Black Biz Backers Get $1M Boost

by LISA REISMAN

A vegan baker, a mobile notary, and a professional organizer were among the 20 hand-picked Greater New Haven minority business owners to embark on a rigorous entrepreneurial boot camp and to benefit from a new $1 million grant designed to help that program and its participants thrive.

That grant was given by the KeyBank Foundation to the Connecticut Community Outreach Revitalization Program (ConnCORP) to set up the new ConnCORP/Quinnipiac Community Entrepreneurship Academy and Clinic.

Supporters of the program gathered on Tuesday at the Lab at ConnCORP at 496 Newhall St. to celebrate the $1 million grant and the entrepreneurial education it will allow for.

The community impact grant, which will be dispensed in $200,000 increments over the next five years, is designed to “help address the entrepreneurial challenges facing the Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods,” KeyBank’s Matthew Hummel told a spirited group of 20 attendees.

The grant reinforces a successful partnership between KeyBank and ConnCORP Board Chair Carlton Highsmith and CEO Erik Clemons that began in 2012 and continued with a $1 million grants to the related job-training nonprofit ConnCAT in 2018.

“We embraced their vision of building a place where people could be inspired to come, to learn, and to change their life path,” Hummel said. “I’ve seen first-hand the immediate impact these programs can have on our communities, especially for the underserved.”

With ConnCORP embarking on a largescale revitalization project to transform the Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods, the grant is timely.

To hear Highsmith, who serves on the board of directors at KeyBank, tell it, it’s also crucial.

To underscore the issues besetting Black business development, Highsmith cited a 2019 Newhallville and Dixwell Neighborhood Community Index created by ConnCAT in partnership with the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.

“One of the highlights for me was the lack of quality and scalable Black-owned businesses capable of creating jobs,” he said.

That’s where ConnCORP, a for-profit subsidiary of ConnCAT, as well as the Entrepreneurship Academy, come in.

“Local minority-owned businesses and entrepreneurs in the Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods suffer challenges like lack of access to knowledgeable networks and, most importantly, access to capital,” said ConnCORP Lab Executive

Director Aya Beckles Swanson.

The grant, she said, “will be used to develop the entrepreneurial support ecosystem ConnCORP is building in these neighborhoods.” For local businesses, “it will help bridge the gap between the initial idea and business success.”

That’s the objective of the Entrepreneurship Academy, which kicked off last weekend with the first cohort of 20 minority-owned businesses from Greater New Haven.

The academy and clinic, which is being taught by Quinnipiac professors and business students, will culminate in a pitch competition and up to $5,500 in seed money from the federal Small Business Administration for each participant who makes it through the course.

“It’s going to be spread over 12 weekends,” Swanson said of the program, which will use a blended format of inperson and virtual coaching. The Lab at ConnCorp will host the in-person workshops and virtual business clinics.

Click here to read a list of all of the entrepreneurs participating in the program.

According to this Patch article, some of the participants include BLOOM’s Alisha Crutchfield, Ekow Body’s Candice Dormon, and Noir Vintage & Co.‘s Evelyn Massey.

A stipend will afford the small business owners and “solopreneurs” the financial wherewithal to engage in the program.

“A lot of the businesses selected don’t have staff to support them, and they need not just that support, but also support to continue to stay in the class, so over the course of the training program, they’ll receive funds for child care, for travel,” Swanson said.

In addition to the Academy, KeyBank’s funding over the next five years will help the Lab sustain its mission as a business incubator for the exchange of ideas and support among new and existing community-based businesses.

“We have 100 people coming to networking events, mixers, and training in financial literacy, and also the speaker series,” said Sarah Blanding, ConnCORP’s chief investment officer. There’s also a quarterly investment roundtable for women of color designed to overcome the intimidation many feel about investing in capital markets.

CEO Erik Clemons praised KeyBank for its “unwavering commitment to our mission.”

“What the Lab is doing in the name of creating businesses and filling in gaps of existing businesses is addressing poverty,” he said. “A lot of time, if not always, organizations address disparities in poverty but not poverty itself.”

The partnership with KeyBank has helped in that regard as well.

“It’s really, really special because a lot of Black-owned businesses and blackgoverned organizations do not have the luxury of having an incredible financial institution who backs them up on everything they do,” he said.

Washington Movement’s threat to lead a 50,000-strong Black worker’s march into Washington, D.C. And all three of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act were concessions to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Every advance, improvement in our quality of life and access to the levers of power to determine our destiny has been achieved through struggle. John Lewis advised, “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” presser, marks an important construction project of a different kind for students like Mohammed. It allows for “the demolition of significant financial barriers” for eligible students from surrounding neighborhoods as well as “the building of pathways and opportunities” for those same students to step into high-demand parts of the economy.

Lewis’ advice is true not just for the 21st century, but also during the antebellum period, as seen in the narratives of the enslaved, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, to testimonials about lynchings and ongoing police violence against African Americans. With the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, and thousands of other Black women, men, and trans people there are new movements (i.e. #Sayhername) and organizations (i.e. Black Lives Matter) that are pushing for the justice system to investigate police involved shootings and white supremacist vigilantes. Nearly 179 years ago, the Rev. Henry Highland Garnett proposed that the only path to freedom, justice, and equality; self-determination; and/or social transformation is resistance. In thunder tones, Garnett shouted, “Let your motto be resistance! resistance! RESISTANCE!

Hill Alder Ron Hurt, one of the lead negotiators from the Board of Alders on the 101 College St. deal, said that the biosciences industry “has become a core part of our city’s economics” over the past three decades. “Still, there is a significant potential for more growth.” We as a city cannot be satisfied, he said, with the economic success of bioscience companies and developers if young people from nearby neighborhoods remain all-too-often stuck in cycles of violence, disinvestment, and lack of opportunity.

Such a fund “changes the geographical mistakes of urban renewal,” Hurt said. “We still have a ways to go. But we have come a long way.”

Scholarship applications will be posted in February to the New Haven Scholarship Fund’s.

After the presser, Winstanley told the Independent that the core and shell of the new 101 College St. building should be finished by early fall of this year, and the first tenant spaces should be open for business by early 2024.

By resisting Black people have achieved triumphs, successes, and progress as seen in the end of chattel slavery, dismantling of Jim and Jane Crow segregation in the South, increased political representation at all levels of government, desegregation of educational institutions, the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History in DC and increased and diverse representation of Black experiences in media. Black resistance strategies have served as a model for every other social movement in the country, thus, the legacy and importance of these actions cannot be understated.

As societal and political forces escalate to limit access to and exercise of the ballot, eliminate the teaching of Black history, and work to push us back into the 1890s, we can only rely on our capacity to resist. The enactment of HR 40, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the Breathe Act, and the closure of the racial wealth gap is not the end. They too will require us to mobilize our resources, human and material, and fight for “freedom, justice, and equality”; “self-determination”, and/or “social transformation.”

This is a call to everyone, inside and outside the academy, to study the history of Black Americans’ responses to establish safe spaces, where Black life can be sustained, fortified, and respected.