On November 2, 2023, the Black Business Association of Oregon revealed its Black Economic Prosperity Dashboard. The dashboard assembles key data to tell the socio-economic story of the state’s Black community—a story that is often lost in broader, population-wide reports on community outcomes. The data in the dashboard will be used to inform decisionmakers, stakeholders, and the public as they consider changes to public systems, policies, and practices to support more broadly shared economic prosperity. The dashboard assesses community conditions across five domains: population, health, education, economic well-being, and business ownership.
The data under the chosen domains will provide a better understanding of the current economic state of Black business and Black residents in Portland and beyond. The data will also serve as the baseline for creating a Regional Strategic Plan for Black Prosperity. The dashboard will also be used to measure key metrics, analyze trends, and report publicly on the status of our efforts to create Black economic prosperity. To see the dashboard and the data it presents, I encourage everyone to visit this link and explore the findings: https://bbaoregon.org/black-prosperity-dashboard/.
The Black Business Association of Oregon’s approach to developing a strategic plan for economic prosperity for Oregon will by no means be typical. It will be unique in that we will be reaching out to individual stakeholder who have expertise in the five domains indicated on the dashboard, and asking them to analyze, interpret, provide reasoning, and suggest short-term, mid-term and long-term actions that must be taken to improve the current situation of Black Oregonians. Our work has just begun. Stay tuned as we will provide updates on our progress.
Lance J. Randall, Executive Director