Helping to Grow Profitable Businesses for 55 Years

To commemorate Black History Month, NYCHA is highlighting the work of partner organizations that support, educate, and advocate for NYCHA residents to learn new skills to empower themselves and their communities.

Melisa Jamison had a small business but was not sure how to grow or market it. A flyer in the lobby of her Rutgers Houses building caught her eye: “Learn how to run your own business,” the text read. She wrote down the information and enrolled in the workshop, which she said was one of the best business decisions she has ever made.

The flyer was from Workshop in Business Opportunities (WIBO), a zone partner of NYCHA’s Office of Resident Economic Empowerment & Sustainability (REES) and a non-profit organization that teaches small business owners and entrepreneurs from underserved communities how to start, operate, and build successful businesses so that they can gain economic power, provide jobs, and improve their communities. WIBO serves low-income people, with an emphasis on people of color, women, veterans, and formerly incarcerated people.

As both a NYCHA resident and a U.S. Navy veteran, Ms. Jamison received a discount to take WIBO’s flagship 16-week workshop, “How to Build a Growing Profitable Business.” She began the course in February 2020 and participated in two in-person sessions before the pandemic shifted the workshop online. Ms. Jamison said the transition to virtual was great and she received the same valuable information and feedback.

Ms. Jamison calls the book she received in the workshop her “business bible” and said her major takeaways from the course were being able to hone in on her target market, creating a financial plan to avoid being “in the red,” and planning out the first five years of her business, M Jay Business Growth Solutions. She provides virtual assistant services for her clients, helping with everything from bookkeeping, filing, and answering phone calls and emails, to making travel arrangements and managing social media, websites, and e-commerce sites, and more.

WIBO’s programs are open to everyone; however, most participants are like Ms. Jamison: 90 percent are women and 70 percent are Black or Hispanic. For the last 55 years, WIBO has helped more than 18,000 entrepreneurs create or grow successful businesses.

“WIBO was founded during the heights of the civil rights disruption,” said Stephen Jackson, CEO of WIBO. “The founder Walter Geier and his wife were watching the same television news that millions of Americans were watching, seeing peaceful African Americans be hosed down, dogs set upon, beat upon. And his suggestion was that what could help the Black community was if we could be taught to grow and operate our own businesses. His wife asked him who was that ‘we.’”

Mr. Geier was an expert sales trainer and teacher who was introduced by one of his students to Dr. Mallalieu Woolfolk, who at the time was the head of the Upper Manhattan Small Business Development and Opportunities Corporation, which gave loans to entrepreneurs of color. Together, they founded WIBO in 1966. On March 1, 1966, WIBO held its first 16-week course at the Harlem YWCA on 125th Street, with 15 students: seven Black men, five Black women, two white men, and one Hispanic person.

WIBO now has five program sites in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Prospect Park, Lower Manhattan, Harlem, and the Bronx. The organization has expanded programming, including workshops for alumni, and it provides scholarships for NYCHA residents and veterans and has a program for formerly incarcerated people. It also has an Affiliate Partner program to bring the workshop outside of New York City. Its “How to Build a Growing Profitable Business” workshop has been conducted at 29 locations in 8 states, including workshops for Native American people in South Dakota, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona, and workshops have even been conducted in Tibet, Bulgaria, and China.

Mr. Jackson became CEO of WIBO in 2018 and is the first head of the organization who is a graduate of the program. He graduated from WIBO in 1992 and built and sold three multi-million-dollar companies. Mr. Jackson instituted the scholarship for NYCHA residents (it’s only $75 for the course), and since 2018, approximately 200 NYCHA residents have graduated from the program.

“Our focus is that you launch the business at the end of the workshop,” Mr. Jackson said. “Our graduates’ businesses help create more jobs, more economy. We talk about home ownership, we talk about creating generational wealth. We become more politically active; we want to get elected officials who want to support the communities we serve and are affiliated with. This is the real WIBO mission, creating that empowerment in our communities.”

Over 75 percent of WIBO businesses were up and running within a year of the program and more than 54 percent are still in business after five years, higher than the national average of 20 percent.

Ms. Jamison sees her business being one of the success stories thanks to WIBO. She recommends that every self-employed business owner participate in the WIBO program because “you get the cheat sheet to some of the mistakes that new businesses make, and you can avoid that by taking this course. The instructors have real-world experience. The fact that the CEO was my main instructor for the duration of the class spoke volumes. There were speakers with many years of success who shared their many years of experience and let us ask questions. If you don’t want to waste time and money, you should take this workshop.”

To learn more about WIBO, visit WIBO.

NYCHA residents may also visit Opportunity NYCHA to learn about other REES business development opportunities.