IEDL 2021
Supporting and Scaling Black -owned and Black -led Businesses
The 2021 IEDL project Supporting and Scaling Black-owned and Black-led Businesses was inspired by one statistic. The oft cited, and alarming statistic that 41% of Black owned businesses closed in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Like so much else about the first pandemic year, statistics like this one shed light on the inequalities of our society and the differential exposure to the vortex of vulnerabilty at the intersection of race and class in the United States.
City of New Haven Stakeholder Deliverables
This year, the IEDL worked more closely on city stakeholder projects, structured as student engagments on deliverables led by two city “clients,” the Black Business Alliance (BBA) and the Elm City Communities (ECC). The ECC project developed a preliminary set of analyses to be of use for the ECC adminisrators as they assess the ECC’s entrepreneurship program. For the BBA project, the IEDL coordinated with the Yale Law School Community Economic Development Clinic to review best practices for engaging anchor institutions on diversifying supply chains resulting in a white paper for the BBA.
NHE3 Landscape Study
Over the summer of 2021, Professor Kate Cooney in collaboration with Mark Abraham at DataHaven were engaged by The Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, Mission Investments Company to conduct a landscape study for the New Haven Equitable Entrepreneurship Ecosystem (NHE3) coalition. This study built upon insights developed over the IEDL Spring 2021 Lab and included additional research from RAs Sam Ahn, Patrick Hayes and Tabitha Njubi. A motivation for participating in the study was to pass along the knowledge generated from the Spring IEDL to key stakeholders in the community actively working on these issues. Click below for the accompanying written report and powerpoint deck from the NHE3 project.
Below, see video recording from the final NHE3 Landscape presentation to the coalition reviewing the key findings in report above.
Selected Conversations, Spring 2021
We are excited to share with you in video form, selected conversations from the Spring 2021 IEDL, that form the basis for key episodes in the CitySCOPE podcast, Season 3. The Podcast is heavily produced to create thematic episodes that weave together several interviews in a narrative format that explores the focal theme of Scaling and Supporting Black-owned and -led Businesses. Below, we feature a selection of the interviews in full, unedited form.
