Now more than ever, the community must continue the camaraderie shown during the pandemic when it relates to helping businesses survive and thrive. What can you do?
I challenge everyone, whether it’s personally or through your professional channel to be proactive and intentional about finding ways to support our local shops, restaurants, and local companies.
The GMCVB has an ongoing focus of Tourism Business Enhancement, which works to elevate small and multicultural businesses in Miami’s heritage communities directly or indirectly affecting the hospitality industry.
Not many convention bureaus across the U.S. have programming to work directly with businesses in the community, and none that I know of are taking the approach that we have at the GMCVB. It is important that we do our part by being a catalyst to economic growth to all of the county.
The official mission of our TBE program is to facilitate initiatives that advocate, support, and strengthen the economic sustainability and access of our multicultural communities and heritage-related businesses within Greater Miami.
Some of the projects we offer or collaborate on are entrepreneur small business training, professional business workshops, GMCVB Partnership development, new business referral and vendor opportunities, educational resources and enrichment program referrals, advocacy and community outreach, technical assistance, strategic marketing support, and several opportunities under the Art of Black Miami marketing platform.
We lead efforts and we collaborate to get the above items implemented. There are a couple key collaborations with the Miami Bayside Foundation and the Beacon Council that are pivotal at this point of post COVID-19 recovery.
Through our partnership with the MBF, we refer businesses from our stakeholder bank to be a part of their small business training.
The partnership with the MBF is important because it provides a workshop series for businesses to attend and learn or get a refresher on foundational business operations. It was designed to help owners and organizations operate more profitably and leverage the promotional support of the GMCVB.
One of our newest collaborations is with the Beacon Council. Through the Multicultural Department, we are participating with the Beacon Council’s Small Business XCELerator Program by referring businesses and serving as an advocate organization to the participants.
The goal of the program is to assist Black and Latinx businesses with under 10 employees and less than 500K in revenue per year. In addition, the program provides technical assistance and resources over the next three years through the Rockefeller Foundation Grant track to those selected.
The impact of these efforts take time, but we know from the feedback of the participants that the programs provided have been beneficial to their businesses.
A key area of impact is the capacity building focus, which helps to increase the ability to compete and sustain as well as job creation.
For more information about the GMCVB’s Tourism Business Enhancement resources/opportunities, visit the website at www.multiculturalmiami.com or for events, tourist activities happening in Miami-Dade visit the general website at www.miamiandbeaches.com.