Supporting Small Businesses and Their Workers: A Quality Jobs Roundtable
The LISC Institute for Community Power hosted a roundtable with Boston’s Ujima Project, Urbane, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on how to help small businesses thrive while providing their employees with quality jobs.
Overview
A thriving small business sector presents an alternative to corporate-fueled inequality, and a way to counter the racial wealth gap. Because small businesses tend to hire locally, they can also provide jobs to residents who have been excluded from employment in other sectors. By definition, however, small businesses have fewer resources to pay higher wages and offer benefits, making it harder for them to create and sustain quality jobs, however much their proprietors may want to.
Fortunately, practitioners, funders, and policymakers have been finding ways to simultaneously support small businesses and their workers. Building on LISC’s Equitable Pathways to Small Business Recovery Playbook, which was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the LISC Institute for Community Power hosted a roundtable on how to help small businesses thrive, especially BIPOC-owned establishments, while providing their employees with quality jobs. In particular, the roundtable reflected on the role of place-based strategies and community-based practitioners, and the need for funders and policymakers to scale this critical but challenging work.
View recording
Panelists
- Kimberly Brown is a Senior Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For more than 15 years, she has worked on initiatives promoting economic mobility through education, workforce development, and philanthropy.
- Maggie Clark is a Manager at Urbane. Her work elevates community-driven processes for equitable development and small business support.
- Nia Evans is Executive Director of Boston’s Ujima Project, which is focused on organizing Greater Boston area neighbors, workers, business owners, and investors to create a community-controlled economy.
Moderator
- David M. Greenberg is Vice President for Community Research and Impact at LISC.
Read the report
A playbook from LISC and Next City offers a framework for paving equitable pathways to small business success, and lays out concrete strategies for supporting capital access, small business capacity, and commercial real estate.