MINORITIES

The call to action comes against a backdrop of a widening wealth gap between whites and minorities and calls for Memphis and Shelby County governments to rectify historically disproportionate spending with white firms.

“The economic pie in Memphis has not grown significantly for the past several years and the minority participation rate is, quite frankly, dismal,” said Mary Frances Winters of The Winters Group, a diversity consultant who led the panel discussion.

Buy Local is borrowed from the Billion Dollar Roundtable, 18 Fortune 1000 companies that have achieved an average 9.8 percent spending rate on minority- and femaleowned businesses, Winters said.

“The Buy Local strategy transcends the idea of taking from one demographic group to another,” Winters said. “We often times have a scarcity mentality that the pie is fixed. We’re talking about expanding the pie for everybody in this plan.”

Yancy said: “This study that the MMBC has done, I consider it very accurate. We called a number of companies. We pulled a lot of data. So I think the number ... is a very conservative number. So hopefully with the chamber’s help, with the Chairman’s Circle and others, we can adopt a Buy Local strategy and impact minority receipts and small-business receipts immediately.”

Chamber president Phil Trenary, who was one of the panelists, said afterward that he expects the chamber and its leadership group, the Chairman’s Circle, will take up the Buy Local idea in the future.

Trenary said the chamber is focused on related initiatives that include certification for femaleand minority-owned businesses, pairing of mentors and protégés and growing the number of jobs and minority businesses.

Joining Trenary on the panel were Jerry Collins, chief executive of Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division; Gary Shorb, chief executive of Methodist Le Bonheur HealthCare; and Frank Sanders, vice president, technology and manufacturing of Intel Corp.

Collins and Shorb said they divide large contracts into smaller pieces when possible to improve the prospects of minority and local companies winning the business.

Collins said MLGW spending on minority, female-owned and local businesses doubled between 2012 and last year.

“It is my belief a strong supplier diversity program is always in the best interest of the customers of MLGW,” Collins said.

Sanders said the computer chip maker went out on a limb in 2015 and committed to spend $1 billion a year with diverse companies by 2020.

At the time, Sanders said, “Our spend was about $140 million. Do we have a clear path in understanding how we’re going to get there? No. The bottom line is we recognize that was such an important imperative that we had to figure out a way to go do it. We had to be bold. We had to make a commitment. We strongly believe that what gets measured gets done.”

Shorb said Methodist embedded minority firms within prime contractor Turner Construction Co. on its Olive Branch and Methodist University construction projects to help build the minority firms’ business capacity.

Spending more with minority firms “can’t be just a program,” Shorb said. “It’s got to be part of the culture of an organization. It’s got to be an expectation of the leadership.”