Palm Coast, FL (June 3, 2022) – Since incorporating the African American Entrepreneurs Association in 2018 founder and CEO Leslie Giscombe has worked with local, state and federal partners to increase the opportunities for underserved and minority entrepreneurs.
Growing the organization’s reach, with partnerships like the Small Business Administration, Bank of America, United Way, and the Daytona Tortugas baseball team supporting the efforts of the AAEA, Giscombe was pleased to add the City of Palm Coast as a partner on Friday, June 3rd.
Meeting with the Mayor of Palm Coast David Alfin and the city’s chief community development officer Jason DeLorenzo, who helped spearhead the effort, the city is excited to add the African American Entrepreneurs Association as resource for business builders in the community.
“Business and economic opportunity are not only a strategic priority for the City of Palm Coast, they are essential to the future success of our community,” said Alfin, a staunch believer in personally building professional relationships to help further economic development that supports the city’s dynamic blueprint for the future.
“Quite honestly, even in today’s digital and online world, it’s still important to be able to sit down face-to-face with people you want to create a long-term and lasting relationship with,” he said.
“Leslie has a track record here locally in the community and brings with him a great experience from the region, as well. To help him build on that success here to benefit the residents of the City of Palm Coast is a great collaboration.”
Providing conference room space, AAEA is able to offer businesses counseling, mentorship and educational workshops in the Business Assistance Center located within Palm Coast’s City Hall building alongside other business mentoring organizations like SCORE.
“Our Business Assistance Center has changed over the years, how it works, but we still have a pretty robust mentoring system and this is just going to add to that mentoring and allow our new businesses to foster and our existing businesses to grow and continue to meet the workforce needs of the community,” said DeLorenzo.
Sharing the vision of AAEA with business leaders and academics across Florida, the organization now provides resources through the City of Palm Coast’s Business Assistance Center in addition to their locations at the University of Central Florida’s Volusia County Business Incubator in Daytona Beach, and at the Santa Fe College Gainesville Technical Entrepreneurship Center (GTEC) in Gainesville.
“I think that the important thing is partnerships and sticking to your mission,” said Giscombe. “Because we’ve stuck to that, our partners are supporting those efforts.”
The support from businesses including financial institutions is helping open up opportunity and capital for the 1.1 million minority business owners across the United States, in turn, allowing them to further invest in their communities.
“Each one of those financial institutions are now beginning to create a program and have a product which is important in the banking industry,” he said. “Besides the micro-lenders out there, the regular commercial banks are understanding that they need to incorporate a program for that segment of the population.”
Giscombe and Alfin echoed similar missions when discussing the positive impact the African American Entrepreneurs Association will bring as an asset, helping to open up opportunity for all residents working to create or grow a successful business in Palm Coast.
“I think it’s great. I appreciate the willingness to not just talk about inclusion, but acting on it,” said Giscombe.
“This is one of the meetings I had initially with the mayor. I’m really impressed, really excited. This is the first mayor that has bought into this vision of not just talking about inclusion but making an effort and being intentional about how to do it. He did it with the community in mind, knowing and looking at who our partners were, and what we have to offer. That’s the key thing,” said Giscombe.
“We also looked very carefully about the foundation and the underpinnings of this vision that we’re talking about,” said Alfin. “Cities will only prosper, they will only be sustainable if they are well-balanced. We are working every day to create that balance for the future.”
The addition of the African American Entrepreneurs Association as a resource is part of the city council’s strategic efforts to bolster and enhance the city’s business-friendly ecosystem.
“In the next couple of weeks we are going to be recruiting an economic development manager, to try to bring this vision forward. All these pieces that we’re building will be under that manager to really move the city forward economically,” said DeLorenzo.
