Lancaster Avenue

This is an initiative created by LA21-CDC and its partner Community College of Philadelphia’s Power Up your business program with primary support from The Philadelphia Commerce Department.

 The program fundamentally asks one question - Why do so many small and minority businesses fail and struggle? COVID-19 has revealed so much about structural challenges faced by small businesses in our communities and the lack of true support for small businesses.  Well, we hope with this program we will begin to start making gradual inroads in correcting this fundamental problem.

Our goal with this new program is to make a paradigm shift on how we train, coach, and support the next generation of sustainable, scalable, and replicable businesses capable of creating generational wealth. To do so, we needed a team, hence our top-notch partners Community College of Philadelphia and Finanta CDFI - all of us will be combining forces to provide quality business planning training, technical assistance (TA), and resources for our cohorts to scale up their businesses and to become successful, capable of creating jobs in Philadelphia and sustainable for years to come.

Components of the training class include:

• 2 Week pre-class assessment (idea viability, credit, and readiness)
• 10-week class (3/hour a week every Monday from 6:00 - 9:00 pm
• Access to LA-ERIC Center for FREE office hours
• Access to paid consultants (Legal, marketing, accounting, social media, e-commerce, HR/Operations, Import/Export)
• Coaching and Mentoring during class and after graduation- paid for by the program
• Access to capital via lending Partners
• Mandatory Online presence and accounting system- paid for by the program
• Mandatory credit assessment and building - paid for by the program
• International trade as part of business planning strategy
•  Refundable Enrollment fee of $ 350 matched 100% upon successful graduation = $ 700
• Access to loan laptops
• Classes will be 100% online unless conditions change

Our overarching goal is to graduate businesses with a strong foundation and infrastructure - filling the credibility gap that has existed in our small business ecosystem for years.