LYNN — Small businesses in the city made waves on Saturday with the first-ever small business crawl. 

A Salem Trolley-driven event was organized by City Councilor Nicole McClain with the help of other city council members Jordan Avery, Natasha Megie-Maddrey, Cardeliz Paez, and Council President Constantino “Coco” Alinsug to celebrate the city’s lively small business community in a new, fun way. 

“We’re excited to be able to pour into a small business community, and hopefully, people that are on this trolley will come back out and visit these businesses,” McClain said. The goal of this event is to ensure the participants return to the businesses and help patronize the community in the city. 

The destination list allowed participants to support local coffee shops, boutiques, and other businesses, including two of Councilor Avery’s self-owned companies, curating deeper connections within the city. 

This event means more to the city than just a small, 30-person, curated event for residents, but it is also an opportunity to make the city’s roots stronger. Councilor McClain spoke about the hope to expand the crawl into a returning event that operates more like a bus making stops. 

“We want to make this an annual event, so we’ll call this the pilot event right here today,” McClain said. “Our goal for next year would be to have actual trolley stops, so anybody from the community can just hop on the trolley and take it somewhere and be dropped off.”

Alinsug said the importance of the event being organized and led by the city council members cements the message that they wish to promote to the city and they are meant to serve the community in every way possible. 

Local organizations with objectives to support and promote small businesses in the city, including Lynn Main Streets, North Shore Juneteenth Association, and the Millennium Latino Project, partnered with city officials on the crawl. 

Tickets for the event cost $15, with all proceeds going to Lynn Main Streets to help continue supporting economic development and entrepreneur initiatives in Lynn. 

“We were able to sell 25 tickets at this point and hopefully some people will just donate or we can get a little more money for them,” said McClain.

This weekend’s pilot crawl marked a milestone for a growing movement to revitalize the city’s small business economy, with city councilors and organizers help.