In a world with limited resources, how do we encourage people in our communities to actively participate in creating sustainable economic growth? Especially when a gap in resources means everybody can’t adopt a bootstraps mentality of “work hard, earn more.” When faced with that gap, how do we build wealth and strong communities?
Shantelle Patton, founder of That Brown Bag—a directory of Black-owned businesses in Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Syracuse, Albany, Rochester, and Toronto—spends her days trying to figure that out. Patton was inspired to create the directory after she saw a Facebook post naming a need for just such a list. “I took it as a personal challenge,” she says. “My next post was a call-to-action to tag all the Black-owned businesses. That is how That Brown Bag started.” Now, Patton is taking the platform national.
The impulse was not random. As Intersect Buffalo’s Director of Programming and Community Engagement, Patton and business partner Kyria Stephens seek to empower entrepreneurs to boost economic growth in Buffalo’s Delevan-Grider area. Her work focuses on teaching entrepreneurs to build capacity, increase knowledge, and get their Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise certification, an official credential that verifies a for-profit business as majority owned, controlled, and actively operated by one or more minority group members or women…