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Resident named to black business board
By MELIA BOWIE, Times Staff Writer TAMPA PALMS -- When the call first came last year Curtis Stokes was at a crossroads. The Tampa Palms resident had been tapped as a candidate for the executive director position on Florida's Black Business Investment Board, but it would mean a move to Tallahassee. As an up and coming businessman who began reading Black Enterprise at age 11 back in his hometown of Belle Glade, Stokes knew this could be the chance he was waiting for. But life was already taking shape in New Tampa for the husband and father. "I decided I wanted to stay here," said Stokes, now 33 and working as vice president and business client manager for Bank of America in Temple Terrace. Last month opportunity knocked a second time for Stokes. Gov. Jeb Bush appointed him to the Black Business Investment Board, or BBIB, on Feb. 5. He will serve four years with the organization, which promotes entrepreneurship, public service and the development of domestic and international black-owned businesses in Florida. The appointment will allow Stokes, a taxing district supervisor who has lived in Tampa Palms' Wyndham section since 1996, to set the stage for business growth from his New Tampa turf. "The BBIB, it gives me that platform to work with our generation of people," Stokes said, adding that Florida, and especially Tampa, has a lot of potential. "Tampa's going to be the next great city," he said. Currently, the state investment board and its affiliates fund a base of black-owned businesses that generate more than $125-million in annual revenue and support more than 1,000 jobs in Florida, according to the governor's office. The seven-member policymaking board works as a quasistate agency that oversees a number of affiliated agencies, said Michael Brown, program development officer with the BBIB. The organization's primary goal is to overcome stumbling blocks that black-owned businesses have often faced by providing access to capital and technical assistance and help in obtaining state and federal contracts. "It gives me an opportunity to help black businesses become more self-sustaining," said Stokes, who works with about 200 local clients, none of them black, in his job at Bank of America. Even in an area such as New Tampa where fast-paced growth and population surges lure investors and entrepreneurs, only a handful of black-owned businesses have sprouted up, among them a brokering firm, an insurance agency and a hair salon for children. The upscale area that Stokes, a Florida native, now calls home offers as much opportunity for minorities as it does for anyone else, he said. "Although we'd like to see more black businesses in New Tampa, it is up to us to get them there," he said. " . . . It's up to us to take up the torch." - Staff Writer Melia Bowie can be reached at (813) 269-5312.
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From the Times |
