A watchful eye is clearly necessary to hold back the waves of progress that I feel threaten the essence of the Island. As a small business owner in partnership with my niece, Gareth, at KIN in Edgartown, there is an increasing sense of an imminent need to defend our Island sweetness.

The Island is meaningfully comprised of home-grown local year-round small businesses ­— restaurants, inn keepers, boutiques, fishing shops, yoga studios, juice bars, the list goes on. These are our neighbors. They are paying all the nuts and bolts of their small business. They are then providing for their families, giving back to the community and if they have a second maybe going to the beach or finding a moment of fun for themselves. It is not easy, they do it with passion, grit and an unwavering love for the soul of our Island.

If community leaders truly have the local people at heart, they would not, even for a day, bring in a corporate entity next door to a year-round hustling business. To do so is the antithesis of Martha’s Vineyard’s ethos. The concept that these pop-up corporate businesses help the small local shop owners is either naive or selfish. Either way it is flawed through and through.

We locals send each other customers, we buy from one another, we champion each other’s success and we share the table of our summer bounty. The same cannot be said of the corporate entities that send their profits back to their home office far, far away from the Vineyard.

Personally, over the last 40 years I’ve spent on Martha’s Vineyard, I have worked for small businesses and Island families. It is the cornerstone of my working career. I have worked in all of the Island towns. In three different towns, I worked for six family-owned businesses, starting in Oak Bluffs with Dockside Market Place working with the McCarthy family. In the ‘80s, I was lucky enough to work for the unforgettable Bramhall and Dunn in Vineyard Haven.

Today, my niece and I co-own KIN in Edgartown. It is magically located where I also worked in the ‘80s and ‘90s with the Cohen family and Lisa Stone. The Island business community is absolutely extraordinary. There are some amazing stories of landlords helping local small businesses find creative ways to get started. In fact, for three years the iconic shop called Petunia’s (now Sole) let me, as L.A. Brown Photography, rent their tony location at 37 Main street. It was in the off-season months, from Indigenous People’s Day to New Year’s Day. In my decades as a business owner, the “rent” I was charged in this situation was the most creative, and pro small business solution. I paid the utilities and a percentage of my proceeds to Martha’s Vineyard Hospital; that was my rent.

But there is a generational shift happening now. The old guard that valued local ways are going or have gone. We now have a choice at our door. Take a look at the world around you, and see what is truly being lost by the one-stop corporate shop. The “Buy Local” campaign did not come about by accident; it is a call to action.

I believe the very fiber of the Island and the livelihoods of hundreds of businesses owners is in play here. In this way, it is also the landlords in successful financial positions who can either help or hinder the true essence of the very place they found valuable enough to invest in.

Some would say it is far too late for that. I disagree.

People in positions of power need to understand the effects of their choices. If I am not mistaken, they serve the Island’s year-round population that voted for them. These are entities in our midst with the power to nurture our local business community and not further allow the inauthentic, homogenized corporate spin into these darling streets of ours.

From the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce to the boards of trades, from the elected officials to the landlords, it is all our collective responsibility to be stewards for the Island and its people. Let’s vow to keep the Island from being gobbled up by corporate pop-ups, and chain retail shops.

If we don’t, they will be here to stay at the expense of your year-round neighbor’s very well-being.

Lisa Brown Langley lives in Edgartown.