March 2010 E-Newsletter

Webinar:  Best Practices in County Supplier Diversity Programs – Register today!

• 11:00 AM – 12:20 PM, Pacific Daylight Time
• Thursday, May 6, 2010

Description: This webinar will discuss practices and innovations among counties across the US in relation to supplier diversity, procurement with local small businesses, and minority and women business procurement programs. The webinar will focus discussion on efforts to strengthen the local economy through local small business procurement, while saving the county money through strategic sourcing.

Presenters:

• Tim Lohrentz, Director, Inclusive Business Initiative
• Debra Brewer, Deputy Director, Contract Compliance, DeKalb (GA) County Purchasing & Contracting
• Michael Estelle, Supplier Diversity Coordinator, Contracts Division, Fairfax (VA) County Purchasing & Supply Management Department
• Helen Foster, Director of Research and Development, and Ty Austin, Director of Strategic Initiatives, DelACCESS Consortium

The fee for this webinar is $25, plus a $2.37 processing fee. Register from this link. After registration you will receive event log-in details.

Report on County-based Local Small Business Programs and Supplier Diversity

The Insight Center, in partnership with the DelACCESS Consortium, released a new report (PDF) on best practices in strategic sourcing and supplier diversity among 11 U.S. counties. The research was conducted by the Insight Center's Inclusive Business Initiative, along with DelACCESS Consortium, which is based in Newark, Delaware. The research was performed for New Castle County, Delaware, and the 11 counties were selected due to their similarity to New Castle County, as well as their procurement system.

New Castle County sponsored the research in order to determine strategies to save county funds as a result of strategic sourcing, but also to maximize county procurement with local small and diverse businesses, such as on projects funded by the federal Recovery Act (ARRA).

New Small Local Business Enterprise Program in San Diego

The City of San Diego has designed and approved a small, local business enterprise program, effective July 2010, as discussed in the Inclusive Business Initiative blog. The program is a race- and gender-neutral program, allowable under California's restrictive Proposition 209. One of the objectives of the program is to increase the participation of small, local business enterprises (SLBEs) in City contracting and to ameliorate to the extent possible any disparities in the participation of minority business enterprises or women business enterprises on City contracts.

The program will have an overall aspirational goal for both SLBEs and the smaller Emerging Local Business Enterprises (ELBEs) and mandatory contract-by-contract SLBE/ELBE goals on certain contracts. Smaller contracts will first be open only to SLBEs and/or ELBEs, depending on the size of the contract. To be local a business has to be located within San Diego county.

Inclusive Business Initiative National Advisor, Franklin Lee, helped the City of San Diego to formulate its SLBE / ELBE program.

Historic Settlement by Federal Government with Black Farmers

The Obama administration announced a $1.25 billion settlement February 18 with thousands of black farmers who had claimed that they had been discriminated against by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in its loan programs for decades, as reported in our blog.

This settlement follows a related settlement in 1999 in which $1 billion was provided to 16,000 black farmers. Notification errors left many eligible farmers out of that settlement, errors which critics said was a continuation of discriminatory practices. The left out group of farmers filed suit, known as the Pigford Class Action Lawsuit.

To commemorate the settlement, the Inclusive Business Initiative took a look at the 2007 USDA data on African American farmers. What is most striking is the low average of total sales per farm: among the 12 states with at least 1000 African American farmers, only one has an average annual sales figure of greater than $45,000 - North Carolina, with average sales of about $68,000. See the full data here.

2007 Data on African American/Black Farmers, by State

Anti-Affirmative Action Measure is Knocked Off the Missouri Ballot (again)

We highlight in our blog that Ward Connerly has lost again in Missouri. Connerly's supporters in Missouri were attempting to put a measure on this November's ballot that, if passed, would have made affirmative action illegal in that state. But they withdrew the measure when faced with an ACLU challenge over the measure's language. A similar measure failed to get on the ballot in 2008 as well.

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Please remember to follow us on twitter @biz_inclusion and to check out the Inclusive Business Initiative blog.

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