“I think that you’ve got to meet people halfway and if you don’t invest in them, how are you going to expect them to invest back?” says Michele Cuthbert. Cuthbert is talking about the encouraging environment she strives to cultivate at Baker Creative, her successful brand strategy and marketing firm based ... Read More

Cooking is in Benjamin Smith’s blood. Following in the footsteps of his father, he spent many years working in restaurants and hotels, but it was the opportunity to help rebuild the community he loves that helped him find his life’s passion. “We had prostitution, drug activity, a lot of gangs,” Benjamin ... Read More

Growing up in South Jamaica, Queens, the son of Nigerian immigrants, David Alade was raised with a great sense of community responsibility. A graduate of Columbia University, he worked on Wall Street for Lehman Brothers, Barclays and Credit Suisse, and also as an investment banker, where he learned how to value ... Read More

Twins Jonathan and Matthew Burgess are no strangers to American history; they’ve been a part of it their whole lives. Their great-grandfather, Rufus Burgess, a freed enslaved person, became a landowner once California became a free state. There, in Sacramento, he owned the first African American-owned church — the Emmanuel. ... Read More

A look at what happened to established business owners and lessons for the next crisis by Howard Wial, Senior Vice President and Director of Research, Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, and Devon Yee, Senior Research Analyst, Initiative for a Competitive Inner City December 2021 During the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, ... Read More