A Decade After Riots, First AME Church Center to Aid Businesses
The FAME Renaissance Center, an economic branch of First African Methodist Episcopal Church, opened a 54,000-square-foot business incubator and technology center this week near a corner in South Los Angeles that was devastated nearly a decade ago by riots.
Historically, such centers, which help people create small businesses and jobs, have been built by nonprofit agencies, government and universities seeking to create jobs and commercialize inventions. FAME Renaissance spent several years visiting and studying several so-called incubators before deciding to concentrate on helping entrepreneurs in multimedia.
With space for 30 start-ups, the incubator will provide each company with high-speed Internet connections, video conferencing facilities and computer labs. Business experts will be available for free consulting.
“For the most part, blacks and Latinos have not had access to that industry,” said Mark Whitlock, FAME Renaissance’s executive director. “We have access to these industries, and we will surround each new business with experts who will help them succeed.”
The Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor at First AME Church, said the unveiling cannot be fully appreciated without looking back to the 1992 riots, when fires and chaos engulfed the city.
First AME Church was in the eye of the storm after the not-guilty verdicts against the Los Angeles police officers who beat motorist Rodney G. King. From its pulpit, then-Mayor Tom Bradley called for peace as angry mobs threw rocks and bottles, torched buildings and looted.
“This very neighborhood had lost all hope in itself,” Murray said. “Today, we stand here full of pride and faith in our community and its capacity to rebuild itself.”
In 1997, FAME Renaissance obtained a $300,000 grant from the city’s Community Development Department to purchase a 90-year-old brick building near the corner of Western Avenue and Adams Boulevard that once served as a telephone switching station for Pacific Bell. The building was renovated with $6 million in state and federal grants and contributions from such corporate sources as Disney, State Farm Insurance and Wells Fargo Bank; the U.S. Department of Commerce chipped in $1.8 million.
“Incubator programs are tremendously important to communities that want to grow,” said Wilfred Marshall, an economic development representative with the federal agency. “We support incubators around the country, particularly in depressed areas, because they give communities an opportunity to help themselves.”
The brick building has a 700-seat auditorium for community meetings and business seminars. Each start-up company will receive business coaching, access to copy and fax machines, and loans of $1,000 to $500,000. Another arm of FAME Renaissance serves as a venture capital fund, which can also invest as much as $1 million in business participants.
The program calls for start-up firms to become financially self-supporting within about three years.
Whitlock said there is a waiting list of 100 companies for the 30 available slots--at rents ranging from $200 to $1,500 a month. Small firms can simply rent a desk.
“They say most businesses started on the kitchen table,” Whitlock said.
Wells Fargo and State Farm are also leasing office space in the building, each paying market rent.
“Part of our strategy is to work with community organizations,” said Brenda Ross-Dulan, senior vice president at Wells Fargo. “FAME has inroads in a community that a financial institution doesn’t always have.”
Greg Jones, president and chief executive of State Farm, said his company’s $1.5-million donation “makes a statement in the communities we serve.”
Jones added, “After the riots, many companies and small businesses turned away from South Los Angeles, and of those who stayed, many were owned by people from outside the community who simply just took money out.”
The incubator program can help reverse that trend.
“Instead of businesses that take money out of the community, we have a chance to build an entrepreneurial class that will keep money in,” he said. “That’s the goal.”
For Murray, the goal has been to address problems that were brought home a decade ago.
“It all hinges on having the feeling of being competent,” Murray said. “If I can pay my rent and have a car, then I can own my home and send my kids to school. Then I can feel competent.”
