BUY NEW HAVEN is an initiative designed to make local purchasing simple, strategic, and impactful.
66% of New Haven’s businesses earn $500,000 or less per year.
BUY NEW HAVEN serves as a two-way bridge between New Haven's anchor institutions and its small businesses. The program provides the necessary strategies, tools, and resources to reduce barriers and create clear, easy-to-follow pathways for systems change.
BUY NEW HAVEN Guides, resources, and workshops make it easier for large businesses to source from the community while providing smaller local businesses with the resources necessary to successfully compete for contracts with larger organizations.
BUY NEW HAVEN is more than an initiative—it’s a movement to reimagine how we spend, invest, and grow. Explore BUY NEW HAVEN, join the effort, and be part of shaping an inclusive, resilient New Haven economy.
BUY NEW HAVEN Purchasing Guides provide roadmaps that empower institutions to prioritize local spending. These free resources offer inclusive, practical strategies to source local goods and services, making the purchasing process approachable for organizations of any size. By utilizing these guides, your organization transforms everyday purchasing into a powerful act of economic community support. When you BUY NEW HAVEN, we all win.
Guides
This guide provides practical guidance for procurement officers, event planners, administrative staff, and organizational leaders who want to intentionally support small businesses in their communities by encouraging organizations to view food procurement as an opportunity for community investment.
Guide to Supporting Local Food Entrepreneurs
This guide provides insights on overcoming challenges in procuring local professional services that New Haven’s anchor institutions, large businesses, and local services providers may face, illuminates best practices in broadening outreach, and proposes strategies that can create conditions for greater inclusion.
Guide to Supporting Local Professional Service Providers
This guide provides inclusive strategies for procuring local art, along with resources like directories and templates to help you along the way. Using this guide is one of many intentional steps we can take together to make our shared vision—an inclusive economic future for New Haven—a reality. For a shorter read, download our Art Guide At-A-Glance.
Guide to Purchasing Local Art
This guide provides actionable tools, resources, and best practices to help you make local participation central to your project approach.It is especially useful for those seeking practical strategies to engage small, local, minority-, and women-owned contractors in development projects.
Guide to Supporting Small, Local Contractors
Workshops
The BUY NEW HAVEN Workshops are strategic training opportunities designed to help small businesses become "contract-ready," improving their ability to bid on institutional contracts, strengthening their negotiation skills, and increasing their knowledge about how to scale their businesses.
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS:
Stay tuned for future workshop dates.