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September 25, 2019

Creating a more ‘inclusive’ ecosystem for entrepreneurs

PHOTOS | New Haven Biz Panelists (l-r) Gergen, Hurst, Smith and Lee at Wednesday morning’s session on creating a more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem at the Omni.
By Michael C. Bingham

A provocative “conversation” convened by the region’s largest philanthropic organization on Wednesday challenged attendees to transform New Haven into a place where opportunity and economic well-being are treated as precious community assets to be shared by all.

“Cities like New Haven can be laboratories of place-based inclusive entrepreneurship.” 

So asserted Christopher Gergen, co-founder and CEO of North Carolina-based Forward Cities, a national network of communities seeking to stimulate and nurture greater entrepreneurial activity, particularly within minority communities. New Haven joined the Forward Cities roster in May.

Gergen was a panelist in a breakout session titled “Creating Opportunity Through an Inclusive Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.” The session was part of a conference, Creating a Future of Opportunity, convened Wednesday morning by the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven and held at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale.

The conference was predicated on the principle that opportunity to create new businesses and generate wealth exists in the nation and in Connecticut, but is not equally accessible to all.  

On the national level, Gergen said, there are 2.6 million enterprises owned by African-Americans — but 90 percent are sole proprietorships. And in Connecticut, he added, white business owners are 19 times more likely to employ workers than their minority counterparts.

That disparity is of course reflective of the larger income gap in Connecticut and beyond. In New Haven County, Gergen said, the poverty rate among its 860,000 residents is 11 percent, but in the urban centers of New Haven and Waterbury, that figure approaches 60 percent. And the rate of business starts by minority entrepreneurs in New Haven pales in comparison to their peers in cities like Buffalo, N.Y. and Pittsburgh.

Margaret Lee and Caroline Smith are boots on the ground in setting that entrepreneurial ecosystem in motion in the Elm City. Two years ago, the Yale College alumnae founded Collab, an entrepreneurship incubator/accelerator that focuses on building new companies from scratch, particularly in the minority community. Lee and Smith joined Gergen on the Wednesday morning panel, which also included Peter Hurst, president and CEO of the Greater New England Minority Supplier Development Council.

Lee and Smith created Collab in 2017 so that the ideal of wealth-generation and economic prosperity could  be “broadened and deepened” to facilitate access to opportunity to all residents of the New Haven community. To accomplish that, a truly inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem needs a “large open door.”

Hurst’s group seeks to link minority-owned companies throughout New England not only to one another, but especially to larger companies to which they may supply goods and services. Minority-owned companies “need financial capital, they need intellectual capital — but most of all they need contracts,” Hurst said.

In his opening remarks to conference attendees, Community Foundation President and CEO William W. Ginsberg called the event a “day of discovery about how we as a community can create a future of opportunity” for more members of the community.

Community Foundation head Ginsberg offers opening remarks to attendees of the group’s ‘Creating a Future of Opportunity’ conference Wednesday morning.

To facilitate that, the Foundation had created an agenda that was “not about economic development or social programs as we traditionally talk about them, but about creating greater opportunity for more of our residents in a time of declining social mobility and widening income disparity.”

 

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