Center For Black Entrepreneurship Launches At Spelman, Morehouse

ATLANTA — Spelman College and Morehouse College will host the new Center for Black Entrepreneurship, the sibling colleges announced on Monday.

Thanks to a two-year, $10 million grant from Bank of America, the schools will launch the first-of-its-kind academic program to train and develop a generation of African American business owners and business leaders on the grounds of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). In cooperation with the Black Economic Alliance, the two colleges and Bank of America aim to remove barriers to opportunity and cultivate a pipeline to entrepreneurship by providing education, mentorship and access to capital.

The Center for Black Entrepreneurship will teach students how to create a business, launch a startup, evolve and translate a business concept, acquire or reposition an existing business, scale promising innovation into commercially viable products, and connect with venture capital institutions.

The program also will offer certifications in fields such as cybersecurity, coding, project management and data science, and will offer a global curriculum through virtual learning platforms.

Spelman College President Mary Schmidt Campbell said the grant will enhance the already exemplary educational opportunities both schools offer.

Spelman College President Mary Schmidt Campbell

“Bank of America’s gift to Spelman and Morehouse enables our institutions to create a dynamic academic experience for aspiring Black entrepreneurs,” Schmidt Campbell said. “Our students will learn to build strong businesses and create wealth for their families and their communities, all while obtaining a first-rate liberal arts education.”

Beyond simply changing the educational environment, the program offers both colleges — which encourage their students to be engaged in their communities — the opportunity to grow businesses that can build the neighborhoods the students want to serve while in school and upon graduation.

Morehouse College President David A. Thomas said the Center for Black Entrepreneurship “adds important capacity to support our work with minority-owned businesses and current or future entrepreneurs who are gaining access to capital, creating jobs, leveraging technology, and developing the products and services that enhance the standard of living for us all.”

The CBE, which will be housed on the all-female college’s campus, will incorporate some of the curriculum and pro-business programs already in place, such as Spelpreneur and the Innovation Lab, which are part of Spelman’s Department of Economics. Many students attend all-male Morehouse, next door to Spelman, for its renowned business program with the hope of parlaying what they learn into their own startup companies.

“Many of our scholars come to us with an entrepreneurial mindset or having had some experience with business,” said Monique Dozier, vice president of institutional advancement, in a statement. “Morehouse has a nationally acclaimed business program that has launched students into careers at Fortune 500 companies, but we do not have an entrepreneurship major. This contribution will allow us to expand our offerings to meet the needs of students who want to create businesses and jobs in communities of color and achieve personal prosperity.”

The funding to develop the CBE is a part of Bank of America’s four-year, $1 billion commitment to advance economic opportunity and racial equality. This initiative includes contributing to the support of entrepreneurship, job and career development, education, health and housing.

Bank of America recently announced it is investing $150 million in 40 private funds focused on minority entrepreneurs as part of its efforts to address the persistent gap in access to growth capital for minority-led businesses, which included Fearless Fund, based in Atlanta.

Spelman alumna Cynthia Bowman, who is Bank of America’s chief diversity and inclusion talent acquisition officer, said she knows firsthand how the two HBCUs have helped both the students they have graduated and the respective communities those students learned in and joined after earning degrees.

“This collective partnership will work to eliminate existing barriers by providing unique opportunities to Black entrepreneurs, ultimately fueling Black innovation and economic mobility within the next generation,” she said.