Diversify Your Circle

DIVERSIFY YOUR CIRCLE Supporting POC-Owned Businesses From restaurants to grocery stores, hair salons, barbers, health and beauty shops, yoga studios, gyms, event planners and services, businesses are the backbone to Pensacola. Diversifying your circle is about shopping, supporting and uplifting people of color (POC)-owned businesses. When we shop at these businesses, we add wealth to the community, help decrease economic by Gina Castro & Dakota Parks disparities and allow small businesses the chance to grow.

August is National Black Business Month dedicated to shopping and supporting black-owned businesses. Other POC and minority groups do not have their own business months, but they face many of the same issues and discriminatory challenges. In an effort to be as inclusive as possible, Downtown Crowd has included a wide variety of POC-owned businesses, while still highlighting blackowned establishments. Around the spread you BLACK OWNED will see circles indicating BUSINESS black-owned businesses.

Brian Wyer, the president and CEO of the Gulf Coast Minority Chamber of Commerce spends a large portion of his job advocating for POC and minority-owned businesses, as well as educating the community on the unique issues that they face while helping businesses conquer them. In 2018, the chamber changed its name from the Gulf Coast African-American Chamber of Commerce, an 18 year namesake, to allow for a more inclusive and wider base.

“Changing the name allows us to advocate for more people,” Wyer said. “If you look at the 2012 Census for Escambia County, for example, AfricanAmerican-owned businesses accounted for about 3,000 businesses. When you incorporate all minority groups, we have around 6,000 businesses. That’s a wider base and it includes people that are facing some of the same issues but don’t have chambers to support them. When we come together, we can have a bigger impact.”

Through events like the monthly GAIN night and the Pensacola Supplier Diversity Exchange, the chamber helps connect business owners with people that teach about social media, website design, financial management and help them navigate the city and state bids and contracts.

“Minorities are both systematically and generationally behind what some of the non-minorities are struggling with. We have less experience and capital to put toward businesses,” Wyer said. “Discrimination can keep small businesses from competing with big businesses. Disparity studies show this. The city of Pensacola spent $250,000 on a disparity study in 2012 to find out why minority businesses weren’t getting contract jobs in the city.” According to the disparity study, minority contractors won only 10 to 12 percent of the total construction and prime contracts in Pensacola. Participants responded that they felt unequal treatment and that a “good ole boy” system discriminated against small firms. Access to capital also put minority firms at a disadvantage. They reported that only 3.7 percent of non-minority loan applicants faced denial while 52.6 percent of AfricanAmerican owned firms were denied loans. While these findings relate to city contracts and bids, many of these issues are shared by other minority-owned businesses.

“There’s an old saying that says ‘as a minority, you have to work twice as hard to get half as much.’ That’s a philosophy we want to break. We want to work hard and get our equal share,” Wyer said. “At the end of the day, these are not just businesses. These are also people that have hopes, goals and dreams. They want to own something for themselves, be independent and strive toward that American Dream that we all want. When you invest in POC and minority-owned businesses, you invest in that future.”