Equitable Entrepreneur: Kevin Williams, Black Squirrel Collective

Recognizing a Sense of Responsibility

PACDC’s Equitable Entrepreneur Award recognizes outstanding achievement by an individual entrepreneur that advances equity and economic opportunity for low-income residents in their business model.

Black Squirrel is a unique organization that serves as a nexus point for small business improvement and neighborhood revitalization that leverages resources for sustaining and scaling local enterprises to advance a community’s economic health and wealth. The company provides disruptive solutions for developing and curating programming that provides innovative practices to create opportunities for economic prosperity and wealth for members of Black and Brown communities to ensure a vibrant and stronger inclusive Philadelphia economy. Through its network of industry professionals, innovation thought leaders, and technical assistance providers – Black Squirrel delivers solutions that emphasize sustainable economic investment for generational wealth creation.

Kevin Williams was the visionary for the incubation of this type of company that would be a nexus for the region’s business thought leaders, funders, innovators, community stakeholders, and subject matter experts to rethink, reform, and realign how resources, support, technical assistance, and capital are deployed, delivered and distributed for the economic benefit of Philadelphia’s Black and Brown communities. This resulted in Black Squirrel creating the “BizScoreline” a data-driven online AI platform that measures a company’s strength and capacity to add customers, increase sales, and eligibility for financing. Consider a ”Credit Karma” for small businesses, this tool provides users a snapshot of its capabilities with a roadmap they can implement and apply to grow and scale their enterprise. PACDC and the City of Philadelphia’s Commerce department have engaged Black Squirrel to use its proprietary tool to support their small business initiatives.

Black Squirrel has received national notoriety for the development of its Philly RiSE Real Estate Accelerator, which it created to disrupt the regional real estate development ecosystem by rethinking community investment by reversing how external parties provide the capital to develop new housing often in communities of color, gentrification, through Black Squirrel working with community-based local developers to provide training, funding, and professional mentoring to perform the development themselves in these neighborhoods, regeneration. Twelve developers were selected for its first cohort to build a mix of 50 affordable and market-rate homes with $15 million in funding for both equity and debt, to cover all development costs, training, and membership in Urban Land Institute Philadelphia with professional mentoring and coaching by a leading construction and project management firm.

PACDC congratulates Kevin Williams on being recognized as PACDC’s 2023 Equitable Entrepreneur!