Countries Largest On-Line Black Business Directory Partners with Lehigh Valley Non-Profit

SBO Announces Pennsylvania Campaign Partnership with Black Heritage Association of the Lehigh Valley (BHALV)

Allentown PA.- April 30th 2019 —  Support Black Owned  (SBO) one of the country’s largest Black Business data directories in all 50 States, has announced the launch of its Pennsylvania SBO Directory Campaign.

Herbert Lee, Founder and President of Lee Alliance Inc., the Florida-based parent company of (SBO), expressed how his company made the decision to concentrate on the Pennsylvania business sector and partner with BHALV.

“Six months ago the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania released a Disparity Study that assessed the procurement success of Black owned business contracts with the PA Commonwealth.  Unfortunately, the numbers looked pretty dismal. When you combine that with the second highest African American unemployment rate in the country ( District of Columbia (11.8 percent), followed by Pennsylvania (8.9percent), you are, as Dr. King would say, “ confronted with the fierce urgency of now, in this unfolding conundrum of life and history”. 

Historically, African Americans have shown that economically as a group, we tend to look inward to strengthen our economic situation, Lee Explains” Our goal is to give the Pennsylvania business sector more visibility in today’s economic market place and the BHALV organization was doing just that.

In 2018 the Black Heritage Association of the Lehigh Valley (BHALV) partnered with 

Utley Associates of Harrisburg PA to produce the Lehigh Valley BlackBusiness Directory & Resource Guide. That project enabled the organization to gather extensive data on Black Owned Businesses in the Lehigh Valley and Harrisburg region.  “In working with Utley Associates we realized that a hard copy directory, while a quality product, was a tough sell to our community stakeholders and constituency. After reaching out to SBO during that period, we knew that their current and future ‘Social Media Integration Plans’ would add to our data acquisition across the state and would be a perfect fit for our community development goals,” said Kevin Easterling, CEO at BHALV. “We acquired a ton of data and developed some very important relationships across the state around the topic of Black Business, but we were less successful in galvanizing production funding around the project. We think this Private Business / Non-Profit partnership will remedy that.”