#StartupsEverywhere: Mildred Franco, Executive Director, The Generator at Go Forward Pine Bluff
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Supporting Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Southeast Arkansas
Pine Bluff is known as the ‘Bass Capital of the World’ because of its numerous recreational opportunities and bass fishing tournaments, but a group of local citizens and entrepreneurs is working to turn the city into a hub of business development. Go Forward Pine Bluff (GFPB), a non-profit organization, is working to improve education, local government, infrastructure, quality of life, and economic development in the city. The organization created an innovation hub in 2017 to help drive their economic development efforts. Known as The Generator at Go Forward Pine Bluff, the innovation hub is working to improve the digital skills of entrepreneurs, improve the city’s lagging broadband access, and support the long-term success of small businesses. We recently spoke with Mildred Franco, Executive Director of The Generator, to learn more about the innovation hub’s work, how the coronavirus pandemic has affected local entrepreneurs, and what the organization is doing to improve the city’s connectivity.
What in your background made you interested in supporting entrepreneurship in Pine Bluff?
I’ve been living in Pine Bluff for 30 years. I moved here from New York City, where I was an oil trader. My husband and I started a computer company, according to the Economic Development Alliance, at the time, there was a real need for computer consultants who could translate business practices into technology.
But around 2015 we wanted to do other things and so I took some time off. I was on the boards of several nonprofits, and that was an avenue I wanted to explore further. That was around the time Go Forward Pine Bluff (GFPB) was beginning to take off. I was on the board of the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub at the time, and I got a phone call from one of the chairs of GFPB who said, “I know you’re involved in entrepreneurship and innovation hubs, and we want to take a close look at that as part of the economic development pillar.”
I was minimally involved with the GFPB planning process, and simply connected them with people who came to speak about innovation hubs as drivers of economic development and the creation of small businesses. GFPB was working with about 100 volunteers--all citizens of Pine Bluff from different walks of life and backgrounds--to put together a plan to revitalize the city. They unveiled the plan in early 2017and realized they would need more than private funding to implement the plan. So, they asked the citizens of Pine Bluff to pass a 5/8th-cent sales tax to help fund the plan, the tax passed. Towards the end of 2017 I got a phone call from the CEO of GFPB, Dr. Ryan Watley, and he said, “We want you to come and join the team as the Executive Director of the innovation hub.”
Tell us more about The Generator at Go Forward Pine Bluff. What is the work you’re doing, and how are you working to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Pine Bluff and across Southeast Arkansas?
The plan for The Generator innovation hub was part of GFPB’s economic development pillar, which had two main initiatives: one was the innovation hub, and the other was employability training. So, I started having conversations about the goals and objectives of what they wanted to accomplish. And it was clear from the beginning that they wanted to create more small businesses and support the city’s small businesses.
I started meeting with people, mapping our resources, looking at the gaps, and seeing what was already in place here to figure out what Pine Bluff residents thought an innovation hub would look like. And it became apparent very quickly that support for small businesses was a big need, as well as digital skills training. I felt that we could do something around that and have some real impact.
I focused on asset mapping and a proof of concept to help bring things to town that we didn't have before. We held a series of workshops on access to capital, marketing, human resources, sales, business legal structures and selling to the government. We did about 30 of those workshops and with subject matter experts to help lead them. I also entered into a partnership with Grow with Google to bring in Google workshops as well. All of this was to help validate the idea that this was of interest to people here. And we had great success with the workshops, and we knew we were on the right track.
What makes Pine Bluff’s entrepreneurial community so unique?
Pine Bluff is a small city of about 43,000 people. It’s about 78 percent Black, and that population is about 55 percent female. Our community is very underserved, and resources are not really coming here. Pine Bluff was once Arkansas’s second-largest largest city and is considered the gateway to the Arkansas Delta. But Pine Bluff and the Arkansas Delta have suffered from a population decline the last 20 years. There are other areas in Arkansas, like Northwest Arkansas, where the growth has been taking place.
Our entrepreneurial community is unique because, despite being so under-resourced, it’s very community driven. Despite the many challenges that we have, they still try to make it. There is a desire to make it, and an ambition to do better.
How has The Generator been working to support local entrepreneurs affected by the COVID pandemic?
We were supposed to officially open our doors in April once our building renovations were done, but then COVID hit. And my first concern at the time was that a lot of our city’s small businesses don’t really have the capital to survive something like this.
I have a good relationship with the Small Business Administration's local district office, so I reached out to them to see what was happening. The SBA quickly put together the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) program, so I started learning about it. Since we have poor broadband in Pine Bluff, getting information out proved challenging. The way information is disseminated here is one-on-one or in groups. So, I was on the phone all day long with people.
The Black business community here is averse to loans, perhaps because they’ve been underbanked, unbanked, or don’t have a relationship with traditional banks, so they’re not comfortable with the idea of loans. When COVID hit, and not knowing what was going to happen later, it was hard for them to think of getting loans not knowing if they were going to be able to pay it back. This was before the Paycheck Protection Program loans came out, which included some loan forgiveness.
So, I started reaching out to foundations I know to try and see if they were developing anything. I’m on the board of the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas (WFA), we had a meeting in March and the board decided that the WFA needed to get grants out right away. They developed a fund to help women business owners, and they were able to offer some grants. So, I focused on finding grants that were designed to help small businesses, especially minority and women entrepreneurs, because a lot of the business owners here are women of color. My main priority was making sure our businesses could keep their lights on, and so far, we’ve successfully brought from the WFA and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) about $175,000 in grants to the community to do just that.
Can you tell us a bit about your efforts to bring high-speed Internet to Pine Bluff, and why this is so important for the city’s entrepreneurs and business community?
At the beginning of 2019, we were selected to join the first cohort of the Rural Innovation Network (RIN), an initiative of Rural Innovation Strategies Inc. (RISI), which is a program of the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI). Through this partnership we are now working on a broadband plan for the City of Pine Bluff, a USDA-supported plan to bring high-speed Internet to Pine Bluff.
The Generator is working with the City of Pine Bluff, RISI, and CTC Energy and Technology to create a broadband plan to bring Pine Bluff into the 21st century. The first phase now is asset mapping and resource mapping to identify what’s in place and the gaps, and identifying partners, to later create a public-private partnership and get the funding necessary to implement the plan.
What additional steps can state and federal lawmakers take to support Pine Bluff’s entrepreneurs?
Until the whole of government addresses the generation wealth gap, the food insecurities a lot of our families suffer, and the educational challenges we continue to have, then everything else is just lip service. You can’t grow prosperous communities when people are hungry, poorly educated, and the Black-white wealth gap is what it is right now. The net worth of a typical white family is nearly 10 times greater than that of a Black family.
When a white friend of mine wants to create a business, they may be able to go to their families and borrow $5000. When a Black friend of mine wants to create a business, they may not be able to do that if his/her family's accumulated wealth on average is around $15,000. We can talk all day long about creating businesses and offering loans and technical assistance—and we’ll continue to do that—but you can’t effectively accomplish that when the system isn’t set up to address basic issues.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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