| North Carolina Central University (NCCU) intends to use its Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) grant to establish its Building Minority Ownership Project (BMOP), which will address the low rates of homeownership and business ownership, and organizational capacity gaps that impede efforts of community and faith-based groups in the 11 impoverished census tracts surrounding the campus in Durham, North Carolina. BMOP will significantly expand activities initiated by the 2002 Community Economic Development Initiative (NCCU-CEDI). NCCU will construct two houses near the campus, enabling homeownership for two low-income or very-low-income families. NCCU-CEDI Entrepreneurship Center will continue to offer Basic Business Skills, Business Plan Development, and Bankers Panel Preparation courses developed for microenterprises with the university’s 2002 HBCU grant. The NCCU Department of Public Administration will create the Social Entrepreneurship Resource Incubator (SERI) to educate, enable, and empower nonprofit community- and faith-based organizations and their leaders, which actively advocate for the area’s rehabilitation of housing and elimination of neighborhood problems. SERI will provide research and technical assistance in the structuring and the application of community inspired innovative solutions, for example implementing technologies such as GIS and social networking. The specific projects are: (1) hold four social entrepreneurship workshops, and (2) coordinate three specific client driven technical assistance and research projects. Looking forward, SERI will create a development plan for organizational and physical infrastructure to support social entrepreneurship that meets grant funding and industry collaboration requirements.
|
