February is Black History Month, a time when we celebrate and honor black communities throughout the United States and highlight the people and stories that remain central to our nation’s history and enduring values. For ICIC, and our Inner City Capital Connections program in particular, this means recognizing  black-owned businesses’ unique challenges and successes,  and learning more about their founders’ stories. Read More

With the 20^th anniversary of the Inner City 100 program taking place this year, it’s a perfect time to look back at past IC100 winners and see how their participation impacted their lives, careers and communities. The broad range of individuals represented in the IC100 list is ever-changing, but they all seem to share a few things in common. Read More

Youth UpRising, of Oakland, California, was created in 2003 in response to heightened racial tensions driven by decades of poverty and strife. They opened in 2005 with programming focused on direct service, community relations, and a unique public/private partnership between themselves, government, foundations, and other local service agencies. We sat down with their CFO, John Payne, to hear more about Youth UpRising and how ICCC helped them to scale the impact of their program. Read More

There’s one thing Jim and Kathy Turner always say about their seafood, “if it were any fresher, it would still be swimming,” and as a fourth generation family business, Turner’s Seafood is now looking for ways to keep their business strategies as fresh as their fish. In October, the Turner’s traveled from Massachusetts to attend the Inner City Capital Connections (ICCC) culminating conference in New York. Read More

As part of our partnership with JPMorgan Chase's Small Business Forward program, ICIC has been working closely with a group of entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) focused on the high-tech sector to better understand their impact on early-stage businesses. As the field of entrepreneurial support continues to mature, our evaluation provides a critical opportunity to better understand what effective support for high-tech, early-stage businesses looks like. Our findings also start to fill a critical data gap for ESOs. Read More