Tag: minority entrepreneurs

How One New Jersey City Is Boosting Minority Entrepreneurship

Posted on by robbie

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.

When Entrepreneurship Is the Only Option

Posted on by robbie

It was a childhood lie that sparked the entrepreneurial fire in Geraud Staton and set him on a path that would eventually transform his community.
When he was 14, Staton’s older cousin bragged about how he’d been creating comic books and selling them at school for a dollar. “I thought, ‘He’s making money. I can do the same,’” recalls Staton, who now mentors other aspiring entrepreneurs in Durham, N.C. There was just one problem, though. “He told me later that he was absolutely lying — he was just trying to impress his little cousin,” Staton says. But the idea had been planted in Staton’s mind, and by the time he finished freshman year he had his first taste of entrepreneurial success: buying candy in bulk and reselling it to his classmates for a profit.
People who succeed in launching businesses typically have unfettered access to advice and support from a parent, a grandparent or an uncle who was an entrepreneur themselves, he says. “But there are people in communities, including mine, who did not have that. I wanted to be that uncle,” says Staton, whose mission to help what he calls “entrepreneurs of necessity” led him to found the Helius Foundation, a nonprofit that provides free coaching and mentoring to under-resourced small business owners in Durham who have struggled to find living-wage jobs.
“It’s incredibly hard to be an entrepreneur,” says Staton, who attended the Kauffman Foundation’s inaugural ESHIP Summit in June, where NationSwell caught up with him. “But it’s even harder for this particular group of people to find dignified jobs.”

Paying It Forward

Staton credits the early support he got from adults like his teachers and principal with having an outsize impact on his future. “I assumed at the time that everyone had the same encouragement and opportunity,” Staton says of his younger self. As he matured, however, he realized that for many of his peers — Staton grew up in a predominantly lower-middle-class African-American neighborhood in Durham — that simply wasn’t true.
Many of the minorities and women Staton works with have marketable skills but lack business sense. “These are people who can’t afford to fail, starting businesses that are often the first to fail,” he says. To remedy that, the Helius Foundation provides them with free coaching and mentoring services, helps them develop a strategic plan, and teaches them marketing basics.
Though Helius has a short history, having launched in 2015, it’s already given several program participants a much-needed leg up. One mentee, Connell Green, had worked in restaurants until an I-beam fell on him, temporarily paralyzing him. After the accident, he lost his family and his home. “He used baking as a way to heal and focus his attention, and help get some of his mobility back,” Staton says. Now he’s the owner of a successful bakery.
Another mentee is Ayubi Easente, who at just 14 years old is running a thriving business refurbishing high-end sneakers. “He doesn’t know if this is what he wants to do for a living,” Staton says, but Easente is gaining skills that will serve him throughout his life no matter what he eventually pursues.

From Obstacles to Opportunity

The Helius Foundation is based in Durham’s Hayti district, an area that used to be home to a flourishing African-American community with many black-owned businesses; it was once known as the “Black Wall Street.”
But thanks in part to the construction of an interstate that divided Hayti in the early 1960s, the community suffered a serious decline. Today, 46 percent of African-Americans live at or below the poverty line, Staton says, and fewer than 18 percent of local businesses are black-owned. “Those numbers are just horrifying,” he says, adding that changing them “would be huge for our city.”
But building a local ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship is a challenge. When you ask residents what the community needs, Staton says, “jobs” is always the answer. But he doesn’t believe that a large corporation relocating to the area is the best solution to the region’s challenges. “If we can get 1,000 people to start a small business and hire one or two people, we get the same number of jobs, but more sustainability,” he points out. “That money gets to stay inside our community.”
A large part of what Staton does is simply encourage people to try entrepreneurship. “I’ve got people who come in and still believe that they can’t make it,” he says. “I’m having to do a lot more psychology than I thought I would.” In a sense, he’s passing on the gift his cousin gave him: “Someone told me I could do it, and I went out and did it,” he says. “We have a lot of entrepreneurs who just don’t know they can do it, so my job is to show them they can.”

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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.