamy, mango-like pulp and reviled for its stinky smell.
Finding it and other Vietnamese staples was impossible decades earlier when her parents first came to the U.S., until immigrant-owned businesses began to populate Falls Church. So when Tran saw an Instagram post in 2021 hinting at redevelopment plans for Eden Center, she and around a dozen first- and second-generation Vietnamese Americans wanted to protect the grocery and surrounding shops vital to their community. …
Read the story in Maryland Today about how SBAN member Viet Place Collective put our Small Business Anti-Displacement Toolkit into action!
