The United States Black Chambers recently launched the Young Black Male Entrepreneur Institute. This initiative aims to address black male jobless rate.
The United States Black Chambers is an organization compromised of viable and self-sustaining individuals who work nationwide with small business associations. These collaborative efforts with strategic partners, increases their capacity to provide diverse services.
Black men, in the United States, have unemployment rates consistently higher than those of other demographic groups. The Pew Research Center has reported, since the U.S. government began tracking joblessness by race in 1954, black Americans have experienced an unemployment rate at least double that of their white counterparts. Plus, there’s a preponderance of black American female graduates than black American males. And, regardless of educational levels, disparities hold up in other categories. “According to a report released last year by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, black college graduates were generally twice as likely to be unemployed in 2013 as their white peers. The same study reported that a white man with a recent criminal history was more likely to receive a follow-up call after a job interview than a black man with no criminal record and an otherwise identical resumes.”
The Washington D.C. advocacy group plans to offer a 16-week program featuring “a curricula led by subject matter experts from the framework of our nation’s most competitive business institutions. The entrepreneurs will also receive business development counseling from a cadre of diverse business leaders with a culminating experience that allows cohort members to pitch to a selection of CEOs and investors from the region.”
This has the potential of generating gratifying results for black males and the American business world. There’s high hope to have a national expansion once it proves to become an auspicious venture. In an interview this week with NewsOne, Howard R. Jean, the institute’s chief engineer and an education entrepreneur, said the connection between mentors and mentees is key to the initiative’s model.
“We know that having a cohort and having people around you to support you is great, but also having that business savvy, that curricula and the expertise of senior leaders, is going to help us propel these guys to higher heights and accelerate their growth,” Jean said.
This initiative aims to address an alarming black male jobless rate, and let’s see how this can be implemented across the United States.
SOURCE: HUFFINGTON POST
