Boosting local business

Partnership will help fund minorities, women

Citi Foundation and Living Cities announced Thursday that they are partnering with Milwaukee and four other cities to fund initiatives that will support local businesses, especially those owned by women and minorities.

The partnership is offered through the organizations’ City Accelerator program, which provides municipalities with technical assistance and a relatively small amount of grant funding that they can use to test new programs without risking city tax money.

This year, the main focus of the cohort is to solve issues in city procurement processes for local businesses, with an added focus on populations that may be underserved.

“By opening up the procurement process to small and diverse businesses owned by people of color, cities have an incredible opportunity to realize the public’s vision of a thriving, vital economy,” Ben Hecht, who is the CEO of Living Cities, said in a statement.

Milwaukee, along with Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Tenn., and Charlotte, N.C., were each awarded $100,000 and will be offered assistance from an expert in city procurement and disparities that will help them develop the initiatives.

Milwaukee’s initiative would seek to address, among other things, the discrepancy between the majority of city residents who are minorities and the 30% of minority business owners in the city, program officials said.

“We know we can do better,” Mayor Tom Barrett said.

The city’s downtown area is seeing a boom of new development, Barrett said, and he would like to see that energy occur in every one of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods.

“Working with the City Accelerator on our procurement strategies will help connect us to more city businesses and support business growth throughout Milwaukee,” Barrett said in a statement.

Through the program, Barrett said, Milwaukee will seek to spark more bidding among women and minorities in the city and increase the number of awards that are given to those populations to start up businesses.

Along with funding and instruction, cities also are given the opportunity to meet with each other to share the progress of their efforts and to figure out what methods worked or did not.

The funding gives the municipal governments flexibility that they otherwise would not have due to budget limitations, said Brandee McHale, president of the Citi Foundation.

McHale said Milwaukee was chosen because of its “willingness and commitment” to examine long-established approaches to driving city growth and aim to change it to include all populations.

What Milwaukee and the other cities do with the program will be recorded and shared with other cities around the country, McHale said.