From the Director

Happy Spring!

This year is a year of many celebrations, as is fitting for Mayor Turner’s last year as Houston’s mayor. In this issue, we continue to celebrate our recent achievement of certifying our 5,000th business, a milestone for the City and an extraordinary accomplishment for a municipality in Texas. We are proud to have such a large pipeline of diverse businesses to meet our contracting needs as well as the needs of other public sector and private sector entities, locally and nationally.

We also celebrate the graduation of our Turnaround Entrepreneurship Program – a class filled with enthusiastic local entrepreneurs charting paths of their dreams. And finally, we celebrate the upcoming awards that will be bestowed upon our esteemed Advisory Board Chair, Brandi Harleaux, our dedicated Advisory Board Members, Edgartt Melton and Adriana Gonzales, Liftoff Houston Start-up Business Plan Competition Winner, Lyndsey Brantley, and our very own, Dr. Porscha Jackson. Last, but certainly not least, we welcome Cylenthia Hoyrd to the OBO team. You will learn more about Assistant Director Hoyrd in this issue.

While we continue to grow our pool of certified companies, we also want to ensure that the City’s Supplier Diversity Program is realizing its intended impact. The City has a stated commitment to ensuring that historically underutilized and underrepresented businesses have opportunities to compete and participate in City procurement. As such, the City has retained MGT Consulting, a public sector consulting firm that specializes in disparity and availability studies, to perform the City’s disparity study. The study seeks to identify the impact of a firm’s race, ethnicity, and gender on its ability to do business in the City’s marketplace, both public and private sectors, and acquire capital and bonding. The results of the study will also be utilized to assist the City in implementing strategies geared towards improving its principles of equity in the procurement and contracting processes in accordance with state and federal laws, and offer additional considerations to enhance the City’s ongoing efforts in these areas.

Many of you will be contacted by MGT Consulting representatives over the next few months. Your participation in the disparity study process is extremely important, as your input and insight will help to form the basis of recommendations put forth in the study. I am making a special request for you to make every effort to engage with the consultant. Thank you in advance for your participation!

- Marsha E. Murray, OBO Director