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Advancing wealth and business knowledge

Transforming local Black-owned microbusinesses into local Black-owned small businesses

Dr. Kurt Kraiger, professor and chair of the Department of Management in the Fogelman College, in partnership with community partners Luther Mercer (President and CEO of Community LIFT) and Ernest Strickland (President and CEO of the Black Business Association of Memphis [BBA]), was awarded the Build2Scale Capital Challenge grant from the Economic Development Association (EDA) for the BANK (Black wealth Advancement through New business Knowledge development) project.   

As part of the Build2Scale Capital Challenge grant, Kraiger will work with Community LIFT, a Memphis-based Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) with a successful track record of raising investment funds for the Memphis region, to improve the local capital raising infrastructure and raise funds to transform local Black-owned microbusinesses (businesses that only employ the owner/s) into local Black-owned small businesses (businesses with employees in addition to the owner/s) in the technology sector. The grant specifically targets microbusinesses in the tech section. Kraiger will also help support the partnership between Community LIFT and the BBA, a business development resource for Black-owned Memphis businesses with a long history of providing education, advocacy, and business development resources, as the BBA uses its business expertise and networks to assists Community LIFT with its fundraising efforts. 

Via this three year, $ $700,196 grant, BANK intends to: 

  • Raise $5.3M in investment capital;
  • Recruit 50 potential funders to attend microbusiness entrepreneurship awareness and/or angel investment workshops; and,
  • Investigate, vet, and recommend 10 microbusinesses for investment. 

 

Post-grant, the BANK partnership will seek additional funding for an infrastructure to support: 

  • The funding of at least 10 Black-owned tech microbusinesses allowing them to scale; and  
  • The transformation of the funded businesses into successful small businesses, each creating at least 10 new tech jobs each, totaling at least 100 new jobs.
     

Kraiger has had a long academic career which includes being named a Fellow in the Society of Industrial-Organizational Psychology and receiving multiple federal grants to fund his research. Since coming to the University of Memphis, Kraiger has started to move from focusing on research, to impacting the community through academic leadership and community-focused grants.

For more information on Kraiger’s work, contact him at kurt.kraiger@memphis.edu.