Small minority-owned businesses in Baltimore and elsewhere that struggle to access financing could get help through a new public-private federal partnership announced Monday in East Baltimore.
Officials with the U.S. Department of Commerce finalized a national agreement with St. Louis-based nonprofit Urban Strategies Inc. to bring resources such as access to capital and technical support to minority-owned businesses in Baltimore and about two dozen other metro areas.
Those are “all the things that minority-owned businesses have had challenges with in the past,” said Esther Shin, Urban Strategies’ president, during an event at Perkins Square, the city’s former Perkins Homes public housing that’s being redeveloped as mixed-income housing, and where the nonprofit is working with residents. “The partnership is really an effort to remove those barriers.”
Urban Strategies has a designation as a community development financial institution, allowing it to offer financial services in low-wealth communities and to people who lack access to financing.
Officials from the Commerce Department came to Baltimore to announce that Urban Strategies was joining its network because of the nonprofit’s work in the city and growth of the city’s entrepreneurial community, said Eric Morrissette, the acting under secretary of commerce for the federal Minority Business Development Agency.
The agency has been increasing its partnerships and currently has more than 100 co-operative agreements with groups around the country as well as memorandums of understanding with other community development financial institutions and federal agencies.
“Our job is to create wealth, wealth for minority businesses around the country,” Morrissette said.
Business owner Ancill McDonald said that after several years of trying to get her Maryland Skin Care Institute off the ground, she was able to move forward and hire a worker after Urban Strategies helped her get a loan. She said she will be moving her business from Prince George’s County to Baltimore.
“It’s a nightmare as a small business, especially minority-owned, woman-owned” to connect with funding, McDonald said, but Urban Strategies helped her to find someone “who shared that dream with me.”
Officials with the Housing Authority of Baltimore City said Monday that supporting minority businesses dovetails with the city’s strategy of revitalizing communities, such as in East Baltimore, where the Perkins Somerset Oldtown redevelopment will include 796 units with a one-for-one replacement of public housing units mixed with workforce and market rate housing. A first phase of 103 mixed-income apartments was completed in April.
“Starting a business is a difficult project. Maintaining a business is an even greater challenge,” said Michael Moore, the housing authority’s executive vice president and chief administrative officer. But “revenue from these local businesses tends to stay in the community. When small businesses do well, so do the local communities.”