Saturday Oct. 15th – The Blue Heart Foundation held it’s monthly workshop which focused on both personal and professional development. This month Taryell Simmons of Connect2Careers focused on Creating an Elevator Pitch – Elevator pitches are brief, rehearsed introductions that give potential employers a “highlight reel” of a person’s experiences and aspirations — answering the common “tell me about yourself” interview question. Participants learned to build a pitch that included their passions, goals and qualifications, then practice their pitch individually and in groups.
Our Professional Development portion focused on Real Estate, facilitated by Derrick Luckett, President of DESTINY-SIX-FINANCIAL. Mr. Luckett’s interactive workshop focused on credit health and keys to home ownership. He also provided a powerful overview on redlining and how it impacts communities and wealth redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas.
While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance, other services such as health care[ or even supermarkets, can be denied to residents (or in the case of businesses like the aforementioned supermarkets, simply moved impractically far away from such residents) to carry out redlining. The term “redlining” was coined in the late 1960s by John McKnight, a sociologist and community activist. It refers to the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest; later the term was applied to discrimination against a particular group of people (usually by race or sex) irrespective of geography.
During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were black inner city neighborhoods. For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative-reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle- or upper-income blacks. The use of blacklists is a related mechanism also used by redliners to keep track of groups, areas, and people that the discriminating party feels should be denied business or aid or other transactions. In the academic literature, redlining falls under the broader category of credit rationing.
Finally, we were treated as Jay King of Club Nouveau stopped through and present on entrepreneurship… Mr. King started his career over 30 years ago (King rewrote music business history when he manufactured, distributed, marketed & promoted the Multi-Million selling #1 R&B and Top Ten Pop hit ‘Rumors’ by the Timex Social Club on his Indi label Jay Records in 1986). He knows what kind of talent, infrastructure and support that is needed to create a successful brand as well as business.
Building real synergy and networking opportunities between local communities and businesses are critical to the success of ones business, sharing his expertise as a marketer, visionary and businessman who was one of the music industry’s first black executives. We were honored that he would stop by to mentor our young men and guests
