Cultivate Small BUsiness Program

This project is unique from the rest in that this one was actually part of my work at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC).

The Cultivate Small Business Program was designed to help small food businesses in low-income neighborhoods build and sustain their businesses, with a focus on women-, minority- and immigrant-owned businesses. The program provides the business owners with an industry specific education, networks and mentoring as well as small capital grants — all at no cost to the business owner.

The program is the result of an awesome partnership between Santander Bank (funder), Babson College (curriculum delivery), CommonWealth Kitchen (mentor program), and ICIC (project manager).

As a senior associate at ICIC, I was responsible for finding and recruiting the food businesses to join the CSB program. From there, I worked with my team at ICIC (and the other partners more broadly) on the design, development, organization, and implementation/iteration of the program.

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