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Unlocking capital, unlocking 1M businesses and 9M jobs

A conversation with Gregory Johnson, managing director, The Rockefeller Foundation
By Ramona Schindelheim
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In this week’s Work in Progress podcast, I speak with Gregory Johnson, managing director of The Rockefeller Foundation’s U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative.

The mission of The Rockefeller Foundation, says Greg Johnson, is to fight for vulnerable families who have been locked out of economic prosperity here at home and abroad. He says it crucially import now, as we work toward a post-pandemic recovery.

Through its Rockefeller Opportunity Collective (ROC), the Foundation is putting $15 million into the hands of a group of government, business, faith-based, and non-profit partners in 12 U.S. communities. Johnson says the money will be used to eliminate barriers to accessing capital and credit among low-wage workers and small businesses operated by women, Black and Latinx owners.

“We’ve been really focused on how to build public-private partnerships that bring capital into communities that have had a really hard time securing it,” says Johnson. “Minority-owned businesses are less likely to receive loans. They’re more likely to forego applying for loans for fear of rejection, and they tend to pay higher interest rates on business loans compared to the non-minority counterparts when they do receive those loans.”

Small Businesses are Job-Creators

According to ROC, by helping provide better access to capital, there is the potential to create more than one million new businesses, which will create nine million new jobs and boost the national income by more than $3 billion.

Creating new businesses will build stronger families and communities, Johnson adds. “We know that the research suggests that business ownership is associated with higher levels of net worth and that for black and LatinX small businesses, this also serves as a community stabilizer and is a highly visible example of economic mobility.”

The Rockefeller Foundation Opportunity Collective will include the following 12 places: Atlanta, Ga.; Boston, Mass.; Chicago, Ill.; El Paso, Tex.; Miami Dade County, Fla.; Houston, Tex.; Louisville, Ky.; Newark, N.J.; Norfolk, Va.; Oakland, Calif.; Baltimore, Md.; and Jackson, Ms.

Johnson says, “The data drove us to where we are. Urban areas are minority and COVID centers. Black businesses and black populations are geographically concentrated in urban hubs. Forty percent of black business activity is focused in only 1% of U.S. counties. That’s 30 counties across the country. 63% of those 30 counties had the highest rates of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., too.

“When we think about building back—when we think about the way forward—we would be fooling ourselves to think that we can get there from where we are without including low-wage entrepreneurs. When Black women are starting businesses at six times the rate of all of their peers, when Latinx women are starting businesses at rates that outshine most of their peers, when women are increasingly responsible for the finances of family and community and institution, we cannot do it without them. There is too much at stake.”

Johnson and I talk about the next steps with the investment, how it will be used to unlock these opportunities, in the podcast. You can listen here, or download the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

Download the transcript for this Work in Progress podcast here

Episode 176: Gregory Johnson, managing director, The Rockefeller Foundation
Host: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Executive Producers: Joan Lynch, Melissa Panzer, and Ramona Schindelheim
Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0.

You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.

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