City’s diversity office celebrates success, but work remains
Being homeless wasn’t going to cut it for Shelisa Cox. She likes prettying up places too much.
“I’ve always had a thing for decorating,” said Cox, whose two-year-old business, Sophisticated Events, specializes in planning events and adding touches such as balloon arches and other festive trappings.
Cox’s touch also extends to costumes and accessories — like her tan, UGG-style boots with rhinestone S’s emblazoned on them, the bubble umbrella with lines from “Still I Rise,” and other Maya Angelou poems. Her house, she says, is decorated beautifully.
Yet 13 years ago Cox, who has three children, had no home to beautify — a predicament that she described as life happening to her. Being in that place, she said, was part of what motivated her to start her own business: to be in control of her destiny.
But, Cox said, she couldn’t have done that without help from the city’s Office of Business Diversity & Compliance, which recently honored people like her with doughnuts, coffee and prizes at its Customer Appreciation Day.
It was that office’s seminars on how to manage money, how to obtain licensing and all the business dos and don’ts, Cox said, that prepared her to take her leap into the business world.
Joann Lewis-Massey, director of that office, said that since it opened in 2016, it has played a key role in preparing people like Cox for such leaps.
After a study released that year showed the disparity between white-owned businesses and minorityowned businesses awarded contracts with the city of Memphis was increasing, Mayor Jim Strickland’s administration created the diversity and compliance office to help remedy that.
Among other things, it helps by taking small, minority and women-owned businesses through steps toward receiving city certification. It also shows them how to apply for microloans and other resources and opportunities, Massey said. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” she said. The program is showing some signs of success. In December of 2015, Massey said, only 12.67 percent of city contracts went to small and minority-owned businesses. That has since doubled to 24 percent, she said.
Of that 24 percent, 18 percent are owned by AfricanAmericans, Massey said. Prior to 2016, the city didn’t record the percentage of small and minority contracts by race.
“But you track what you care about, and this is what this administration cares about,” she said. However, Strickland said work remains. “We have to diversify the businesses that we contract with,” he said. “There’s not an auto dealership here owned by an African-American or a woman ... no African-American business installs speed bumps . ... We’ve got to change that.”
Strickland is right. But changing that will require addressing the deep poverty that has languished way too long in a city where 64 percent of the people are African-American but 30 percent are poor.
That means many come from environments that don’t allow them to dream of owning a car dealership, or a business where they can make money fixing the streets instead of trying to survive on them.
While Memphis has shown some success with black-owned companies — two business publications, Black Enterprise and Fast Company, recently recognized Memphis as the top city for African-American entrepreneurs — it has been tough for those businesses to grow. Few have paid employees.
But in the meantime, if the diversity and compliance office can supply people like Cox with wings to let their dreams take flight, that’s not only good for her, it’s good for Memphis. If she’s successful, then she’s contributing to the tax base and all the things that make the city work.
It also helps that Cox is doing well at something that she loves and that Massey and others in that office helped her figure out how to make money from it.
“I’ve always been a leader, and since I was 8, I’ve always known that I wanted to do something out of the box,” Cox said.
A box that once included homelessness. And one that she escaped by following her dreams.