Johns Hopkins and 24 other Baltimore-area businesses have pledged to harness their collective influence in order to help strengthen the city by creating more economic opportunities.
Through the BLocal initiative, companies are pledging to expand existing programs or launch new ones to build, hire, invest, and buy locally. They will spend more on design and construction contracts with local and minority- and women-owned businesses, hire residents from Baltimore's most distressed communities, and spend more purchasing dollars with local vendors and women- and minority-owned businesses. Taken together, these commitments—which include the HopkinsLocal initiative launched in September 2015—will infuse at least $69 million into local and minority-owned, women-owned, and disadvantaged businesses over the next three years.
"HopkinsLocal is our comprehensive approach to leverage Johns Hopkins' economic power to do more to build, buy, and hire locally," says Ronald J. Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University. "Building on that promise, BLocal aims to help bolster a local economy, not on a project-by-project basis but through a collective, deep-seated change approach."
As a group, the BLocal companies expect to invest an initial $53 million in renovation and construction projects, and $16 million in goods and services purchased from businesses headed by local and minority- and women-owned businesses through 2019. That investment is expected to grow as more of the BLocal partners determine exactly how much they will invest in the initiative and in what areas.
Among the 25 companies participating in BLocal are Johns Hopkins University and Health System, Under Armour, BGE, T. Rowe Price, and Whiting-Turner.
Posted in University News
