Innopower launches Indy Biz Pass to support minority business owners
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Indianapolis-based Innopower—an organization that aims to support minority entrepreneurs—has launched a tool designed to connect minority business owners with essential resources to help fuel growth.
Indy Biz Pass, developed in partnership with Indianapolis-based Metaimpact, allows business owners to reach out to potential funding partners, industry experts, and talent development resources.
“We’ve met with several service providers to understand how we take the resources they provide and connect it to the business owners,” Innopower CEO Emil Ekiyor said. “Everyone in the region has come together to say, ‘Look, we want to make sure we’ve created an environment that supports startup growth and sustainability of Black businesses.'”
Ekiyor told Inside INdiana Business that the idea for Indy Biz Pass came during the pandemic when JPMorgan Chase convened a group of business owners, not-for-profit leaders and policymakers to study what assets are available and what challenges needed to be addressed.
“Three main things stood out to us was,” he said. “We had to create a continuum of capital and be innovative on how to create opportunities for capital for Black businesses in the region. We had to go away from just having individual activities and develop a more coordinated ecosystem where all of those activities are working together for a specific goal. And then three was doing that whole research. They saw that a lot of available resources, but not a mechanism to connect business owners to those resources.”
JPMorgan Chase provided funding to help develop Indy Biz Pass, which has also received support from the Indy Urban League, Business Equity Indy, Sagamore Institute and more.
Ekiyor said to support startup growth in the Black community, it may not necessarily be about creating new resources, but maximizing the resources that already exist.
“That was one of the major focuses was the asset mapping around what’s available today, and are we maximizing what’s available today?” he said. “So [we want] to be able to measure that, to be able to connect business owners to those resources, and then come back to the table to say, “Here are the results, or you know what? We actually need more resources,’ which we all feel like we do. But I think this is a good way of going to know that we maximize the available the current resources today.”
Among the resources being made available through Indy Biz Pass, Ekiyor said business owners can get connected to local Community Development Financial Institutions that can help them gain access to microloans they may need.
But he said users can also take advantage of programs they may not have to known about to get help preparing to apply for those loans.
“I can go to this training program, then I can learn more about how do I prepare myself to go get a loan from a CDFI, then I can walk into the CDFI prepared,” he said. “By being aware of the process that we have trained in to prepare you, you go to this training for three or four weeks, you get your books in order, now you walk into the CDFI to apply for a loan, you have a better chance of getting that loan.”
Indy Biz Pass has about 50 resource providers signed on and since its June 18 launch, Ekiyor said they’ve already seen about 1,700 views on the platform.
Ekiyor said the next phase for the platform is to identify the opportunity to supply diversity to the city, which he calls an “immense opportunity.”
“For us, it’s all about having a market approach to solving the problem. That people make more money, flourishing and growing their businesses, it helps us with our poverty situation. It helps us with our housing situation. It just solves a lot of issues for us, just helping people do better economically. So phase three is building out a supply diversity environment, connecting the business owners to that resource. We’re creating a process that prepares them to go compete for contract.”
You can learn more about Indy Biz Pass by clicking here.