How One New Jersey City Is Boosting Minority Entrepreneurship

Newark, N.J., is an urban renewal success story — but only for some of its 280,000 residents.
As more and more people move into sleek new lofts downtown, and amenities like a new pedestrian bridge and urban park draw hordes more, a disparity has become abundantly clear: Newark’s minority entrepreneurs are being left out of all this development.
Lyneir Richardson, executive director of the Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CUEED) at Rutgers University, recalls a flood of people knocking on the doors of the business school, asking for help accessing resources. “‘We’re not getting accepted to the local accelerators,’” Richardson says the school kept hearing — particularly from minorities and women looking to launch businesses.
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Underrepresented entrepreneurs like the ones Richardson works with often have trouble breaking into the formal and informal networks that support startups. If you know someone who’s opened a small business you’re likely to get recommendations of lawyers and accountants who can help you. But the would-be business owners CUEED works with — about 70 percent of whom are black or Latino, and 60 percent of whom are women — don’t have that advantage, says Richardson.
They also tend to have more trouble accessing capital in the form of investments or loans, and they may need education on what their financing options are, he adds.

Rich in Resources

In many ways, Richardson is the perfect person to serve as a champion for these marginalized entrepreneurs. He was raised as the son of business owners in Chicago, where his parents owned a bar, a restaurant, and two specialty popcorn stores, and he grew up hearing about the bread-and-butter issues of running small operations.
Later, when Richardson was 27 and a lawyer for a large bank, he was assigned pro bono work helping identify candidates for loans in a tough area of Chicago. From the perspective of the bank, Richardson says, the neighborhood didn’t look promising. But he had a different view.
“I knew people who grew up there — I grew up there,” he says. Right then, he made a life-altering decision: “I wanted my personal mission to be seeing opportunity in people and places that others didn’t.”
From any viewpoint, Newark has a lot of potential. “This is an area that’s always been asset-rich,” Richardson says, with major air, shipping and rail hubs, several colleges and universities, and New York City right next door. The mayor, Ras Baraka, has championed local businesses and recently launched an initiative aimed at encouraging institutions like Rutgers and its employees to “live, buy and hire local.” But there remains a challenge — namely, making sure that all this opportunity is equally open to everyone.

Brainstorming Solutions

Richardson attended the Kauffman Foundation’s inaugural ESHIP Summit in Kansas City, Mo., which gathered people from around the country who work to support entrepreneurs in their communities. A common goal, no matter where participants hailed from, was generating new ideas to build thriving ecosystems that connect people who want to start businesses with the resources they need to do so. For his part, Richardson came out of the summit with a couple of concrete ideas he hopes to put into action in Newark.
The first is a solution to a problem that many minority and female entrepreneurs face: They don’t know anyone who has thousands of dollars to lend them as informal seed money. At the Summit, Richardson heard about entrepreneurs using crowdfunding to raise that first round of funding. Richardson says he knows people in his community are familiar with crowdfunding, because it’s often used to raise money for funeral costs or other personal needs. “Can crowdfunding be broadly defined as a friends-and-family round for entrepreneurs of color?” Richardson wonders. He intends to find out.
After connecting with someone from Seattle who educates angel investors on how to evaluate small business investment opportunities, Richardson is thinking about launching a similar program in his city. His nascent plan: targeting people who have some history in Newark and might otherwise make a donation to an existing program, and instead trying to persuade them to invest in an entrepreneur who can create new value in the city.
“That’s something I heard that I cannot wait to try,” Richardson says.

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This content was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which works in entrepreneurship and education to create opportunities and connect people to the tools they need to achieve success, change their futures and give back to their communities. In June 2017, the foundation hosted its inaugural ESHIP Summit, convening 435 leaders fighting to help break down barriers for entrepreneurs across the country.

Rutgers University Admits Unlikely Student Body, Journalists Use Reporting to Urge Politicians to Act and More

 
A University That Prioritizes the Students Who Are Often Ignored, The Atlantic
Traditionally, America’s colleges seek to attract the best and brightest to their hallowed halls. Committed to cultivating local talent regardless of status, New Jersey’s Rutgers University is bucking that trend, recruiting low-income, public-school graduates with mediocre GPAs and test scores — the very students that other schools shun.
A Plan to Flood San Francisco With News on Homelessness, New York Times
Can journalists advocate for a cause while remaining unbiased in their reporting? Next month, writers and editors from 30 Bay Area media outlets plan to do just that while collaborating on coverage focused on San Francisco’s homeless problem. The goal: To serve as a catalyst for solutions to the seemingly intractable problem.
This City Is Giving Away Super-Fast Internet to Poor Students, CNN Money
No longer are the poorest families in Chattanooga, Tenn., forced to visit a fast-food restaurant so their children can access the Internet needed to complete their homework. Two new programs are bringing citizens online in the Southern city, where 22.5 percent of the population lives in poverty.
MORE: Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduate from College. This College Is Going to Change That

These Student Hacks Make Choosing Classes Less Nightmarish

Crafting a college class schedule is no easy task. It’s a delicate balance of finding the right classes at the right time with the best professors. Inevitably, poor souls (mostly freshmen) will have no choice but to take 8 a.m. classes Monday to Friday with instructors they never wanted because all the best classes are already full.
However, two ingenious college students from different institutions have figured out how to beat the minefield of class-shopping time, the New York Times reports.
MORE: How Chicago’s Community Colleges Are Training the Next Generation of Business Leaders
Vaibhav Verma, a Rutgers University student in New Jersey, was frustrated about not getting the classes he wanted. So he built an online app, called the Rutgers Schedule Sniper, that surveys the university’s registration system and notifies users whenever someone drops out of a class. After developing it, 8,000 students used it the following semester, according to the Times.
And Zach Hall of Furman University in Greenville, S.C., created Classget.com that allows students to search course offerings based on teacher, time, date and general education requirement. Users are also alerted when the class they want has an opening.
While students crave these types of digital tools, universities can be less than enthusiastic about them, in part due to laws protecting students’ privacy. Which is exactly what Brown University student Jonah Kagan discovered when he created an app that enabled users to submit their three favorite classes, which, in turn, helped course shoppers find interesting electives. Because he couldn’t access student data and enrollment figures, the project never took off.
“Students are always more entrepreneurial and understand needs better than bureaucracies can,”  Harry R. Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for Harvard’s computer science department, tells the Times, “since bureaucracies tend to have messages they want to spin, and priorities they have to set, and students just want stuff that is useful. I know this well, since students were talking to me about moving the Harvard face books online seven years before [Mark] Zuckerberg just went and did it without asking permission.”
To help mediate the disconnect between students and university administration, student developers from across the country held a Campus Data Summit last summer. From the gathering, they published a Campus Data Guidebook that includes advice on making friends with faculty and asking for forgiveness, not permission.
Some lucky app developers, like Alex Sydell and William Li from University of California, Berkeley, attend schools that see the value in their creations. Sydell and Li created Ninja Courses, a course comparison website,  and were paid by Berkeley for their innovation.
With STEM being such a hot button topic in education these days, we can only imagine that it’s only a matter of time before all universities welcome this type of student innovation with open arms.
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