PLATFORM : Partnerships

If you look at statistics, most of the jobs that are provided for the masses of people are not provided by one lone major corporation. It’s provided by small businesses who hire bites of 10 here and 12 here and five here and 25 over there. And we think that the real future of the black community is tied dramatically to our ability to really develop business opportunities in our own community for our own people and to trade with them to make sure that black people are exchanging that dollar.

We are interested in forming partnerships with (major) businesses. If we’re going to spend a million dollars over here developing this area, it would seem to me that businesses would want to have a partnership in that. And we could do a lot more things if we had them come into the forefront. Many of these businesses support charitable organizations, but we don’t want them to support us in such a benevolent way; let’s create a partnership and do something that really has some economic wherewithal and will create a foundation where other things can thrive off of it.