Lodge Grass is moving forward with plans for a business incubator. The incubator will help train budding businesses with book keeping and leadership.
Tana Stewart owns the food truck Tipi Coffee. She plans on opening up a coffee shop inside the business incubator. There's no place to get a healthy meal in Lodge Grass and she wants to change that.
“You can go to, like, IGA or the gas station and get a cup of coffee but my whole idea was to be able to get good coffee, be able to get good food, even whether it's breakfast or lunch and. Um, cause we do live in a food desert,” Stewart said
Stewart studied food sovereignty systems in tribal communities and wants to contribute to the betterment of her community. She thinks this business incubator is a great way to give a booster shot to the local economy.
Along with Stewart’s coffee shop, the building will house offices and a conference room for training. The incubator plans to bring in people to teach classes and directly mentor the businesses.
Mayor Quincy Dabney grew up in Lodge Grass and wants the town to grow to the size it was in the 1940s and 1950s.
“This is the launching pad for, bringing that, bringing that back to this community, which used to be the hustle and the bustle. We had 43 different businesses. We had over 800 people that lived here. Now we have two different businesses and about 550 people,” he said.
Dabney says the idea has been in the works since 2018 but this year proved complicated.
“So the timeline, so we should have already had the building built, but I guess with the quote unquote tariffs on wood. Yeah. It just now jumped up to a hundred thousand,” he said.
Dabney says the business incubator should be breaking ground in the next year. The project is funded by the American Rescue Plan Act that was passed earlier this year.
Taylar Stagner is Yellowstone Public Radio's Report for America Indigenous Affairs reporter.
