Updates

JANUARY 2021: FRONTPAGE NOTE

January 1, 2021

PAGE DIRECTOR’S REPORT

Happy New Year!!! Goodbye 2020 and Hello 2021!!

 

I hope each of you had a wonderful Holiday!! Last year was no doubt an incredibly interesting year and I, for one, am excited and looking forward to a fresh start! Even through the challenges of 2020, we still managed to achieve much. This past year we:

 

  • Held our first ever PAGE+ Leadership Roundtable on August 12th.  We identified nearly $2Billion of spend collectively among 7 anchors and look forward to continuing our work to shift spend to our local black and brown businesses.

  • We welcomed Independence Blue Cross as our newest PAGE Anchor. We are looking forward to working with and learning from Chuck Stefanosky and his team. Read more about how Independence’s Supplier Networking Meeting Encourages Collaboration and Relationship Building Among Black-Owned Businesses. Read more here.

  • We have partnered with Stimulus Inc. to help us with our Spend Shift Reporting. Stimulus is a relationship intelligence SaaS platform that uses data and analytics to help companies make better purchasing decisions. The Stimulus platform powering the PAGE initiatives will allow our team and the participating institutions one platform to track/manage our goals: including finding the right supplier at the right time. It will also house our PAGE Database of Anchor Suppliers! Which has been a request of our anchors for some time! Tiffanie Stanard just recently received a grant from Google and her company is a local, black, woman-owned business. We are thrilled to feature her in our inaugural edition of the FrontPAGE! Read more here.

  • We won a highly competitive grant from the federal Economic Development Agency’s Build to Scale program, which will allow us to build an impact investors hub.  This hub, which we are calling PAGE Capital, will help address the well-known “access to capital” problem faced by so many Black and brown-owned businesses.  We are thrilled to be partnering with Impact PHL and Social Venture Circle, entities well known to all of you. Check out more here.

  • Just as important, last month we learned that the Barra Foundation, based right here in Greater Philadelphia, has awarded us substantial funds to build a business advisory component that we are calling PAGE Prep.  We want to make sure that every local established Black and brown-owned firm that wants to do business with a large institution has what it takes to thrive in institutional supply chains.  So we are working with colleagues at EY, MFR Consultants, and other top-shelf consulting firms to build a suite of curated services to ensure competitive edge and sustainable growth for PAGE firms.

  • We welcomed Kenyatta James to the team as our Business Engagement Manager. Kenyatta’s primary responsibilities will be building out PAGE Prep and engaging with our suppliers.

 

In short, we have come quite a long way since February 2020 when I came onboard as the PAGE Director. Hard to believe that we are coming up close to my one-year anniversary! I am thrilled to launch our inaugural issue of FrontPAGE. I hope its' contents are of value to you. This Newsletter will be a great resource for benchmarking across institutions, and will be a place to learn about upcoming suppliers and business partners within our ecosystem.

We are already working on the 2nd Issue, so please let me know if you have a story to share! I cannot thank you all again for your continued support, and best wishes to you and yours for a safe and healthy 2021.