Most experts agree that to succeed, businesses need organization, a clear business plan, and a good management team. Another crucial piece? Capital — which is where Ascender wants to be of assistance.
For the second year, the Pittsburgh community org for entrepreneurs has launched a mini grant program aimed at Black business owners in Allegheny County. The East Liberty-based organization will award five mini-grants ranging from $300 to $5,000, Ascender Executive Director Nadyli Nuñez told Technical.ly,
“We work with entrepreneurs every day,” Nuñez said. “And we can teach them about marketing and sales all we want, [but] at the end of the day, they need money to do these things.”
Ascender has experience awarding small, directed grants. In the fall of 2023, in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, it launched the Mini-Becas accelerator program to support local Latinx entrepreneurs.
What Ascender’s leadership is looking for from applicants, per Nuñez, is clarity and visible effort. Knowling there’s a lot that goes into keeping a business running, Nuñez urged applicants to put care into their pitches, but to not worry about overdoing it.
The production value of a pitch doesn’t matter so much, Nuñez said, “but it does need to be thoughtful [about] what your intention is. It is important that you know what your vision is [and] have some traction.”
If you submitted a pitch last year and ultimately weren’t selected, feel free to recycle that video, she added. In a world where funding isn’t easy to come by, Nuñez said, the goal of this program is to offer business and startup founders a path to funding that doesn’t include jumping through multiple hoops.
“We are trying to make it as simple as possible,” Nuñez said. “This isn’t a lot of money, in the grand scheme of things. It’s not all of what Black businesses need to be receiving, and all kinds of business should be a lot more than what we’re providing, [but] what we’re trying to provide right now is just a brief peace of mind.”
So if you’re a Black startup and or business owner and could use an influx of cash to fix something or acquire something your company needs, submit a video pitch to Ascender by Mar. 4, 2024.
“The whole purpose is that we don’t want people to be spending many, many hours to submit a two minute video. That defeats the purpose,” Nuñez said, noting that you should always equate effort to the amount of dollars you’re receiving. “So don’t spend a whole week planning for this. Just the answers to these questions: What do you do? Why are you special?”
Atiya Irvin-Mitchell is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Heinz Endowments.