Empowering Change: How LISC and Chicago Housing Authority Are Transforming Opportunities for Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses

The COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning stemming from protests against police violence sparked a renewed appreciation for the role small businesses play in our communities. Since 2020, LISC has provided grants, loans, and technical assistance to more than 1,200 Chicago-area businesses, most of them owned by women or people of color. An important piece of this work is removing barriers minority- and woman-owned businesses (MWBE) face in receiving public contracts. 

Public contracts represent a major opportunity for MWBEs to build wealth and expand their businesses. In Illinois, in 2023, the state spent $1.3B in contracts with women-, minority-, and persons with disabilities-owned businesses, representing a 12% increase over the previous year. Despite this growing opportunity, government contracting remains daunting for many entrepreneurs. 

Enter LISC. After working with the Chicago Transit Authority on its Building Small Businesses program, which connected small firms with the Red and Purple Line Modernization Project, LISC approached the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) to explore a new partnership.

The idea behind the partnership was to address the knowledge and confidence gaps that small business owners experience with CHA contracts. The CHA’s work is subject to a mandate from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development called Section 3, which designates a percentage of employment opportunities and contract opportunities go to businesses owned by CHA residents and/or low-income individuals. CHA’s Section 3 team recognized that compliance with the Section 3 mandate didn’t always result in equitable opportunities for small business owners. Furthermore, the CHA’s property office had identified some Section 3 certified businesses that lacked the experience and capacity to execute contracts.

After brainstorming and discussing Section 3 vendor challenges with the CHA, LISC identified two technical assistance organizations to provide one-on-one and cohort-based services to certified Section 3 businesses: Sustainable Options for Urban Living (SOUL) and Builders Avenue. Walmart also contributed funding to LISC to support this initiative, which aims to ease businesses’ paths toward securing and executing CHA contracts. 

SOUL works with small businesses on project management and scheduling, as well as business basics like incorporation, managing cash flow, and bookkeeping. Builders Avenue works one-on-one with construction entrepreneurs on similar issues and connects business owners to a network of ancillary supports like accountants and estimators.

Photo credit: Tafari Melisizwe

In just 12 months of working with the CHA, Builders Avenue’s and SOUL’s work has had tangible impacts:

• The organizations provided more than 500 hours of one-on-one coaching, focusing on bookkeeping, access to capital, and estimating.
• Business owners receiving support bid on 30 projects worth $3.1M, both at CHA and private firms. Of these bids, $355k have been awarded to date.
• Businesses participating in the program created or maintained 50 jobs during the program term.
• Participating entrepreneurs reached critical milestones: becoming a union signatory, securing their first public contracts, connecting with lenders and getting loans, obtaining minority business certifications, establishing business credit, and more

Sydnei Matthews-Hardy, who owns and operates P&A Plumbing, credits Builders Avenue for helping her company build a strong administrative and financial foundation to take on new and more complex projects. 
“Builders Avenue helped me feel a lot more comfortable being a signatory with Plumbers Union Local 130. The scale is different, the pay is different. Financially there is no room for errors,” says Sydnei.

This strong foundation will help Sydnei build toward her longer-term goals, which include empowering more women to become plumbers and encouraging young people to explore the industry in high school.

According to Builders Avenue Program Manager Andrea Yarbrough, Sydnei helped advance the organization, too. “She has the desire to learn more, and she understands what she needs. She has pushed us to explore offering services around business credit,” says Yarbrough.

Even experienced entrepreneurs found benefits in the collaboration. April Griffin of Griffin Group Consulting, LLC received construction management training and back-office consultation support from SOUL. April says she would probably have found these resources on her own, but that it would have taken longer. “The program provided structure and ideas and opened my mind to other solutions,” she says.

In addition to this immediate impact on small businesses, Kevin Brooks, Senior Manager at the CHA’s Workforce Opportunity Resource Center, says that LISC, Builders Avenue, and SOUL’s collaboration with CHA unlocked connections to other business service organizations, awareness of local and national funding opportunities, support for client events, and more. “LISC worked to align us with two business service organizations that were able to both fill programming gaps and help us meet clients where they are,” Kevin says. 

LISC is proud of the milestones already achieved through the CHA technical assistance program. This work is integral to our commitment to racial equity and our ongoing efforts to narrow racial health, wealth, and opportunity gaps.