About Us

Approach

Mission

InnerCity Entrepreneurs (ICE) develops community leaders and creates better ties among ethnic communities and the broader business world by promoting wealth generation, job creation, capacity and community building for existing inner-city small businesses and organizations interested in growth. ICE partners with community based organizations and offers business education, networking and research to facilitate access to new markets, capital, and knowledge.

History

Three years ago, Boston University Sociology Professor, Dan Monti, began to explore ways in which small businesses and entrepreneurs could help revitalize inner city communities. Monti's research for the past twenty years had focused on how American cities became thriving business and cultural centers. He recognized that business leaders and ethnic communities brought about amazing change in cities but rarely worked together. As the U.S. and world economy became more focused on business as an important way to grow communities, Monti decided to combine these two forces. He proposed to offer direct assistance to small business owners in neighborhoods with minority or ethnic populations, to tap the informal networks and loyalties of the people living there, and to assist local leaders in revitalizing their own communities. To learn more about how to accomplish these goals, he assembled a group of business men and women, entrepreneurs, and economic development specialists from different minority and ethnic groups in the Boston area and began to develop his vision to start InnerCity Entrepreneurs (ICE).

Around the same time, Andrew Wolk, a faculty member at the Boston University School of Management had just completed a business plan based on the work he had done at the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation. Wolk had been offering technical assistance to individuals in the inner city interested in starting a business. He recognized that an incredible amount of financial and human resources were being devoted to helping people start businesses, but very little attention was being paid to helping existing business grow. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's 1997 Survey of Minority Owned Businesses, existing businesses owned by blacks, Latino and Asians, as compared to white owned businesses, lagged far behind in sales For example, Latino owned businesses account for only 3/10 of 1% and black-owned businesses account for only 2/10 of 1% of total business revenue in the state of Massachusetts . Most are so small that only one in eight to ten of black or Latino owned businesses in the state have paid employees. As a whole, black-owned businesses average sales receipts were only $85,000, and Latino owned businesses average sales are not much higher at $127,530 - less then one-fifth of the typical white-owned small business. These facts combined with the fact that on average eight out of ten businesses fail, led Wolk to the conclusion that it was essential to provide existing businesses with a more sophisticated level of business education then what was currently available.

In April 2001, Dr. Monti went to the School of Management at BU for assistance and met with Peter Russo, the director of the Entrepreneurial Management Institute. Russo brought Monti and Wolk together and the two combined their ideas. In January, 2002 with approval from Louis Lataif, the Dean of the School of Management, it was decided the new initiative, InnerCity Entrepreneurs, would be housed at Boston University's Entrepreneurial Management Institute and would use the resources of the School of Management and the Department of Sociology to meet the needs of existing businesses in the inner city and assist in developing leaders and growing stronger communities.

While it was clear that Boston University could offer tremendous resources to existing inner city small business owners, that equally as critical was bringing those resources to the inner city. In February 2002, Monti and Wolk met with Peter Koch, the new Director of the Small Business Development Institute at Roxbury Community College. Koch and the SBDI, already committed and working with existing small businesses, was immediately excited about the uniqueness of the ICE program and its ability to grow existing inner city businesses while at the same time building a new generation of business leaders. Koch agreed to partner with ICE and pilot the program at the SBDI as a feature of the Institute's future activities.