To celebrate Black History Month, learn how IMPACCT Brooklyn has helped black entrepreneurs and black-owned businesses thrive throughout the borough for over twenty years.
In late 1997, after three decades of advocating for affordable housing and tenants’ rights, IMPACCT Brooklyn set their sights on helping small businesses throughout Central Brooklyn. In the twenty-two years since establishing the Economic Development Department, no one’s done more to help Brooklyn’s small businesses thrive than Dale Charles.
Dale’s work with small businesses started in 2000, when she interned with the Good Help program at the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, before joining IMPACCT Brooklyn’s Economic Development team in 2001 as an LISC AmeriCorps volunteer. At the time, she was an entrepreneur with twenty-two years of experience, but she felt passionately about sharing her resources and experiences from opening up a storefront with other aspiring businesspeople throughout the borough. Now, almost two decades later, she continues to help black-owned businesses in Brooklyn thrive as our Director of Economic Development. Her work includes a combination of hands-on workshops, one-on-one business counseling, legal assistance and landlord mediation, and much more.
Over the past eighteen years, Dale’s work has touched over 2,000 black entrepreneurs and businesspeople, through:
- One-on-one counseling, where she’s advised 270 black entrepreneurs over the past seventeen years;
- Rolling Up the Gates Storefront Strolls, where 220 black entrepreneurs have toured the borough and learned about opportunities to start small businesses since 2009;
- Rolling Up the Gates workshops, which have attracted 945 black entrepreneurs since starting in 2011;
- Merchant organizing, which has benefited 600 black businesspeople since 1998 through the creation of four separate merchant associations.
One of these merchant associations is the Parkside Empire | Flatbush Avenue Merchant Association, Inc. Storeowners along Flatbush Avenue between Parkside Avenue and Empire Boulevard reached out to the Economic Development department in 2012, hoping to organize. The newly-formed merchants association was incorporated in 2015 and became a nonprofit in 2016.  By organizing, the business owners created a network to promote their businesses, and now they can work as a collective to accomplish broad objectives, provide support and create awareness of one another’s businesses, represent their interests in local and state governments, and attract new businesses to help form a stronger association with both the residents and businesses in the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens neighborhood.
Desmond Romeo, better known throughout the neighborhood as Dr. Cuts, is a member of the Parkside Empire who’s benefited from Dale’s guidance. When the rent at Romeo’s barber shop was through the roof, and he was faced with leaving the community he’d been a part of for over seventeen years (he was even the President of the Merchant Association for more than four years), he turned to Dale for help.
“Dr. Cuts came to me because … he did not want to leave the avenue that he has been a part of for more than seventeen years,” Dale started.
“As part of our RUG program, we were able to find him a location that had cheaper rent one block from his current location, negotiate with his landlord to surrender his lease, and work with the broker from the location that was a lower rent. Our pro-bono attorney, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, worked with us to make sure he was able to meet all the terms of the new lease.”
“Now, Dr. Cuts will survive another ten years as a small business of Flatbush Ave in Prospect-Lefferts Garden,” she finished.
“I really appreciate what IMPACCT Brooklyn has done for the Parkside Empire | Flatbush Avenue Merchant’s Association, because I don’t see us coming together without them,” Romeo said.
“They helped tailor the situation to our needs and they are what I would call a very selfless organization. They’re like family.”
Got an idea for a small business, but you’re not sure how to get it off the ground? Need help expanding? Contact Dale Charles & the IMPACCT Brooklyn Economic Development team and find out what we can do for you.
