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MAPA's Broadly Speaking Event Addresses Need for Minority Entrepreneurs

The next Broadly Speaking talk, part of MAPA’s Heartland 2050 speaker series, is: “Growing Your Own: Why Entrepreneurship is Critical to Developing Black and Latino Communities.” 

The presenter, Dell Gines, is Senior Community Development Advisor for the Omaha office of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.  His publication, the “Grow Your Own Guide,” describes how to build rural and urban economies through entrepreneurship.

Gines says entrepreneurships are important both for building the economy and reducing wealth inequities between diverse communities in Omaha and statewide.  He says the Omaha area lags behind the nation as a whole in the growth of minority-owned businesses and that a number of factors influence this, including education and culture:

“You know we don’t tend to educate around entrepreneurship in our school systems. You’ve been trained for 13 years to go work for somebody else and now you want to be an entrepreneur but you don’t see a lot of entrepreneurs in your environment, which is what happens in a lot of black and brown communities, even though that’s changing. So, there’s a lot of different factors that influence it, but to me the number one factor is really issues of education and culture and also collective support by the communities in which black and brown and Asian people live.”

Gines says there are a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurs in our area and that the big question is whether these opportunities are inclusive for minority groups as well as for women.

His presentation takes place Thursday, December 8th from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m. at 1905 Harney St. Pre-registration is encouraged.  For more information, the website is Heartland2050.org