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This article is the sixth article in our series—The Promise of Targeted Universalism: Community Leaders Respond—that NPQ is publishing in partnership with the national racial and economic justice nonprofit Prosperity Now. In this series, writers will examine how targeted universalism—a narrative framework that advocates the use of targeted approaches to achieve universal goals—can inform efforts to close the racial wealth gap, community by community.
Talent, we posit, is distributed equally across the country, but opportunity quite obviously is not. A lot of the work of community development practitioners, particularly in rural communities like those in the South where we work, focuses on closing the gap between talent and opportunity and between opportunity and wealth.
Wealth building usually revolves around an increase in income and net worth primarily from real estate or investment transactions. These traditional wealth building strategies are not creating equitable wealth for people in BIPOC communities, as we see the racial wealth gap continuing to widen.
According to a study by the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, Black business owners have 12 times more wealth than Black wage earners. However, support for entrepreneurs of color cannot focus solely on business start-ups or even small business growth but must rather include intentional pathways for building wealth.
Targeted Universalism, as developed by john a. powell and his colleagues, provides a pivotal framework for closing the wealth gap. The universal goal applied here is that all entrepreneurs in the US ought to have the opportunity to generate reasonable wealth. A radical idea. We root our work in the notion that health begets wealth, so addressing the social determinants of health—such as ensuring access to healthy food—is actually critical to achieving success in business development, especially when working alongside businesses in Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other communities of color.
Utilizing the targeted universalist approach, the messaging of this universal goal links wealth building for all entrepreneurs to overall wellbeing in the US economy. Take, for instance, a McKinsey & Company study published in October 2020. It demonstrates that the racial wealth gap is estimated to cost the US economy up to $1.5 trillion per year by 2028. McKinsey further concludes that building supportive ecosystems for Black-owned businesses by addressing the “challenges of access—to capital, expertise, and services” will help close the racial wealth gap.
Fortunately, there are business development organizations across the country today led by Black, Brown, white, and Native American individuals—both urban and rural—that are well positioned to expand into intentional wealth creation. Forming a multiracial coalition around entrepreneurial wealth building allows a …….
Source: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/wealth-building-for-business-owners-of-color-a-whole-person-approach/
