Brief, private group meetings on the campaign trail late in a general election race do not typically yield specific policy proposals or commitments. At best, what the candidate can communicate is that he or she is willing to listen to that group and try to understand their concerns.
In the case of Jason Kander, Democratic candidate for U.S. senator, and his private group meeting with members of the St. Louis Black Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, October 6, that mission was accomplished.
“I get that he gets it,” said Kevin Bryant, CEO of Conversions Global Marketing who attended the meeting, which was held in a conference room at Kwame Building Group in downtown St. Louis. The meeting, which lasted about an hour, was attended by about a dozen local black business owners and professionals.
Kander, 35, a Democrat from Kansas City currently serving as Missouri secretary of state, is running against Roy Blunt, 66, a Republican from Springfield. For Bryant, Kander’s youth and evident comfort in a majority-black group were encouraging.
“I’m excited to see there are younger politicians like this coming up in Missouri,” Bryant said of Kander. “Conversations like this give me hope that we can get something done.”
The American was invited to join the tail end of the meeting. At that point, Marvin Steele, a black chamber board member, was talking about black businesses’ relative difficulty acquiring capital.
“I believe there is a market opportunity that the banking industry hasn’t identified,” Kander said. “I don’t think the problem is a lack of business opportunity. There is something else going on. I think that folks outside the black community don’t recognize the economic opportunity in the black community.”
Alex Fennoy, executive vice president and Community & Economic Development director at Midwest BankCentre, who attended the meeting, agreed with Kander.
“It’s smart business going after that market,” Fennoy said. “The perception is it’s so different doing business in the black community, compared to the way banks normally do business, but it’s not.”
Fennoy has been instrumental in Midwest BankCentre opening new branches in Pagedale, in partnership with Beyond Housing, and in North St. Louis, in partnership with Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church.
In a commentary in The American in August, Fennoy acknowledged that the bank increased its business in black communities pursuant to an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2011, but were pleasantly surprised with the results. “In banking, we expect a retail branch to show profits in five years,” Fennoy said in May when the bank was breaking ground in North St. Louis. “That branch in Pagedale showed profit in less than three years.”
These are the business advisors whom Kander is seeking out in the home stretch of his campaign for U.S. Senate.
The group also discussed the struggles of small businesses. Kander said that entrepreneurs with new business ideas frequently get an outsized share of attention and support compared to existing business owners.
“There’s this sense that entrepreneurs are separate from small businesses, as if small businesses are not entrepreneurial,” Kander said. “A new business gets attention because it’s disruptive. But a company that stays in business, day in and day out, and manages not to get disrupted – that’s an entrepreneurial endeavor.”
Bryant was impressed. “Dialogues like this at least get to the root of some problems,” he told Kander during the meeting.
After the meeting, Kander said that groups like the black chamber don’t often get focused attention from a statewide candidate a month before the general election. “Their issues don’t get the attention they should in the last stretch,” Kander said. “It was important for me to do this now.”
The meeting concluded with handshakes, hugs and selfies.
“We are gratified by the attention we are receiving from Jason,” Steele said. “We had a lot of questions for him, and we did not get snap answers. He came in with an attitude of listening and understanding.”
Kander’s campaign did subsequently release some policy stands, following this meeting and another with St. Louis Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones and St. Louis citizens at the city’s Financial Empowerment Center she opened in City Hall.
Kander proposes allowing post offices the ability to partner with banks to offer basic financial services, which would allow low-income residents the ability to avoid check-cashing and other predatory financial services. This would not only help expand banks’ markets to areas where they have no presence, but could help alleviate the Postal Service’s budget problems, he said in a statement.
He also proposes allowing local and state governments to provide the start-up funds for banks to establish new branches in underserved areas, and offering tax breaks and other incentives to banks that open these branches.
Finally, he proposes supporting the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) program run by the U.S. Treasury. CDFIs are financial institutions that create access to capital and other financial services to low-income and underserved areas.
“It’s a great start,” Jones said of the proposals. “And I applaud Jason for paying attention to the plight of people who are vulnerable financially. This needs attention, because it’s expensive to be poor. These are steps in the right direction to mitigate that.”
Kander faces Blunt on the November 8 ballot.
