Prosper seeks to make a more equitable, inclusive Birmingham

The initiative, launched in June, aims to help accelerate Black businesses

Since its big launch in June, Prosper has made large steps to further its four initiatives: Birmingham Promise, Black Business Acceleration, Business Advisory Services and Health Tech Accelerator.

Prosper is a conglomerate of business, civic and city leaders working toward a more equitable and inclusive economy in Birmingham by focusing on three areas: job creation, job preparation and job access.

JW Carpenter, president of Prosper, said the initiatives are ambitious and likes that these initiatives are a communitywide effort.

“These are big, long-term, swing-for-the-fence initiatives,” Carpenter said. “One of the things about these big initiatives, though, is getting them going, which is something that I’m still getting used to. The good news is we’ve made a lot of progress in the last few months.”

Birmingham Promise, a program created to give Birmingham City School students the ability to pay for college through scholarships and other programs, has completed its first class of students and is preparing for its second.

Carpenter said Promise will also start offering paid internships for high school students at the beginning of 2022.

“I think they’ve done really, really good work generally but especially when you give it in context — year one of a new program in a pandemic — you just have to give them a ton of credit,” Carpenter said.

Prosper has also made great strides in its Black Business Acceleration initiative, a program that provides Black entrepreneurs with coaching, funding and networking to help build their business, Carpenter said.

The accelerator will begin a six month program to map Black-owned businesses and the Black-owned “ecosystem” in Birmingham and Jefferson County.

“Let’s figure out what the profile is of our Black-owned businesses and identify all the different organizations out there who are doing great work in supporting black-owned businesses,” Carpenter said. “Let’s take a look at the whole picture, holistically, and from there, as a community, figure out what we can do to help grow the Black-owned business ecosystem.”

Prosper will announce two groups that will work together to complete the ecosystem report and is hopeful the report will be completed in spring 2022, he said. Carpenter said Prosper wants to invest in Black entrepreneurs and the organizations that support them but first needs to figure out “who’s doing what and where.”

Carpenter said he considers Prosper’s Angela Scott Abdur-Rasheed, the communications and community engagement director, an entrepreneur after publishing her third book, “The Adventures of Abigail Jones: The Family Reunion,” which he said is an example of the potential in supporting Black entrepreneurs and their business endeavors.

“Three books is no small achievement so [Black Business Acceleration] is really neat and dear to my heart,” Carpenter said. “We want to make sure we are helping to unlock the significant opportunities in supporting Black-owned businesses.”

Carpenter said that Prosper’s Business Advisory Services will kick off this year in partnership with Birmingham Business Alliance, an initiative that betters productivity, technology adoption, innovation and “job creation in ‘missing middle’ small businesses.”

“We are really excited to partner with the Birmingham Business Alliance on this,” Carpenter said. “I can’t say enough good things about what the Birmingham Business Alliance has done to help put this program together, and we’re excited to get it going.”

Prosper, as part of its three-part health tech initiative, will also be working with Acclinate, a start-up health research company based in Birmingham that works to diversify clinical trials to build a platform to connect people in Jefferson County to the resources necessary to meet their health care needs, Carpenter said.

If the health care needs of Jefferson County residents are met, he said, then Prosper should be able to help connect people to job opportunities or higher paying jobs than the ones they currently have.

“We know the No. 1 reason people aren’t working right now, not the only reason but the No. 1 reason, is because of their health care needs or the health care needs of someone they’re taking care of,” Carpenter said. “This is going to help increase their wealth along with their health.”

The second piece to the initiative, Carpenter said, is Prosper’s Health Tech Accelerator that will launch at the beginning of 2022. Prosper will work in partnership with Gener8tor, a business accelerator based in Wisconsin, to help early stage health tech companies grow their businesses through funding, networking and advisory.

“This is only possible because we’re partnering with Red Hawk Advisory, owned by Matt Hottle and Mickey Millsap, to raise a $10 million fund, which will be a traditional venture fund that will invest in these companies,” Carpenter said. “When some of them become very successful, we’re going to demonstrate the power of collaborative, collective effort on the investment side and on the support side for businesses, letting everyone here and around the country know that this is a place where if you have a business idea in health tech, you will get the kind of support you need financially and otherwise to help grow your business.”

Carpenter said it’s Prosper’s hope that this diverse group of business founders will help to solve the problems that Jefferson County citizens reported as part of their work with Acclinate. “There is no reason that a company can’t make a lot of money, be successful and also do a whole lot of good for the people, not just to meet the needs of people here in Jefferson County but all over the country and the world,” Carpenter said.

A third part of the health tech initiative, Carpenter said, is Prosper working with Tech Birmingham, Innovate Birmingham and Central Six to help align the health care and health tech workforce around the needs of employers to make sure their needs are met and also make it easier for citizens to have access to jobs, job training and job workshops, which will be done in part by Prosper’s B-Included platform.

Carpenter said he thanks Brookings, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C., Prosper board members and the community for helping form these initiatives.

“Collaboration is really important to us at Prosper,” Carpenter said. “We don’t have all the answers, but we know people that have a lot of the answers. We feel that when we work together, we’ll be able to make sure that our ecosystem is operating efficiently, meet the needs of employers and make it easy for folks on the ground.”