Chicago Urban League Shifts Focus

Cheryl Jackson is president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League. These excerpts are from her speech at the annual luncheon in Chicago, Illinois on February 9, 2007.

There comes a time in the life of good and strong organizations when change is not just desirable, but required. This is such a time for the Chicago Urban League.

Now let me be very clear, there is one thing about the Chicago Urban League that will never change, and that is our unshakeable commitment to furthering the cause of civil rights in our society, in our city, in our state, and in our nation.

The Chicago Urban League linked arm and arm with Dr. King during the height of the struggle for civil rights; here in Chicago, the Urban League is inextricably linked to the sense of mission, the sense of purpose, the sense of intensity that fueled the protest marches, the sit-ins, even the civil disobedience that marked the period that led to the passage of landmark pieces of legislation in the 1960s.
We honor that heritage, and it will guide and inspire and inform everything we do as we move forward.

But the strongest oak needs to sprout some new branches from time to time. And it is time to sprout some new branches on the civil rights tree.

The Chicago Urban League is getting out of the social services business and will focus exclusively on economic development. Moving forward, we will lead with an economic agenda to drive social change.

As I look across Chicago and America, I see a city and a nation that are economically muscular, increasingly politically inclusive, and brimming with a dynamism and spirit that are the envy of the world. I see African-Americans climbing the ladder of achievement on Wall Street as well as on LaSalle Street—holding seats at the pinnacle of power in Fortune 500 companies, and occupying the president’s office in Ivy League universities. Yet this is just a part of our story.

If we look more closely, it’s clear that something is missing. The African-American unemployment rate is double the unemployment rate for whites—not just this year but every year. There is little commerce along our commercial strips, precious little private investment in our investment zones, and venture capital behaves as if it were allergic to neighborhoods with names like Englewood and Garfield Park. Organized labor and manufacturing, once both enormous providers of jobs and steady employers for minorities, are shrinking.

Inside professional services firms, the number of African-Americans in management rose only 1 percent in the last 10 years to 6 percent. And in the midst of all this, only 39 percent of African-American boys graduate high school by age 19, and seven of 10 Chicago Public Schools graduates are ill prepared for college. The African-American community is facing permanent economic isolation and is in danger of becoming forever the underclass for all the reasons I just mentioned.

There should be at least one organization out there devoted to building the kind of society where fewer social services of any kind are needed, there should be a few organizations who view as their mission the creation of wealth—not for the few or for the already wealthy, but the kind of wealth that is shared by the many. The kind of wealth that can be sustained and will lift up whole neighborhoods and entire communities. The kind of wealth that leads to decent paying jobs and money in the pocket, savings in the bank, returns to investors, and hope for the future.

This kind of wealth is created, in my view, when we build on the entrepreneurial assets that already abound in Chicago’s African-American community. When we build on a rich tradition of black entrepreneurship that links the heroes of the past—people like John Johnson—to the role models of the present—people like John Rogers—we create the pioneers of the future.

We have pounded on the door of government for a long, long time and, while there is work left to do, we have made real progress. Now we need to pound on the door of the private sector. Loudly. Not for hand-outs, but for investment. Not for pity, but for partnerships. Not for patronage, but mutual profit. Not for a quick buck, but for deep-reaching transformation.

The shifting sands of social services do not provide stable footing for our highest aspirations. So we will build our new structure on solid rock. And that solid rock is economic development.

projectNEXT consists of four key components: entrepreneurship, workforce diversity, commercial real estate development, and education and advocacy. Each of these pieces rests upon a single unifying concept: to link economic value to social change. Each segment is connected to the next and they are all linked to an overarching goal—economic development to produce shared, sustainable wealth.

To help create projectNEXT, we needed partners. The Chicago Urban League is pleased to announce an extraordinary partnership with BP America. BP has committed to Chicago Urban League $6.2 million over three years to help launch projectNEXT.

We will focus on entrepreneurship because investing in black-owned businesses creates jobs and inter-generational wealth right in our own community. A recent study revealed that historically, the state invests a majority of its economic development dollars to attract large businesses to affluent areas, mostly in the suburbs, and little to none in African-American and Hispanic communities. The Chicago Urban League will fight for more funding and policy changes to attract businesses to the city’s urban centers on the West and South Sides

At the same time, we can’t fail to nurture the resources that are indigenous to our communities—black-owned businesses. It’s a fact that black-owned businesses hire more black people than any other businesses, and they are vital to job creation.

But the problem is that many of our businesses are not growing. There are more black-owned businesses in Cook County than in any county in the nation. But only 4,000 out of the 64,000 African-American businesses have one or more employees. And the average revenue they generate is five times less than the majority-owned business. If our businesses don’t grow, they cannot create jobs. So the Chicago Urban League will create an entrepreneurship center to do just that—grow African-American and minority-owned businesses.

Today, I am pleased to announce that the Chicago Urban League, in partnership with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, will create an Entrepreneurship Center to help African-American businesses grow and prosper. The center will take a comprehensive approach to growing African-American and minority-owned businesses in the professional services, retail, and construction business by focusing on three critical areas.

First, the center will provide high-level training and one-on-one coaching to help strengthen business operations and develop growth strategies. Secondly, through an aggressive supplier diversity program, we will help businesses secure new opportunities and contracts in both the public and private sectors.
And finally, through special banking and financing relationships, we will build bridges with the lending community to help businesses access capital. In particular, the center will focus on developing strategies for minority-owned businesses to access venture capital.

Another component of projectNEXT builds on Chicago Urban League’s long-standing commitment to workforce diversity. Unemployment rates in Chicago’s predominantly black communities are staggering—topping 33 percent in communities such as Riverdale and as high as 25 percent in Englewood and North Lawndale. Not everyone is going to college, but that shouldn’t mean you have to forfeit the right to have decent paying job. Today, I am pleased to announce two major initiatives aimed at diversifying two high-paying sectors of our economy: the construction and manufacturing sectors.

Organized labor is a source of good-paying jobs—about 60,000 of them, in fact—for people without a college degree. Yet African-Americans have been under-represented in the trades. The reasons for black under-representation in the trades are complex and include thorny issues surrounding race. The Urban League will seek solutions to this lingering question by first forming an Organized Labor Task Force.

Specifically, the task force will examine ways to improve the pool of apprenticeship candidates, expanding training and changing the internal culture of the building trades. The stakes are high: About $25 billion will be spent on public construction projects alone over the next decade in Chicago.

I know many of you have heard that manufacturing is dead. However, I have recently had the opportunity to learn about the good-paying manufacturing jobs that remain, and I want to fight to make sure my constituents are able to access these jobs. I’m pleased to announce that the Urban League is forming a partnership with the Chicago Manufacturing Renaissance Council to strengthen Illinois’ huge manufacturing base.

Right now the manufacturing sector needs to fill about 10,000 new positions per year. Yet many of these firms have trouble filling positions—mainly because vocational education is scarcely taught anymore. That’s why we are partnering with Chicago City Colleges to do just that—to train people in trades and skills that lead to better-paying jobs.

The final, but most important component of projectNEXT is education and advocacy. The biggest obstacle to increasing business growth in inner cities is an unskilled, uneducated labor force. How can you staff a well-paying job if the workforce isn’t trained? We welcome new ways of looking at old problems, and charter schools offer positive alternatives for black children. They are laboratories for innovation. Teacher and principal mentoring, smaller classes, longer school days, an extended school year, and mandatory kindergarten are all plans that should be supported.

Imagine schools that are not just places of learning but community centers as well. They open early in the morning before school starts and stay open through the evening, because learning shouldn’t stop when the bell rings. They are staffed with on-site case managers—a social worker, a mortgage counselor, a job training coach—a whole range of services to support parents. Community schools have already found success in New York City, and about a hundred CPS schools are building services around the community school concept.

Chicago Urban League will never forget our roots. But the strongest oak needs to sprout some new branches from time to time. God bless you.