Program History

In order to compete in a global economy, metropolitan regions everywhere are pooling public and private talent and resources to pursue economic goals.

The Prosperity Partnership is a coalition of more than 300 business, labor, government, education and nonprofit organizations from four Puget Sound counties: King, Kitsap, Pierce, and Snohomish, working together as a powerful team to develop and implement a shared regional economic strategy that will 1) Create additional new jobs in our region, and 2) Ensure long-term economic prosperity for central Puget Sound.

The Strategy focuses on specific industry clusters with the highest job growth potential and works to rebuild the foundations of our economy - transportation, education, taxes, small business ownership, technology commercialization and quality of life - that allow these industries to be successful.

In particular, the Prosperity Partnership focuses on seven of our region's leading industry clusters:

An increasingly important part of supporting businesses in those leading industry clusters is helping them improve their procurement systems, particularly with regard to minority-owned businesses.

To address this opportunity, the Prosperity Partnership formed the Minority Economic Development Working Group - currently chaired by Seattle City Councilmember Bruce Harrell- which pinpointed a number of inefficiencies in the minority-owned business ecosystem: the system of interactions between MBOs, the large cluster businesses with whom they contract and the business resource providers (education and training organizations, funders, networking and advocacy groups and others) that prepare MBOs for business and connect them to opportunities.

The Prosperity Partnership's minority-owned business development strategy - in particular the creation of Performance First - identifies steps to improve coordination and communication throughout the minority-owned business ecosystem.

To read the full Prosperity Partnership Minority-Owned Business Development Strategy, click here.

To see the full list of the Prosperity Partnership's Minority Economic Development Working Group, click here.