Leveling the Playing Field: Expanding
Minority Business Opportunities

Remarkable gains by minority-owned business stand to be squandered unless new growth strategies are adapted to compete in a rapidly changing
business market. Minority businesses need to collaborate with corporations as well as with government agencies.

This forum, cosponsored by the Springboard Economic Development Corporation and the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice, will highlight numerous tactics— legislative and otherwise—for improving the state of minority businesses.

Agenda

Richard A. Marcantonio is a managing attorney for Public Advocates Inc., a nonprofit law firm in San Francisco that effectively challenges the systemic causes of poverty by addressing issues of racism, affordable housing and transportation justice.  

In 2010, Marcantonio and his colleagues won an unprecedented victory against Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), a rail system that proposed to build a 3-mile, half-billion dollar line from a high-minority and high-poverty community in East Oakland to the Oakland Airport.  The successful administrative civil rights complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Transportation established a new frontier in advocating for a level playing field in transportation funding.