Strategic alliance

Three African American business organizations have joined forces to  develop a program that will help more black-owned companies become  suppliers to major corporations.
The National Black Business Council  (NBBC), the Black Business Association (of Los Angeles) and the  California Black Chamber of Commerce have created the African American  Supplier Engagement Collaboration and have secured $250,000 in funding  across the next two years from Verizon to launch the effort.
The  program will consist of a database where African-American businesses can  register their companies, and which corporate purchasing departments  and officials can access to find potential suppliers.
Companies can  be identified and sorted by product, ethnicity, standard industrial  code, city, state and even zip code.
The database is currently  operating on the NBBC web site and consists of some 56,000 federally  certified 8(a) companies. Thanks to the collaboration any black business  can now join the modified database. This service is offered at  www.nbbc.org.
In the next few months, the collaboration will also  launch an online tutorial designed to teach African American  entrepreneurs the skills required to bid on corporate contracts.
For  more information about the collaboration, call (310) 637-7248.