Lancaster Avenue

About the Program

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.

Services Provided:

• Business planning training via weekly classes & online curriculum
• Market research
• Credit building
• Professional services (Legal, Accounting, Marketing, e-Commerce etc.)
• Loaner laptop if needed
• Connection to a lender (CDFI)
• One-year basic small business accounting software subscription
• Basic website
• Mandatory participation in credit assessment and building if deemed necessary
• Access to LA-ERIC Center for office hours
• Access to paid consultants (Legal, marketing, accounting, social media, e-
  Commerce, HR/Operations) Paid for by the program after regular classes
• Refundable Enrollment fee of $ 100 matched 100% upon successful graduation
• Coaching and Mentoring during class- paid by the program
• Classes will be 100% online unless conditions change. Classes are virtually
  recorded. A media release must be signed by all students before classes start

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.