IN THIS ISSUE:

 Grantee Spotlight: HUD-Funded E2 Initiative Helps Entrepreneurship Flourish in Jersey City
 Anchor Institutions: HBCUs Leading the Way to Community Transformation
 Illinois Institute of Technology’s Community Outreach Initiatives

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Grantee Spotlight: HUD-Funded E2 Initiative Helps Entrepreneurship Flourish in Jersey City

The Business Development Incubator at New Jersey City University provides a professional office environment for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses. Image courtesy of the Business Development Incubator at New Jersey City University. Growing up, Joanna De Leon always imagined herself as owning her own business — she just did not expect it to happen so soon. A few years ago, De Leon enrolled in the Community Business Academy (CBA) at Rising Tide Capital, a nonprofit based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Designed as an intensive 12-week course in management and planning for microenterprises, the academy is the centerpiece of Rising Tide’s entrepreneurship-driven model of community development. Today, De Leon owns a small screen-printing business near the Jersey City neighborhood where she grew up, operating out of an office within the Business Development Incubator (BDI) at New Jersey City University (NJCU).

The Community Business Academy

Since 2006, Rising Tide’s CBA has offered entrepreneurs, many of whom are low-income women, hands-on training in building and running a microenterprise. According to Alex Forrester, Rising Tide’s cofounder, the organization shifted its focus from start-up financing to education and consultation soon after its founding in 2004. “Micro-finance is an important tool, but it’s still debt. . . . Through customized education and consulting services [for microenterprises], we want to ensure that entrepreneurs are prepared to run a business,” explains Forrester.

Students pay a nominal fee to attend the academy; Rising Tide’s sponsors and supporters cover the remaining program costs. Although most of the participants are minorities (90%) and women (68%), Forrester notes that the program is open to all entrepreneurs because he believes that diversity within the program helps create the social networks critical to business success. Typical CBA participants are already employed, and entrepreneurship provides them with the opportunity to create additional income for their families, explains Forrester.

In De Leon’s case, the CBA allowed her to flesh out what it would take to turn her experience in graphic design and screen printing into a viable business. “I’m more of a big-picture type of person, so the CBA really made me think about the important details that I might have missed if I hadn’t gone through the program,” said De Leon. “The way that the program is set up, it really helps you break everything down into little pieces and helps you think about all the little details.” De Leon gained important knowledge of areas such as cash-flow management to help her manage day-to-day operations and set realistic expectations for the growth of her business.

E2 Initiative

After graduating from the business academy, De Leon secured a year-long residency at BDI — 13,000 square feet of shared office space designed to cultivate entrepreneurship and business development in distressed neighborhoods adjacent to the university. Since opening in 2005, the incubator has helped launch many successful enterprises by providing professional office space and a mentoring environment that supports entrepreneurs as their businesses grow.

Rising Tide Capital’s Community Business Academy provides hands-on training in small business management for entrepreneurs. Image courtesy of Rising Tide Capital. A 2010 grant from HUD’s Hispanic Serving Institutions Assisting Communities (HSIAC) program formalized the partnership between Rising Tide and NJCU, allowing De Leon and 11 other CBA alumni to participate in the E2 (Enterprise and Economic) Incubator Residency program over a period of 3 years. The E2 Initiative expands the reach and depth of the BDI and Rising Tide services that are available to local residents.

For each year of the HSIAC grant, four entrepreneurs received office space for a year, along with the services of NJCU interns. BDI staff and faculty from NJCU worked with the entrepreneurs to develop their businesses, and each participant also had access to Rising Tide’s Business Acceleration Services. De Leon rents an office at the incubator and maintains a production facility in Jersey City as her business needs evolve.

Seeding a Successful Partnership

The partnership between Rising Tide and NJCU has helped Rising Tide’s business academy reach and support more entrepreneurs in Jersey City thanks to the now-expended HSIAC grant. The CBA, which graduated 15 students in 2006, had 191 graduates in 2013 and now operates programs in four communities in New Jersey. Forrester notes that the multi-year support from the HSIAC grant was critical to this growth because it allowed Rising Tide to leverage additional private and philanthropic support. All 12 CBA graduates who completed the E2 residency now operate their businesses in the community, says Joseph Tetteh, BDI’s director. Tetteh credited the partnership with helping the incubator reach a population of entrepreneurs it had not typically reached and strengthening the relationship between the community and the university.

Forrester notes that CBA’s partnership with the incubator has proven to be a successful model. Rising Tide has formed similar relationships with other organizations in northern New Jersey to provide shared office environments for CBA graduates. Rising Tide and BDI are currently exploring additional opportunities to continue their collaborative relationship.

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