A newer organization in Springfield is working to connect local minority businesses with resources they need to continue growing and thriving.
The Minority Business Network (MBN) is a collaboration formed by co-founders Lauren Kelley and Aaron Clark.
Kelley is a Springfield native who, in 2020, launched Leaders of Change – an organization designed to be part of a collaborative effort to improve racial equality throughout the community. She works as a corrections officer in Clark County’s Juvenile Detention Center.
Clark works for the
Springfield Promise Neighborhood as a community engagement coordinator and also for the
Springfield City Youth Mission. He also was born and raised in Springfield.
Clark and Kelley realized they had similar goals and ambitions for supporting minority businesses, and they hoped they could use some connections they’d made through their jobs to help link minority business owners with community partners.
“Our goal is really to promote the advancement of minority businesses and connect them to new opportunities for growth and development,” Clark says. “For minority and small businesses, often the issue is, ‘How do they get connected to the people who have influence and who can help me do other things within the community?’”
The MBN launched with a virtual event to talk with minority business owners about what assets they felt they needed to help them take the next steps in their businesses. That conversation led to the recent Access After Hours event.
“It was a mingle – a kind of meet-and greet between minority businesses and community partners who we invited to attend,” Kelley says, adding that some of those partners included people from Park National Bank, the Small Business Development Center, The Turner Foundation, The Greater Springfield Partnership and United Way. “We wanted to show minority businesses what resources are available to them. We wanted to grant that access and utilize the connections we’ve made to help push other people forward.”
Clark says that entrepreneurs in general often face hurdles of not knowing what they don’t know and not knowing which resources to reach out to to meet their current needs.
Additionally, he says that there can be more hurdles within minority communities.
“Within minority communities, word of mouth is everything,” Clark says, giving the example that if a friend of yours has a good experience with a person or organization, there is a level of trust that already exists for you to lean on that person or organization, too.
“Sometimes (minorities) are not always privileged to meet somebody at the table,” Clark says. “I think connecting minority businesses makes them feel like a part of the bigger picture and like they have a seat at the table.”
In the black community specifically, Kelley says that oftentimes people feel most comfortable relying only on other black people to propel their businesses forward.
“However, the only way to thrive as a community is to come together. We have to find a common ground because ultimately we’re all in this together,” she says. “That’s the comfort level and those are the connections we’re trying to create.”
Clark and Kelley both say they hope the meet-and-greet event has a spiderweb effect of spreading information from person to person within minority communities.
“It pushes through the idea that the more information we share, the more it benefits everyone. It promotes the cycle of community growth for everyone,” Clark says. “We have this idea of doing it all by yourself. We have to change that mindset so small business owners feel they are an asset to the community.
“When people come to Springfield and they see all these businesses thriving and moving forward, that encourages somebody else to come to the city and say, 'Springfield is a good place to start a business. Springfield has all this going on to help get my business off the ground as a minority or a small business owner.’ And it just keeps funneling and helping the community grow.”
Rob Alexander, executive director of Springfield’s Small Business Development Center, is one of the community partners who attended the Access After Hours event. He says the handful of connections business owners were able to make at the event are a small step in creating trust and building references within local minority communities.
“We want to make sure that the entire community – and that certainly includes the minority community – understands that we are here for them, and that we are 100 percent in their corner,” Alexander says. “For me, being able to attend an event like this is what builds trust. I think sometimes trust is lacking because of the way people may have been treated or looked down upon in the past.
“We have to step up – they have to meet me and hear my heart and see how far I’m going out of the way to help them. I love opportunities like this so they can see the real side of SBDC, not just what they might assume we’re like here.”
He says that trust builds over time and takes community partners like his organization consistently showing up and stepping up.
“On the flip side, the more I go to things like this event, the more I learn about the unique needs and experiences of a specific community,” he says. “If I’m not having conversations with minority business owners, I don’t know what problems they face and what services they need. I want to make sure our services are culturally appropriate and meeting those needs.”
MBN’s next step is organizing a business conference slated for the fall. The conference, says Clark, will aim to be a training and development tool for small business owners to come to learn new things – whether that involves help with marketing, financials, or client retention.
“Our desire is to have speakers that look like us, that reflect the audience,” Kelley says. “It goes farther when someone sees you’ve had a similar struggle to what they did versus someone they feel has always had more access.
“We want to be able to teach next steps and have someone who is a motivational speaker, someone to build up morale. You can kill someone’s confidence easily without support, but having someone there to boost that confidence can make all the difference in their success.”