LISC and Next Street have just published a new playbook for community developers and their partners working to nurture equitable small business ecosystems in historically underinvested places: Building Organizational Capabilities in Service of Equitable and Inclusive Small Business Ecosystems. The guide is the outgrowth of years of practice and research, and the particular lessons of the pandemic, and the understanding that truly equitable and inclusive business communities must be driven by local organizations and local people equipped with the tools and capital they need to do the work.
Small businesses create jobs, build generational wealth, and contribute to vibrant communities that residents can be proud of. But the last year and a half shined a piercing spotlight on the fact that not all small businesses have access to the same resources. Many entrepreneurs face structural barriers that make it unjustly difficult to start, sustain, and scale their businesses. How can we help communities grow equitable small business ecosystems?
LISC recently partnered with Next Street to help answer that question in Building Organizational Capabilities in Service of Equitable and Inclusive Small Business Ecosystems: A Practitioner’s Guide. We believe that building an equitable and inclusive ecosystem requires us to identify and address structural barriers that curtail access and opportunity for business owners, and especially BIPOC entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, business owners with low incomes, and businesses located in underinvested neighborhoods. We also believe that locally-based organizations are often best positioned to take on that work. Along with strengthening local ecosystems in a broad sense, LISC is committed to supporting local organizations working to make those ecosystems more focused on serving entrepreneurs of color and businesses located in underinvested communities. This Practitioner’s Guide, then, is designed to give local organizations the frameworks and tools to identify what roles they can play in supporting and building their local small business ecosystems, and to lay out next steps.
Over the past several years, both LISC and Next Street have conducted studies and implemented strategies to understand and improve small business ecosystems across the country. LISC’s Building Equitable Local Ecosystems for Small Business brief highlights ways to identify and eliminate disadvantages that many entrepreneurs face. Next Street, for its part, has conducted small business ecosystem assessments in more than 25 communities across the country. This Practitioner’s Guide also builds on past research and a growing body of work found in the resources provided in the publication and webinar. The Guide is meant to meld and amplify those concepts from a practitioner’s perspective, to support the ecosystem champions working in local communities across the US.
The Practitioner’s Guide
Our Practitioner’s Guide and accompanying worksheets are designed to be an actionable resource, one that shares working tools that business development organizations and others can put to use in their ecosystem and organizational planning sessions. We wrote the Practitioner’s Guide with the following goals in mind:
- Share best practices leading with equity and inclusion to help assess local market capacities and gaps
- Outline the potential roles in which local stakeholders can adapt or intensify their efforts
- Provide decision-making criteria to identify appropriate ecosystem roles for business-serving organizations
- Offer guidance on how to create an implementation plan to execute
Last week we officially launched the guide through a webinar with more than 400 practitioners in attendance. The audience learned about setting a strategy for small business ecosystems, including how to understand the local ecosystem, decide where to focus, and operationalize a plan. Attendees also heard from Michael Banks of the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey, and Geri Aglipay of Small Business Majority, two practitioners who are successfully developing equitable small business ecosystem strategies with their partners in Philadelphia and Chicago, respectively. If you missed the webinar, you can watch a recording here.
What’s Next?
We hope that business development organizations and other practitioners across the country will use this guide to analyze their own local small business ecosystems and decide what roles to play. If you are interested in building your organization’s capabilities in service of equitable and inclusive small business ecosystems, consider these next steps:
- Connect with the community and peer organizations to understand your local small business ecosystem
- Assess your strengths and decide where to focus or expand
- Set new equitable and inclusive strategies in motion
Need help? Contact LISC or Next Street for support. Also, we invite you to join LISC’s newsletter and NavNet to connect with other small business heroes and share best practices.