As small businesses and startups continue to drive economic growth, the Urban League of Louisiana Women’s Business Resource and Entrepreneurship Center (WBR & EC), as well as our extension, the Contractor’s Resource Center (CRC), continue to provide access to education, capital, and mentorship through a vast array of technical assistance offerings.  As a result of the extensive, one-on-one interactive trainings, long-term professional business advising, and other specialized services clients receive, our program remains one of New Orleans’ most impactful business assistance programs serving the southeast region of our state.

In response to Louisiana’s unprecedented regional growth and development, the CRC was created to expand the Urban League of Louisiana’s efforts to develop economic and inclusion opportunities for small, disadvantaged business enterprises (DBEs), certified, minority, and women-owned contracting firms. Historically, access to robust technological tools, programs and training has been an issue for minority businesses, resulting in less profits and limited growth. The Urban League of Louisiana provides clients with access to state-of-the-art, technology-based resources, which include an architectural plotter/printer and a computer lab equipped with contractor-specific software programs to facilitate online training in electronic estimating, project management, construction safety, compliance, back-office structure, commercial licensing preparation, and other related topics.

The WBR & EC and CRC serve as pathways to securing economic parity for African Americans and other underserved communities, ensuring access for these businesses and training on 21st century tools, such as PlanSwift, billed as the number one takeoff and estimating software. These technological investments makes it easy for our clients to adjust cost projections and simplify the recalculating process, thereby allowing our clients to bid more jobs faster and help grow their businesses.  

Not only does the Urban League of Louisiana provide training on these programs for low to no cost, saving our clients thousands of dollars, but we also offer discounts on the software programs, to ensure that our clients have access to best-in-class, industry-specific software. New businesses can become members of the CRC and use our computer lab to learn the software and apply its benefits to growing their enterprises.

To maximize public awareness of our resources and services, we manage robust social media campaigns and amplify our marketing by leveraging relationships with local and state partners, such as Louisiana Economic Development Department.

The economic impact of the WBR & EC and CRC in supporting small business development has been significant. In 2017 alone, the centers provided counseling and training services to more than 600 clients and assisted entrepreneurs in securing: $18.3 million in bonding capacity, nearly $900,000 in financing, and $26.3 million in contracts. We oversaw the creation of 36 new businesses and 80 new jobs, proving that investments in technology can advance economic and entrepreneurial vitality.

With 80 years of service as our region’s oldest civil rights organization, the Greater Washington Urban League understands the need to prepare our community to effectively manage the constant stream of new technologies reshaping our society. However, our primary focus is not simply to adapt to our new digital reality. We are committed to developing a response plan that encourages a new generation of thinkers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Black America’s collective response to emerging technology will determine whether it is an opportunity—or an existential threat.

Here in Washington, D.C., we recognize that we are more than the nation’s capital. The Greater Washington region is among the fastest growing incubators of innovative technological development. With one of the largest concentrations of Black residents in the country, there is an enormous opportunity to ensure that our young people are not only consumers, but conceptualizers, creators and developers of new technology. To achieve this goal, our approach has been far reaching and driven on STEM fundamentals. We have also expanded our advocacy ecosystem, and have engaged think tanks and research institutions as part of our multi-pronged strategy to influence conversation, policymaking and outcomes.

We began our work with a combination of forward-thinking programming and awareness campaigns, using social media as a key communications component of our work.  One core initiative was the Greater Washington Urban League’s Entrepreneurship Incubator Program, an intensive, specially-tailored 10-week initiative designed to encourage and foster new minority and women-owned small businesses in the District of Columbia, Prince George’s County and Montgomery County, Maryland. Our entrepreneurs underwent more than two months of training with an EIP counselor. At the end of the program, one finalist was selected to launch a start-up with the support of the program.

We face a grave, triple threat throughout the Greater Washington area. Black unemployment, particularly in the District of Columbia, is much higher than many are willing to admit. There are too few Black-owned businesses despite the high concentration of Black residents. And a national college affordability crisis is preventing many talented and deserving Black men and women from attending college and attaining their American dream.

To combat these systemic challenges, we encourage policymakers to dismantle barriers to equity; we call on established businesses to make necessary investments in workforce development; and we urge leaders in our region to build access to quality education. Most importantly, we call on Black America to see the opportunity—not seek shelter from the change. Technology can become the very thing that will help us control our fate, create our destiny and change the narrative.

It’s no secret that technology is disrupting, reshaping, driving and altering our lives and economy.

Today, we are more connected than we’ve ever been at any point in history. Ideas and capital flow via a stream of electrons. Everyday tasks are being revolutionized. Technology is boosting productivity.  Working from anywhere is seamless.  And digital wealth is being generated.

But can we do better? Can we harness this digital revolution to better improve our lives and communities?

The answer is “yes.”

The digital revolution hasn’t reached its full potential because too many of our best and brightest aren’t included.

Unfortunately, too many young people are locked out of the emerging tech economy due to barriers tied to gender, race and zip code. These individuals are the great untapped potential that techquity could unleash. But how do we take the idea of techquity and make it a reality?

First, we need to prepare our young people for these good jobs.  Far too few of our high schools—just 25 percent—offer Advanced Placement (AP) computer science programs, in part because of a shortage of qualified teachers.

These schools are seldomly located in communities of color (just 20 percent of AP computer science test takers are African American or Latino). And with respect to gender diversity, women represent only 27 percent of test takers – a number that narrows again when you consider women of color.

We are making progress—some of these numbers have doubled over the last year, but they are still, tragically, miniscule. In that vein, change starts at the most elementary level, which is why we must invest in training and hiring more computer science teachers for our schools. 

In Congress, I’ve offered legislation to increase the number of STEM educators by providing tuition and loan forgiveness incentives to those who dedicate five years to training the next generation of coders and developers.

Additionally, the techquity movement is one that needs to invest in our neighbors. While our economy is creating many new jobs, too few of our neighbors have the right skills to fill them. In Chicagoland, Manufacturing Renaissance Chicago estimates there are 15,000 unfilled advanced manufacturing jobs with an average starting salary of $70,000. With as little as six weeks of training, we can get our neighbors the appropriate skills necessary to take on these jobs and make things right here in America.

In pushing to power a greater digital revolution, I’m fighting for more and better job training programs. Using a model successfully developed in my district, I’m working to incentivize community colleges and employers to work together on course curriculum, so students graduate career-ready and with solid industry connections.

I’m also working to ensure that we provide ample opportunity for all to access technological innovation. We need more programs like Black Girls Code, STEM boot camps, hack-a-thons and   innovation hubs like Blue1647 in my district.

These opportunities expose young people to STEM, offer training, and foster businesses that can become community cornerstones that create jobs, opportunity and long term economic growth.

Tech companies and start-ups often locate to regions where residents have high-tech acumen.  There’s a direct line from a qualified workforce to economic development and economic opportunity.  This innovation culture is a perfect example of, “If you build it, they will come.”

We know what’s necessary to throw open the doors of opportunity for young people. The question is “can we get it done?”

In a year that began with #ThankYouBlackWomen trending on Twitter, let’s remember that we are strengthened by our diversity, and continue to fight for techquity for our families, neighbors and communities.

In today’s economy, the information technology sector offers the best long-term growth and wealth building opportunity. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our economy is expected to add 557,100 new IT jobs between 2016 and 2026, representing a 13% growth—which is faster than the average for all occupations. And, in 2016, the median annual wage for computer and information technology occupations was $82,860—higher than the median annual wage of $37,040 for non-tech jobs.

Despite dramatic growth in the IT sector, a survey [1] found that the combined percentage of African-American tech workers at Facebook, Yahoo, Airbnb and Google hovered at 1%—and those statistics did not improve in 2017.

Studies have shown that the lack of diversity in the workforce cannot be blamed on low numbers of Black and Brown people receiving technology training and degrees. The number of African-American graduates with tech degrees is two to three times greater than the hire rate of these graduates by Silicon Valley or other tech firms. Students of color are well represented in college technology departments. The employment problem has deep-seated roots, including bias in hiring and promotions, and the perception (or reality) of an unwelcoming environment tamping down the number of possible candidates.

In 2011, the Urban League of Greater Atlanta began to focus on the challenge of placing more people of color into high tech jobs and careers with the creation of the H1B Technical Skills Training Program. The joint project was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor in collaboration with the international accounting and consulting firm, Ernst & Young, and  Clark Atlanta University’s School of Business. The program provided 145 primarily African-American, college educated, long-term unemployed and underemployed men and women with on-the-job training at Ernst & Young, which eventually led to positions as certified system architects and system analysts to high-level clients in an eight month period. The project achieved a 93% employment and retention rate.

This year, we launched Career Pathways to Empowerment, a workforce development platform that offers employers access to highly trained talent, and job seekers the opportunity to explore high demand and high paying career pathways, particularly in the IT sector. Clients will receive the training and credentials required to enter their respective fields, from entry level help desk work to coding, network engineering, cybersecurity, and more.

Building on the success of the H1B training program, we are laying the foundation to serve as a bridge between our clients and our employer partners, training providers, and educational institutions. The Urban League of Greater Atlanta is poised to make a significant impact on the breadth and depth of diversity in IT professions and on wealth building through IT in African-American communities.

[1] “The Alarming Downsides to Tech Industry Diversity Reports,” Sidney Fussell, December 13, 2016

The data is clear—and irrefutable. Underrepresented minorities currently make up 30% of our nation’s population (a number projected to reach more than 40% by 2050), but in the STEM field, they are poorly represented with only 12.5% earning STEM degrees in 2011. The demand for qualified STEM professionals is high, but the supply is low. Therefore, it is critical that more people from marginalized communities pursue careers in these fields, but that is easier said than done.

Underrepresented minorities traditionally complete high school at lower rates than their peers and tend to score lower on standardized tests, creating real barriers to college admission.  For those who gain college admission and major in undergraduate STEM studies, retention-to-graduation rates are comparatively low as well.  As a result, STEM employers are faced with a growing shortage of skilled STEM candidates and the STEM workforce does not reflect the diversity of America.

The Urban League of Palm Beach County has an active Project Ready STEM program, that prepares middle through high school students for college, work and life with an emphasis on STEM learning and career readiness. Funding was secured to ensure that our kids, who attend underperforming schools in high poverty communities, receive the best education. The target population for Project Ready STEM is low income, minority, urban or rural youth enrolled in Title I schools in West Palm Beach, Riviera Beach and the Glades. Our program is currently working with 50 rising freshmen through their junior year in high school.

Project Ready STEM is designed to train a qualified workforce of color to meet the growing needs of the STEM sector labor market. This is especially important for Palm Beach County as the tech corridor continues to grow in Boca Raton and biotech companies at the north end of our county continue to flourish. In order to prepare a diverse population of future workers, we aim to ignite an interest in STEM careers through experiential-learning and career exploration.  Project Ready STEM helps us achieve this goal, and goes a step further by preparing participants for success in post-secondary education. By providing ongoing discussions and workshops, more students can develop at grade level with the skills they need to be successful and graduate, and pursue a STEM education in college.

We will continue to build the next generation of young scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians of color who can change the world and change the numbers of underrepresented minorities thriving in STEM.

“Over-mentored, but under-sponsored.”

 –BIG 2018 applicant response to the question “Why are you applying to BIG 2018 Incubator?”

Earlier this year, as I reviewed over 200 applications for our BIG 2018 Incubator, I noticed a theme that I could not ignore. When it comes to their entrepreneurial journey, Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs (BLWE) want more than a periodic coffee chat or email exchange.They are looking for someone to not just tell them to keep knocking on doors, but someone who is willing to take them by the hand, walk them to the doors, show them the keys (and where to find them), unlock the doors, and walk them in.

Mentorship is important, but sponsorship is key.

No place is this more true than in the innovation economy. Black and Latinx women have been an important factor in the growth of the innovation economy. While the rise of technologies like cloud servers, machine learning, and mobile devices reduce the unit economics of entrepreneurship; structural, cultural, and financial barriers limit the participation of BLWEs in the rewards of the innovation economy. Entrepreneurs don’t need a bank loan to start a website. They don’t even need a computer. But they do need training, support and money.

This is where we come in.

digitalundivided (DID), a social enterprise founded in 2013, takes an innovative, transformative approach to economic empowerment by building a data-driven ecosystem that harnesses entrepreneurship, innovation and technology as tools of change for Black and Latinx women founders and their communities. Our theory of change is rooted in the belief that providing innovative women founders from these communities with the training, capital and networks they need to build and scale their businesses, impacts the economic development and growth of their communities and prepares them for professional and personal success.

DID is focused on three primary goals:

1. To develop a vibrant, data-driven ecosystem that tracks, assesses, and expands the current body of data and insights about Black and Latinx women founders.
2. To create Confident Founders who can demonstrate their ability to grow a company, attract customers and investors, and articulate where they are going, what they need to get there, and how they can manage risk.
3. To empower Black and Latinx technology women for career, personal, and life success.

DID uses data from #ProjectDiane, digitalundivided’s on-going research initiative that gathers data on women of color in tech, to take an evidence-based approach to the development of our programs. Surprisingly, prior to #ProjectDiane, much of the research in the tech startup space didn’t include research on women founders, let alone Black and Latinx women CEOs. As a result, most of the data on women of color in tech was anecdotal. Over a six-month time period, DID conducted the primary research necessary to build the largest repository of data on Black and Latinx women startup founders. Analysis of this data continues to uncover alarming statistics that highlight the inequality and lack of opportunities for Black and Latinx women in the startup world.

And as the saying goes: numbers don’t lie.

Women of color, specifically Black and Latinx women, are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the United States, creating over 80% of the new women-led small businesses since 2007 (AMEX, 2016). Yet, there are only 88 U.S.-based Black women-led tech startups (#ProjectDiane, 2016). These startups represent only 4% of the women-led tech startups (compared with 35% of the U.S. female population) and receive less than .2% of all venture funding (#ProjectDiane, 2016). The average Black woman-led startup raises $36,000, while the average (mostly) white male failed startup raises $1.3 million (CB Insights, 2015).

The good news is that the data is improving. ProjectDiane 2018 will be released this summer, and we’ve found that the number of Black women-led startups that have raised more than $1 million in funding has more than doubled since 2016.

The #ProjectDiane data inspired what’s now our BIG Incubator program (BIG) – a nine-month incubator for high potential Black and Latinx women who are not currently served by traditional (mostly white, mostly male) business incubator and accelerator programming. We recruited our third cohort this spring. Applications were nearly double the previous cohort and graduates have made it to the finalist stage of accelerator and fellowship programs like Techstars, 500 Startups, and Echoing Green.

I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life (my first business was selling friendship bracelets to classmates after school). It can be tiring, thankless, and filled with moments of doubt. But the work we’re doing at digitalundivided and the success of our cohort graduates gives me hope that women of color with big, bold dreams and innovative ideas are finally becoming a visible and viable part of the innovation pipeline.

I know our work is far from over. But this is bigger than me. And it’s bigger than digitalundivided. If we stay the course at digitalundivided and if we are joined by those who believe in our mission and understand the importance of inclusive entrepreneurship to the economic stability of communities of color, then Black and Latinx women founders can no longer be dismissed, ignored, or overlooked. And anyone who tries will find him or herself on the wrong side of history.

Here's to the future!

By the end of 2017, the U.S. economy appeared to be booming. The stock market was at record highs; companies were competing with one another to announce bonuses for employees in response to federal tax cuts; and the unemployment rate dipped to 4.1%, its lowest since 2000. But in minority communities, many of these gains were passing folks by. Blacks are significantly less likely to invest in the stock market, so the bull market charged right past; the wealth gap between whites and Blacks continues to expand despite a seemingly resurgent economy; and the Black unemployment rate (6.8% at the end of 2017) remains several points higher than the overall average.   

For Black America, these dynamics are frustratingly familiar. Despite making significant progress in a number of important areas, economic opportunities continue to elude far too many members of the community. If true inclusiveness remains elusive in what some feel is a promising economic climate, what else might be done to assure equitable access to these gains?

It might be hard to believe, but there is a lot that can—and must—be done. And fortunately for people of color, much of this will happen in urban environments, where the vast majority of Blacks live.

In general, cities are thriving in the United States. Urban population totals continue to inch up, and diversity in many of the country’s largest cities is booming. While critical issues remain to be addressed in many instances, particularly around social justice, cities are increasingly looking to leverage their many tangible and intangible assets in an effort to reinvent themselves as hubs that can stoke innovation, bolster economic creation, and deliver more equitable outcomes to residents.

At the top of many local officials’ agendas is the determination to close the digital divide because those cities that do so will be positioned to harness the next generation of communications networks and the cutting-edge technologies that enable them to become “smart cities.” Advanced communications networks are rapidly emerging as the foundation upon which more intelligent urban environments will be built. The potential for these systems is enormous. The data generated by devices tapping into these networks will remake sectors from healthcare to education to government itself, creating a pervasive “internet of things” that will make transformative real-time services available to everyone regardless of where they live or how much they earn.

From a jobs perspective, a “smart cities” mindset is fertile ground for economic development. Indeed, many viable opportunities will arise across this new urban landscape, from helping to deploy and maintain the physical network infrastructure to spearheading efforts to harness these networks in the most transformative ways.

Jobs in the telecommunications space remain plentiful, due in large part to sustained investment in the construction, maintenance and operation of the far-reaching, complex advanced communications networks that connect millions of Americans to the internet. In 2017, nearly 900,000 Americans were employed in a sector where more than $70 billion was invested in network infrastructure. Equally important is that this sector has an impressive record of diversity, employing Blacks at a rate above the community’s share of the overall workforce.

Looking ahead, the prospects for jobs in this sector brighten even more. Accenture estimates that three million new jobs will be created each year during the construction and deployment of 5G and other next generation networks, like wireline, that will underlie smart cities. More than twice as many additional jobs will arise to support these new construction positions, which means that a total of about 120,000 new positions will come online as cities pursue this strategy. Ensuring that Blacks are ready, willing, and able to seize these opportunities will be critical, so action must be taken now to not only apprise would-be candidates of these positions, but also to begin thinking about how to deliver the education and training resources needed to create a viable pipeline for jobseekers. One way to achieve this goal is to establish apprenticeship programs. These programs, like the National Urban League’s Wireless Infrastructure Apprenticeship Access Initiative, provide access and on the job training for these high demand infrastructure jobs.

Additional employment and entrepreneurship opportunities will arise in the sectors that will be disrupted by these new networks. Coders, product designers, device makers, and other innovators will be needed to help harness these new services, creating ideal conditions for start-ups and new business creation to thrive in urban areas. Accenture estimates that the total number of such jobs could number in the tens of thousands in larger urban areas like Chicago and New York.

Securing these positions, though, will be difficult for several reasons. First, these positions generally require a specialized skill set. To date, Black educational attainment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) has lagged far behind other groups. Second, unlike the telecom space, the high-tech sector has a dismal record when it comes to workforce diversity, creating high barriers to entry for Blacks. Taken together, these impediments highlight the need for policymakers to play a more active role in facilitating these opportunities.

Realizing these many possibilities will require the concerted efforts of a broad range of stakeholders. Local officials will have to actively work with industry, educators, and community leaders to create a technology neutral policy framework that facilitates the expeditious deployment of next generation networks and ensures that economic opportunities are equitably distributed and accessible to as many people as possible. Taking affirmative steps toward unleashing investment in new networks and creating more favorable conditions for innovation and entrepreneurship provides cities with a competitive advantage in today’s global digital economy. Policymakers and other stakeholders must also recognize that acting now to create a diverse pool of skilled Black workers who will be able to fill new openings is critical. Otherwise, failure to seize these opportunities will mean that Black America, once again, finds itself on the sidelines of an economic revolution.