A pair of projects in St. Louis have won grant funding from Kansas City-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to study racial inequities in the region’s entrepreneurial economy.
The projects, spearheaded by Lindenwood University and Washington University, have each been given three-year grants of about $300,000 to study how racial inequities and resource gaps impact minority entrepreneurs. The Kauffman Foundation funding is through its Inclusive Ecosystems program, which has backed projects examining how “structural issues shape equity and opportunity in entrepreneurial ecosystems.”
With the funding, a partnership between Lindenwood and its Center for Applied Economics, St. Louis Community College and St. Louis technology council TechSTL will pursue a “data equity” project to collect data regarding the participation of minority entrepreneurs in the technology, startup and innovation economies. TechSTL Executive Director Emily Hemingway said the project will help produce better data that St. Louis can use to understand the racial makeup of its entrepreneurial and innovation sectors, while also tracking the challenges and opportunities minority entrepreneurs encounter in running their businesses.
“We’re trying to understand what is the current state of the business ecosystem for founders of color and what are their resource gaps,” Hemingway said.
The data initiative comes after St. Louis Community College this year for the first time included statistics about the region’s startup economy in its annual State of the St. Louis Workforce report. Phyllis Ellison, associate vice chancellor of St. Louis Community College’s workforce solutions group, said the Kauffman-backed project will build on the report's inclusion of startup data.
“Having better data gives us an idea of what is working and what will drive regional efforts towards advancing more equitable upward mobility efforts,” she said. “Data tells a story like nothing else, and we are grateful for the Kauffman Foundation for allowing us to expand the St. Louis story.”
The second project that received the Kauffman funding is being led by the Brown School at Washington University, which is teaming up with local nonprofit WEPOWER to study how systemic racism impacts minority entrepreneurship. Heather Cameron, professor of practice in social entrepreneurship at the Brown School, said the project will involve analyzing regional reports that have been published in the past regarding systemic racism and the entrepreneurial economy locally to see how the two intersect.
“We thought what if we look at these two things together and try and understand the St. Louis entrepreneurial ecosystem as being inside a system that also has all of these great studies about racial inequity in our region (to see) how can we use entrepreneurship to alleviate some of the systemic racism and to create a more prosperous and inclusive St. Louis,” Cameron said.
Cameron said the project also will include interviews and community events regarding the topics. She said the project will involve writing a research case study that will also be used in an initiative by Kauffman to develop a set of equity indicators for entrepreneurial economies across the U.S.
“What we're learning in St. Louis will then be used by Kauffman across the nation to help build more equitable entrepreneurial ecosystems. That’s what our team finds super exciting,” Cameron said.
