by Johnny Magdaleno; June 2018

Last November, more than 1,200 people congregated at an event hall in Portland, Ore. to shop at the inaugural My People’s Market. Packed with nearly 90 entrepreneurs of color selling everything from jewelry to wines, it was a gathering cut from the cloth of Portland’s myriad local markets.

Except this event had a mission. With My People’s Market, Portland wants commerce to be a vehicle for social change.

In 2016, the Atlantic magazine published a widely discussed article that branded Portland with a revealing epithet: the “whitest city in America.” Portland stands out among American urban centers because the population percentages of residents of color rank in the single digits.

The population percentage of white residents, on the other hand, stands at 77 percent, giving Portland more white residents per capita than the United States as a whole.

Historic state laws all but banned non-white people from living in Oregon well into the 20th century. Oregon’s constitution contained racist language, including a clause that barred any “free negro or mulatto” from holding real estate in Oregon, all the way up until 2000.

Those disparities are reflected today in the city’s economic data. Communities of color in Portland have poverty rates more than twice that of white residents.

But Portland-native Tory Campbell, manager of Entrepreneurship & Community Economic Development at Prosper Portland, the city’s economic development agency, has been thinking about ways to reverse these disparities long before the media took a hold on the conversation.

One potential solution? Entrepreneurship. “There are both resilient and emerging pockets of entrepreneurs in Portland, and particularly entrepreneurs of color,” he says. However, they “often don’t get the same attention or exposure as their counterparts.”

So he created Mercatus, a collective of local entrepreneurs of color. The collective has an online registry of 300 businesses. Each one has its own page on Mercatuspdx.com that includes a couple paragraphs about the business, product photos, and website links. Campbell and Prosper Portland, which funds the registry, hope that consumers and businesses like grocery stores will search Mercatus when they want to stock up on local goods.

The idea behind Mercatus is to build greater wealth among entrepreneurs of color, who often face an uphill battle. A 2016 piece of research from the Kauffman Foundation found that black, Asian, and Latino entrepreneurs collected about half the sales of their white counterparts nationwide. Researchers argue that ties back to how much wealth circulates, or doesn’t circulate, in the families behind an entrepreneur—a frequent source of startup capital in sectors like manufacturing, according to the Urban Manufacturing Alliance’s State of Urban Manufacturing research series.

Putting entrepreneurs of color together in the same venue can also spark stronger mentorship networks in the city. “We’d get calls from people of color who wanted to start a wine bar but didn’t know of any wine bar owners of color,” says Amanda Park, a project coordinator at Prosper Portland. “For people going into that industry, it’s really important that they recognize ‘Oh, I have someone else [who shares my background] I can talk to.’”

During the first My People’s Market, which was launched by Prosper Portland and Travel Portland, the city’s destination marketing organization, entrepreneurs mingled amid their stalls to learn about new products and talk the ups and downs of starting a business. Shoppers passed through the event as Indian dance groups and local R&B acts reverberated throughout the space.

The event was only three hours long, but Campbell says it was profitable “by and large” for the businesses that participated. “I take a lot of personal pride in having people come up to me and say ‘Man, this was needed,” he says.

Inspired by that success, Campbell and Prosper Portland are getting ready for a sequel. The second My People’s Market will feature more than 100 entrepreneurs at the city’s largest outdoor plaza, the Rose Quarter Commons, on June 30. Find more information on the event here.

This Portland Equity Profile was generously supported by the Surdna Foundation.