Amazon Web Services recently recognized the City of Asheville as winner of its mid-sized cities Dream Big Award for its equity work, particularly related to using open data as a tool to help identify opportunities to contract with minority business owners.
The award was part of Amazon Web Services’ 2018 City on a Cloud Winners announced at this month at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C.
Here are the judges’ comments:
“The City of Asheville has started taking steps towards becoming a more equitable city. After identifying that contracts with minority business owners were disproportionate to the population, the city decided to increase the number of minority-owned businesses with the competitive capacity to submit successful bids. Inspired by Open NC, an open data initiative that serves as a model for successful community connection and collaboration, the City of Asheville wants to provide a resource hub including loans, education, legal advice and more for all small business owners. This hub will use interactive questions and a live chat to guide business owners to the right resources and save them time.”
Want to participate?
The City of Asheville is looking forward to developing this project with our community partners. If you are interested in giving feedback or participating in user testing, please contact Frances Ruiz at fruiz@ashevillenc.gov.
Find a link to the full Amazon announcement here.