Center For Community Wealth Building

Strengthening local entrepreneurship: to build local economic resilience and community cohesion by strengthening neighborhood microbusinesses through culturally responsive business support, ccwb: - trained 15 businesses (22 total participants) through the family business preservation program to strengthen their business operations and develop succession plans; - further developed the shopbipoc platform to match interested consumers with people of color-owned busineses, growing the network to over 620 businesses in 11 business sectors; - prepared 10 new caterers to do business with anchors through our feeding anchors program, culminating in the fourth eat.local. Food in october 2023, which was attended by 168 people event planners from 71 anchor institutions and community organizations; - provided culturally responsive technical assistance and business support to more than 50 immigrant and people of color-owned businesses, resulting in improvements in the lives of the business owners and the people they were able to hire as they grew.

Engaging anchor institutions: to advance the economic opportunity for communities by leveraging place-based institutions' procurement, hiring, and investing practices, ccwb: - convened 16 local anchor institutions in quarterly meetings of the denver anchor network for peer learning about how they can best leverage their everyday business practices to close the racial wealth gap. - assisted seven members of the denver anchor network to make measurable progress in shifting their procurement spending to more small, local, people of color-owned businesses, and helped two anchors change their discretionary spending limits to lower the barrier for small businesses to work with the institutions. - worked with two anchor institutions to secure investments totaling $7 mm into a local community land trust that is creating affordable home ownership opportunities in colorado. - joined the colorado statewide equity office procurement advisory group to help guide the state's discretionary spending to provide greater access to small, local, people of color-owned businesses.

Edfsi and general program