Don't feel guilty if you just buy something local with it. That's the intent.
Yes! This has been a harping point for me in other social media: there's a difference between hardship relief and stimulus. The premise to a stimulus is not to relieve the hardship of the recipient, that's what things like unemployment insurance and food stamps are for. Rather, it's just to increase the "velocity of money" in an economy.
When I get to economic history topics in my classes, I sometimes do this exercise: I take a dollar bill out of my wallet and time the students while they pass it around, telling them to count every time it changes hands over sixty seconds. Then we do it again, and often the count goes up. That's economic growth; it's still the same AMOUNT of money in the economy, the one bill, but if it MOVES faster, you have more cash flow, more transactions, and thus economic growth. So the point of a stimulus is to accelerate the flow, just give things a push so money moves around the society faster. From that perspective, it doesn't matter much how you spend it; the intent is served as long as you DO spend it.
My wife and I have been fortunate, not to have taken a financial hit in the pandemic so far. It may not last. But when the first stimulus came through, we used it to finally do a home improvement project we had our sights on, installing hardwood flooring in our living room and hallway. We hired a local company, so they had some income and could pay their workers, which means those workers could go pay their bills, and so on. That kind of thing is what a stimulus is supposed to do.
Charitable giving also accelerates the velocity of money, so that's definitely an option. A couple music-related ones that I've had on my radar are Save Our Stages and MusiCares. There's also standbys like food banks and the United Way.
