Farías asks how the city addresses underperforming demographics

And then just...

Quickly in relation to what my colleagues were talking about, when we're looking at numbers of where contracts are being

actually procured and who's getting them, and looking at these utilization numbers, and we're seeing certain groups or certain demographics underperforming,

How are we addressing that?

I mean, I'm not a small business owner, so maybe I'm missing the targeted ad on Instagram or something that's trying to get more people registered as an MWBE or maybe.

Maybe I'm missing something because I'm not part of that target outreach group, but I'm just wondering how are we ensuring that these

plans are being put in place and or the numbers that we're looking at or the demographics that we need to look at that we're clearly failing as a city to provide procurement opportunities to how are we adjusting here?

Thank you so much, Councilmember.

So I think I'd like to just add more context.

It's a program.

It's a very important program for the city, and there's three key agencies that are involved.

SBS is the education outreach programming arm to support the individual business when the individual business needs resources.

So we have a contract financing loan fund product that gives an MWB firm, if they have a city contract, upfront capital that they could use to get started on the work.

We've got an online business directory of all MWBE firms that is another tool for, based on the certification that we manage, that is a tool for all of the agencies to utilize to, as they search for potential

qualified firms, they could leverage that directory.

But in addition to that, we have a buyer services team that not only just supports city agencies, but even other entities, including

as we had the FIFA World Cup in the city, we attempted to make sure that the organizing team in Jersey understood and knew that the city has a directory of all MWB firms.

And if they wanted to engage with us, we could.

could even give them a curated list based on the types of industries or the types of contracts they're interested in and respond to them.

One relevant example to what you've asked is recently the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment and OTI reached out to us for a $7.5 million opportunity of a professional services contract related to grant making.

We leverage understanding, ask them some questions, better understood what they were looking for, gave them a curated list of 20 MWBE firms that are currently in the directory.

So while we in this tri-agency oversight role are simply an

education and a resource provider, and the governance on utilization rests with our partner agencies, when an agency approaches us and they have a clear sense of what they're looking for, what they need, we will give them a curated list and try to better understand their needs and then give them

firms that they should consider in their contracting process.

We are not in their contracting team, so we have no idea.

The next steps as to how they manage those contracting decisions, but we're here as a resource for the vendors, the firms, as well as the procurement officers.