ICIC boosts economic life in inner cities
By the time Richelieu Dennis sold a minority stake in Sundial Brands to Bain Capital for a reported $700 million in 2015, the Liberian-born entrepreneur had become Exhibit A for the methodical work done by the Roxbury-based nonprofit Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.
Founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, ICIC has been combining targeted training of innercity small business owners with assistance in securing capital in order to generate income and jobs in inner cities across America. ICIC had helped advise Dennis in the mid-2000s on how to grow the personal care products company he had founded when the Babson graduate felt it had stalled, and that he needed help in taking it to the next level.
With ICIC’s guidance, Dennis’ formidable skills brought Sundial to levels not only new but sky-high. Last year, Dennis sold the remainder of Sundial to Unilever, and last week he announced the launch of a $100 million New Voices Fund to support woman entrepreneurs of color.
ICIC’s mentoring of Richelieu Dennis and all the good that has flowed from it is perhaps the highest profile example of what the organization, headquartered in Roxbury’s Dudley Square, has been doing for the last quarter-century to train, guide and find capital for small businesses with the potential to vitalize urban areas that had been written off.
“It’s all about empowering inner-city entrepreneurs to help them grow,” said CEO Steve Grossman, himself a product of Harvard Business School and the former state treasurer of Massachusetts. “While government can help, it’s all about private sector investment.”
ICIC began as a research group that assigned itself the task of devising strategies to transform American inner cities through fresh streams of revenue and work. It concluded that supporting and growing small businesses within those inner cities was the key, and could serve as an impactmultiplier.
Backed by such financial powerhouses as Goldman Sachs, Santander Bank and Bank of America, and under the leadership of Porter, Grossman and longtime President Matt Camp, ICIC has developed a series of programs to train small business owners and executives in marketing, finance and leadership, and to help them locate and maintain access to capital.
It has been rigorous about marrying skill-building with concrete help in obtaining funding, and one measure of its success is the number of partners of stature it has enlisted around the country. Another is its reach: In the last 13 years, it has helped more than 3,000 separate small businesses in over 200 American cities. Some twothirds of those businesses are minority owned, and nearly 40 percent of them are owned by women.
For Grossman, who was asked by Porter to consider joining ICIC after he narrowly lost a Democratic primary contest for governor in 2014, the organization’s work is a natural extension of his work as state treasurer. While in office, he directed that over $300 million in state funds which had been deposited in overseas banks be transferred to more than 50 community banks around Massachusetts. Those community banks, which were required to guarantee the same rates of return as the overseas institutions, then used the deposits to make loans to local businesses. This translated into about a billion dollars in capital to individuals and small businesses in the form of some 10,000 separate loans.
“The goal,” said Grossman, a longtime small businessman in his own right, “was to level the playing field for immigrant, veteran, minority and womenowned businesses.”
Grossman, one part policy wonk and one part Energizer Bunny, quotes the biblical injunction — found in Isaiah 58:12, he will have it known — to meet one’s obligation to be a “repairer of the breach.”
Hurtling from city to city, from meeting to meeting, with his trademark enthusiasm, Grossman and his ICIC colleagues slowly, steadily make a difference, and make it possible for others to do the same.