St. Louis Regional Chamber Vice President Gisele Marcus wants to “revitalize” St. Louis, making it a more desirable city for young people to live and work.
One important way Marcus wants to remake the city is through a new economic development entity. The project, Alliance STL, started with the goal to encourage more companies to come to the St. Louis region with plans to expand and therefore increase the workforce.
The program is modeled after the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber’s production efforts to invest in the city after its civil unrest in 2001.
“The goal was actually to revitalize the area that had some civil unrest,” said Marcus. “So what it looks like now is an area where you have residential living that is affordable.”
Marcus was struck by the idea after visiting Cincinnati with a working group from the chamber.
“We have an opportunity to go visit what we would call comparable cities and have the opportunity to learn what it is that they’re doing – if they have fixed some of the challenges that we have and how they’ve done that,” she said.
“They too, like us, have had some social unrest, I would say, from a racial perspective, longer ago than Ferguson. Moreover, they’ve had the opportunity to address that.”
Cincinnati’s project is a public-private partnership called 3CDC. It has spurred development in rental in the city where the ground level of buildings houses businesses and the upper levels are usually apartments or condominiums.
The learning between regional chambers is reciprocal, Marcus said. “They actually replicated programs we have here,” said Marcus.
The Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber previously sent a working group to St. Louis and took back home two ideas that they adopted: the St. Louis Regional Business Council, where owners of mid-sized businesses collaborate to build a competitive world class region, and the St. Louis Mosaic Project, which helps immigrants integrate into the workforce and business culture and
“Like St. Louis, Cincinnati has a growing immigrant population, but Cincinnati did not know how to deal with the population until they visited St. Louis during a leadership trip,” Marcus said. “They saw St. Louis Mosaic Project, and ultimately made one of their own.”
Along with Alliance STL, the chamber recently launched a new initiative as a part of the effort to recruit students at universities and college within 250 miles of Saint Louis to stay in the St. Louis region. The Chamber’s Project 250 will seek out opportunities for students from these universities and place them in corporations around the city to keep them in the St. Louis region in the area.
“We’re looking for about 10 corporations, to partner with us on that, in terms of internships and job opportunities,” said Marcus. “And a number of our membership organizations have raised their hand in terms of wanting to participate.”
The chamber also is trying to stimulate regional economic development by trying help diverse businesses in the St. Louis region develop with the Diverse Business Accelerator. The inaugural cohort, announced in February, includes Kayla Dennis of US Essential Supply & Services, Sriram Devanathan of Medical Guidance Systems, Brittanie Goldsby of Speaker Leaks, Shequana Hughes of The SAVA Group, Trish Jensen of milliCare, Kesha Kent of MrsKeshSpeaks and Emily Smith of Splaced.
“I believe we have a responsibility as the Regional Chamber, the region’s largest business organization, to play a role in the success of our region’s small diverse and women-owned businesses,” Lakesha Mathis, the chamber’s director of Inclusive Business Solutions, said when it was announced.
Marcus said the chamber also is partnering with Regions Bank in a program called Inner City Connections (ICCC). Its goal is to recruit and support small- and medium-sized businesses of all diverse backgrounds, including minority-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, LGBTQ-owned businesses, immigrant-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses and disadvantaged business enterprises.
ICCC will connect businesses to experts in fields such as marketing and small-business finance to help them expand their companies and hire more people. David Christian, senior vice president and regional manager for Community Affairs at Regions Bank calls it “an MBA program on steroids” where business owners “get trained on strategic leadership, marketing –all kinds of valuable information.”
Application for the program should be submitted by August 30. For more information visit www.iccapitalconnections.org.
