Entrepreneurs of color and their advocates in Mobile, AL, found that the current systems in place to assist Minority Business Enterprises (MBEs) were scattered across various agencies and not effectively organized to work on their behalf.
And the 2016 closures of the MBDA centers in Mobile and New Orleans have created a vacuum that has not been filled. Therefore, founders of M.O.V.E. Gulf Coast Community Development Corporation, members of the Mobile County NAACP’s Economic Development Committee, and members of the Growth Alliance Task Force (a minority business group in the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce) began working together to organize an alternative service delivery system catering to the special needs of minority business owners.
Their collaborative efforts with local nonprofits and business owners will create a new entrepreneurial ecosystem that streamlines community-based business training, financial resources, and advocacy into a more effective delivery service system that better assists MBEs and entrepreneurs of color at all levels in the Mobile Area / Gulf Coast Region to grow their businesses and to train the local workforce.
To strengthen advocacy for these business owners, M.O.V.E. Gulf Coast CDC will network with the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP and local branches through their Economic Development Committee in Alabama and their counterparts in the other four Gulf Coasts states. M.O.V.E. Gulf Coast CDC will also work with The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), the Alabama Asset Building Coalition, and other economic /community development organizations to share best practices and policies that increase the capacity of MBEs.
Our collaborative efforts with elected and appointed officials include building greater political will for equitable employment strategies that develop stronger local workforces. Our work also includes building the capacity of under-served communities to frame, develop, and implement policy and programmatic solutions that address long-term economic challenges within their own communities.
The best way to build a greater economic base — in any community but especially those that are under-served — is to start with business development and commerce. Therefore, our principle goal is to promote economic development in historically under-served communities by increasing the financial capacity and sustainability of minority entrepreneurs and their businesses in ways that help them generate revenues, create living-wage jobs, and build up the tax base of their communities. The circulation of money through these businesses enriches the lives of people in their communities, thus creating create true generational wealth and prosperity for all.
M.O.V.E. Gulf Coast CDC is about the business of creating conditions leading to the “commonwealth that transforms commUNITY.”