New Help for Minority and Inner City Entrepreneurs
Posted byChris Thompson - 04.29.2010
Partners in Advance Northeast Ohio have identified two inter-related goals -- first that we need to get more businesses growing in our region's urban cores and second more of those businesses need to be owned by minorities.
Indeed, a new wave of growing businesses in our urban cores would be an effective way to reverse the cycle of poverty that has been eating away at many of our neighborhoods for decades. Darren Redus, president of JumpStart Inclusion Advisors, is partnering with the state of Ohio on a new initiative that will help address those dual goals. Here is some of what he recently wrote on the JumpStart ideaexchange blog.
JumpStart, in collaboration with Governor Ted Strickland, and the State of Ohio Minority Enterprise Division, recently kicked off an exciting new initiative called Launch100 which seeks to create a pipeline of 100 high potential minority and inner city based businesses across Ohio over the next 5 years. If the turnout at the event, which exceeded 250 attendees, as well as the interest that has followed is any indication of the potential of this initiative, we are even more excited about the opportunities for growth and expansion throughout our region.
Much has been written over the past few years about the economic opportunity that exists for our community if we had more of our region’s citizens participating in high growth entrepreneurship. In short, higher growth emerging businesses simply create more jobs. The challenge has been that many of our region’s entrepreneurs, specifically ethnic minority populations and firms based in lower income census tracks commonly referred to as the inner city, have not participated equally in the types of growth opportunities attractive to angel and venture capital investment. Absent this critical component of early-stage funding, these entrepreneurs have been led to the types of businesses that generally did not require much capital which in turn led to a greater propensity of lower growth service oriented businesses. While smaller firms have always been, and will always be a critical component of our economy, even a modest increase in more diverse businesses growing larger scale operations can have a dramatic impact on job creation for all of our region’s citizens.
Read more of the blog here. And check out mor about Launch100 at its web site Launch100.org.
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