The “Little Rock Black Owned Businesses & Services” Facebook group — where small-businesses advertise their goods and services and customers ask members for business recommendations — has drawn a crowd of 49,000 members.

The “Little Rock B.O.B.S.” group needs a 10-person team, dedicating hours every week, to clear hundreds of posts, ranging from people asking for mechanics, landscapers, seamstresses, maintenance workers and youth sports leagues to organizers drawing attention to youth programs and community events, to those advertising contracting services, books, web services and realty. Video advertisements and multi-level marketers aren’t allowed, nor is posting an inordinate number of times within a short span.

Posts in the group vary day-to-day and by the season. Members have recently posted about Mothers’ Day gift ideas and asked for recommendations for private chefs ahead of the day.

“It’s Black people helping Black people, basically,” said member Venita Ross Franklin. She’s starting a summer program with her nonprofit, Project Renew, Incorporated, to continue the same youth life skills and job readiness work it does in its existing after-school program and advertising it on the group. In the past, Franklin has sought board members and youth instructors there, too. Almost every post gets a number of responses, she said, with a good turnaround time.

Evelyn James, a North Little Rock Middle School science teacher who founded the group seven years ago, said it “pretty much moderates itself,” noting that members immediately report posts that break the rules and appreciate it because it’s not “spammy.”

“I’ve learned about things people do as far as businesses from the posts that they make,” James said. “If you can think of it, it’s probably looked-for.”

Local hairstylists, barbers and estheticians are well-represented in the group.

Monica Bradshaw began her dreadlock-styling and hair product business, Locz Dreadz & Thingz, five years ago after moving to Little Rock from West Monroe, La.

“Me and my family were a representation of natural hairstyles, a family with locs. A lot of people hadn’t seen that,” she said. “I gave the people who were looking for a natural hairstylist something different. I’m consistent. I’m always at every appointment. You never have to chase me down. As long as I’m woke, I’ll answer the phone.”

Bradshaw has begun part-time night work as a home health aide since becoming a single mother, but said she would like to resume doing hair full-time, because it’s her passion and because she appreciated the schedule flexibility the work offers.

So she promotes the Locz Dreadz & Thingz hairstyles she does every day online, including on Little Rock Black Owned Businesses & Services. “I have received a lot of new clients through that page,” she said. “They’ll tell me, ‘When I look it up, you’re the first person who pops up because you post every day.'” On a good week, Bradshaw can get five new clients from the group.

Bradshaw said she sees clients every four to six weeks.

“We struggle with having confidence in hair,” she said. “That’s why my motto is ‘I’m oh-so proud to make your nappy so happy’, because it took me forever to get to the point where I was OK with my hair, and I know how hard it is. My goal is to teach us to love what grows out of our scalp naturally and its purest form.”

James is a Little Rock native acutely familiar with the history of the West Ninth Street corridor, which developed over a century into the city’s Black business district before early-1960s urban renewal, including the construction of Interstate 630, destroyed it.

What Ninth Street once was is “kind of the spirit of the group, as far as our collective responsibility to work together,” James said. “The spirit of Ninth Street is that our ancestors did build community, they did support each other, they did keep their dollar in the Black community before it left.”

“We are the biggest group of consumers who are not producers in the country,” she said. “In order to help our neighborhoods better, we need to keep the money in the neighborhood.”

The group originated when James channeled her anger over the July 2016 police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in the St. Paul, Minn., suburbs into creating a resource for the community.

“I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just make a little Facebook group. Mexican people shop with Mexican people and Asian people shop with Asian people, so I’ll just make a little Facebook group for my friends, and we can make sure we shop with each other and know what everybody has in Little Rock,” she said.

Two weeks later, the group had 3,000 members.

In addition to All Phases Core (APC) Fitness on University Avenue, Little Rock businessman Stervin Smith also runs SKS Boys Moving & Transportation. He was among those who joined Little Rock Black Owned Businesses & Services in July 2016.

“It’s been a pretty good gift for us,” he said of it. Smith said he gets five or six moving inquiries a month from the group. “We hear people all the time telling that they just looked through and saw it, and then they reach out to us,” he said.

He praised the group as an opportunity for Black-owned businesses to network with each other as they seek to grow, and for new small businesses to find customers.

James echoed these sentiments.

“There’s no necessary requirements for your business, because you may still be hustling at this point and trying to get it to grow. There is no, ‘Oh, you can’t be here because you’re just hustling.’ No: let us show you, or look at these resources, or you can look at these other people. And there’s people in here who will help you grow your business.”

Grant-writers, commercial real estate agents and accountants post about their businesses in the group, providing the means to successful entrepreneurship.

“Black people in America are working behind a curve,” James said. “The lack of wealth being given to newly emancipated people in this country to build a foundation has probably gotten us where we are as a country as far as wealth relations and the condition of Black America,” she said.

But a member crunched statistics and estimates that $3 to $5 million has circulated over the past seven years because of the group’s existence.

“He was like, ‘Money is rolling through here,'” James said.