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Black-owned Jackson Businesses See Million-Dollar Boost by Kayode Crown
The Rockefeller Foundation’s U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative Senior Vice President Otis Rolley III said it is unfortunate that African Americans are about 80% of Jackson’s population but control a small portion of the economy.
more likely than Whites to be in poverty and working poverty,” the report added. “More than one in three Blacks live below the federal poverty level compared with about one in every 10 Whites.” ‘It’s Morally Wrong’ Rolley believes the lopsidedness along race lines should give people a pause. “That’s not just morally wrong, but just any majority population having that little control would be wrong, whether it was 80% Italian, 80% of women, and it’s not sustainable,” he said in the interview. The philanthropic organization instituted the 12-city funding initiative to open up capital and credit access to parts of business communities that have suffered historical discrimination. “Data shows us that if investments are made in people of color, it benefits
not just them and their families, but the communities, the cities, states and the country as a whole,” Rolley said. He cited a recent study released in September 2020 by Citigroup, titled “Closing the Racial Inequality Gaps: The Economic Cost of Black Inequality in the U.S.” The study concluded that in the last 20 years, the racial gap between Black people and white people set the country’s overall economy back by $16 trillion. “Providing fair and equitable lending to Black entrepreneurs might have resulted in the creation of an additional $13 trillion in business revenue over the last 20 years,” the study said. “This could have been used for investments in labor, technology, capital equipment, and structures, and 6.1 million jobs might have been created per year.” The Citigroup 104-page study indicated that though many laws are in
the books to provide equality of access, centuries of slavery have left residual effects through today. “Black entrepreneurs suffer not from a lack of vision, but a lack of funding along every point in the investment cycle,” it said. “Attitudes and policies undermining equal access are at the root of the racial gaps plaguing U.S. society.” The hindrance to Black entrepreneurs getting financing via traditional routes puts them at an added disadvantage. “The reliance of Black founders on less lucrative forms of financing may reflect the difficulty in financing along the investment channel,” the study explained. “According to the Fed(eral Reserve Bank), creditworthy Black-owned firms experience greater challenges raising capital than creditworthy white-owned firms. Even after controlling for firm characteristics and performance, more BLACK BUSINESSES, p7
January 6 - 19, 2021 • jfp.ms
courtesy Rockefeller Foundation
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OVID-19 has hit Black-owned businesses in Jackson hard, but Otis Rolley III, senior vice president of The Rockefeller Foundation’s U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative, is eager to work with them for the long haul. On Dec. 15, the organization announced Jackson’s addition to The Rockefeller Foundation Opportunity Collective, or ROC, a program launched in June to address the disproportionate effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on minority-owned businesses by investing $1 million in 12 U.S. cities. They are Atlanta, Ga.; Boston, Mass., Chicago, Ill., El Paso and Houston, Texas; MiamiDade County, Fla.; Louisville, Ky; Newark, N.J.; Norfolk, Va.; Oakland, Calif.; Baltimore, Md.; and Jackson, with the last two cities added in December. Rolley has a master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined the Rockefeller Foundation in 2019 after decades of urban economic-development experience in different cities. He told the Jackson Free Press he is delighted to work toward rectifying the city’s race-based economic imbalance. “Jackson is almost 80% African American, yet American Africans only have about 25% of the city’s economy,” Rolley said. “And so we want to be part of the solution and part of both of the policy change and the programmatic change to really try to steer dollars more towards those (disadvantaged) individuals.” PolicyLink and Program for Environmental and Regional Equity jointly released a paper in 2017 titled “An Equity Profile of Jackson,” which concludes that the poverty rate for African Americans in the city is more than triple the rate for white people. “Black residents of Jackson are more likely than White residents to be unemployed,” the report said. “About 11 percent of African American adults between ages 25 to 64 are unemployed, compared with only four percent of the White population.” “African Americans in the city are
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