The Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership (IFEL) has partnered with the National Minority Supplier Development Council to enhance the NMSDC’s Emerging Young Entrepreneurs (EYE) Cohort Program, which provides the next generation of minority entrepreneurs support for their growing businesses.
The EYE program, now is its eighth year, has been recently enhanced with a methodology called Success Circles, originally created as part of IFEL’s Women of Color Connecting (WOCCON) initiative which focuses on leveraging the power of relationship capital to help more women of color entrepreneurs to grow, scale and create wealth from their businesses. Entrepreneurs and founders accepted into Women of Color Connecting are matched with a circle of experts – the Success Circle – who render capacity-building assistance to get the entrepreneurs on a grow-scale-exit trajectory.
Reflecting the IFEL-inspired enhancement, the EYE program now includes EYE Success Circles and employs the capacity-building methodology that centers the entrepreneur among a group of experts focused on using their collective talents and connections to help entrepreneurs build businesses. The Success Circles will help deepen relationships between EYE Cohorts and EYE corporate partners.
“We are very excited to extend the impact of our Success Circles methodology to the businesses participating in the EYE program,” said IFEL CEO Jill Johnson. “NMSDC is a wonderful organization with strong corporate relationships. This model leverages the power of those relationships to create capacity-building and growth opportunities for the participating EYE businesses. Our work together has the potential to be transformative and can serve as a model for increasing supplier diversity impact.”
Jade Melvin, NMSDC program manager and content creator for the newly rebranded EYE program, stated, “We are partnering with the Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership to implement the Success Circles component and are excited about the opportunities to enhance programming for the growth and success of the entrepreneurs.”
EYE Success Circles will launch in June, engaging NMSDC EYE program corporate members as volunteers to provide direct capacity-building support to cohort businesses.
More information on the NMSDC Emerging Young Entrepreneurs Cohort Program is available on the website, https://www.nmsdceyeprogram.org, and by contacting EYE Program Manager Jade Melvin at 203-218-7329 or jade.melvin@nmsdc.org. For more information about licensing the IFEL Success Circles model, contact Jill Johnson at jill@weareifel.org.
