What does it look like when a civil engineer turns a company into a platform for community change? For Selena Rodgers Dickerson, president of SARCOR LLC, the Amazon Accelerate and Empower Program (Amazon A&E) arrived as she prepared to scale. Delivered through ICIC’s Connections initiative with Amazon, Arctaris Impact Investors, and Regions Bank, Amazon A&E helped Selena step back from daily tasks and into her role as CEO.  Through executive education, cohort learning, and a capstone pitch event at Miles College, she refined her growth strategy, engaged her leadership team, and clarified how her ventures focus on building people, places, and possibilities.  In this story, Selena shares how an eleven year old on stage, a legacy of entrepreneurial parents, and two ICIC programs, ICCC and Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, are shaping her next chapter. Read More

Asian poverty is often overlooked. The model minority myth describes Asian Americans as uniformly affluent and educated. Yet many Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) groups have high poverty levels. Treating Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as one uniform group fails to recognize the diversity in poverty rates among ethnic groups and ignores the many AAPI groups in which poverty is a major problem. Read More

The use of liquor licenses as an economic development tool is a comparatively recent consideration among practitioners and policymakers, driven by an increased focus on equitable economic growth and growing recognition of antiquated public policies that underlie licenses’ distribution in many cities. In roughly half of US states, liquor license distribution is controlled or capped at the state-level. Read More

Representation of female entrepreneurs in the Inner City Capital Connections program has grown to 45% in recent years, and mirrors a larger trend in the growth of women entrepreneurs nationwide. The United States is seeing a continual increase of women creating new businesses and employment opportunities, with a 27 percent growth in women-owned businesses from 2007 to 2012. Read More

A key aspect of the Inner City Capital Connections program is executive education focused on capacity-building, which allows entrepreneurs an opportunity to receive high-quality training while running their businesses. The success of the program depends on the quality of the professors who have been recruited from leading business schools throughout the country. Of these educators, Steven Rogers is surely one of the most beloved. Now the most senior teacher in the ICCC program, Rogers considers himself a tenured faculty member. Read More