Small Spaces, Small Towns, Small Joys: A Love Letter To Less
On challenging the gospel of growth.
mimagephotography | Canva I have always appreciated small things. Not necessarily the “small things in life” (though I appreciate those, too) but small spaces, small businesses, small towns. I’ve lived in small houses for my entire life, driven small cars, and sought out urban neighborhoods with a small-town feel.
Most things are so much better when they’re small, which is ironic, because I live in a country that worships BIG.
We like BIG houses, BIG cars, BIG cities. The companies we worship are the sprawling multinational ones. Everything is considered more important and more worthy of admiration when it’s BIG.
The cooperative I co-own works with credit unions, which all started small. The classic credit union origin story is a group of teachers, ironworkers, or government employees pooling their money together in a cigar box so they could make loans to one another.
Back when most credit unions were founded, the banks weren’t nearly as big as the megabanks we have now, but many workers still found themselves shut out of the banking system, unable to access the capital they needed to achieve financial stability. So they took matters into their own hands.
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Sadly, as credit unions have become more “mainstream,” the smaller ones are getting swallowed up by the larger ones in a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. At the credit union conferences I attend, people often include their credit unions’ asset size in their introductions, and they are taken more seriously if they work for a billion-dollar-plus credit union. Credit unions, like so many other industries, have gotten caught up in what author and cooperative leader John Abrams dubs the “gospel of growth.”
I’ve seen this Gospel of Big worshipped throughout my career, and it has never sat well with me.
What I find, time and time again, is that companies become less and less impactful as they grow larger. The impact might be broad, but it’s shallow, far less meaningful for each person they serve.
As they grow, companies also become miserable to work for, siloed, and tangled in red tape. And as a consumer, interacting with these companies becomes a miserable experience, an obstacle course of automated menus and perpetual hold music, and humans who live an ocean away and aren’t typically empowered to address your inquiry or solve your problem.
We talk about big companies giving more people jobs, but they aren’t typically great jobs. We talk about big companies serving lots of people, but it isn’t typically great service. Some big companies, like Amazon, might promise convenience and efficiency, but at what cost?
Having worked at large nonprofits, I now only support small nonprofits — those that know the people they serve and are closely connected to the needs of their communities. In my current line of work, I take the time to learn what the small credit unions are doing, often finding they are the most agile, the most innovative, and the most effective at serving their members during times of crisis and uncertainty. Though I’m not a big shopper, nothing makes me happier than finding something I need (or occasionally something I want) at a local business, even if it takes a little more legwork on my part.
So many of us are taught to worship BIG, to hold up growth as the number one indicator of success, but we’re not encouraged to explore why BIG deserves our admiration or praise.
I worked at an entrepreneurial support organization for several years, and all the chatter was just about growth, growth, growth, without a moment’s consideration for the consequences. Big companies fail most of us while lining the pockets of investors.
I’m grateful now to be working at an employee-owned cooperative that doesn’t subscribe to this gospel. We’ve grown, yes, from two to 17 employees over 21 years, which is a pace that sits well with me. I often joke (or maybe I’m not joking?) that if we reach 50 employees before I retire, I’m going to call it quits.
I love working for my small company — I consistently feel seen, heard, and known. Even loved. We don’t create many jobs, but the jobs we create are good, and the service we provide to our clients is second to none. Here’s to the power of small.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Mom, Interrupted.
