JPMorgan Chase & Co. has awarded $50,000 to the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Free Enterprise Center. The planned center will give budding local businesses the use of high-tech equipment, including 3-D printers to help develop innovative products.
When it opens, the UMKC Free Enterprise Center will operate at 215 Volker Blvd. The Kauffman Foundation has pledged $5 million to the project, and this spring, the Robert W. Plaster Foundation promised $2 million.
The donation from JPMorgan Chase is part of the global financial services firm’s new Small Business Forward initiative, a five-year, $30 million grant program to advance small business support networks that help rising ventures in specific industries.
Other cities to receive opening grants from the Small Business Forward program are Chicago; Detroit; Los Angeles; Milwaukee; Newark, NJ; New Orleans; San Francisco; Seattle; and St. Louis.
The grant program is designed to promote each region’s competitive viability and economic productivity by funding nonprofit organizations that are part of business concentrations dubbed economic “clusters.” Almost half of the successful clusters in the country’s 10 biggest metropolitan areas expanded at about triple the rate of other local businesses from 2003 to 2011, according to a new study from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC). The study was commissioned by JPMorgan Chase.
“Beyond their vital role in our economy, small businesses are often the source of innovation and inspiration,” Scott Geller, CEO of Chase Business Banking, said in a release. “Helping local, small business clusters grow faster and create more jobs will take JPMorgan Chase’s involvement in the entrepreneurial community to a new level.”
U.S. Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, chair of the House Small Business Committee, said that private sector investments like the Small Business Forward program “not only fuel business startups, but really transform communities and local economies.”
“We applaud JPMorgan Chase for providing private sector leverage for these organic movements of innovation and ingenuity,” Graves said in a release. “As our nation’s recovery continues, this program will truly assist small business to network and find resources within their local community that allow them to grow and create jobs.”
