Stevens asks about policies for Black women and Native American women MWBEs

Hello, good morning.

Morning.

Thank you for being here with us.

I just have a couple of questions as I'm looking through some of the information and specifically around like black owned women and WBEs and seeing the numbers being so low and such a disparity in the MWBs is also crazy, right?

But just also just thinking about what policies have you implemented to address those concerns?

Are there specific things that you're doing to ensure that like these other groups who are not getting these contracts are doing other than capital?

And I think it's hitting on with Councilmember Russell saying, like, could you talk about specific policy?

Because I think the numbers are so glaring for me as a person who will be in charge.

I'm like, OK, so we need to start here to figure out how do we do this other than capital?

Because we know that the whole point of this is like a lot of these folks are smaller businesses and they need additional services and it just can't be capital.

So I would love to hear more specifically about the policies that's been created to kind of address the disparities, even within this NWBE categories and specifically looking at black minority owned women businesses.

They only got like 371 contracts and looking at Native American women, they got one.

So like how why are we not starting there?

Could you talk specifically about what policies have been implemented to address that?