Consulting and Business Development Center presents Corporate Partner Award to Microsoft

minority business awardsThis post was written by Jennifer Bauermeister, Assistant Director of the Consulting and Business Development Center.

As we get ready to celebrate our center’s 20th anniversary we’ve reestablished a tradition that we started in the 1990s to recognize our corporate partners who have made a difference in our work.

We presented our 2014 Corporate Partner Award at our 2014 UW Minority Business Awards Banquet earlier this month to Microsoft.

Microsoft has been a key strategic partner in growing the Consulting and Business Development Center into a national center of excellence. As early as 2007 Fernando Hernandez, who is Microsoft’s director of supplier diversity, began helping us to develop the Minority Business Executive Program. This week-long executive education program is designed to accelerate the growth of minority-owned, women-owned, and other diverse businesses that are supply chain partners of major national and multinational corporations. Microsoft has sponsored 20 businesses to this program.

In 2008, Microsoft hosted the center’s 2nd national research conference that focused on diversity in business issues.

In 2011 Microsoft hosted the annual summit for the Billion Dollar Roundtable. The BDR is an association of 20 corporations that spend at least $1 billion annually with minority- and women-owned businesses. Fernando Hernandez, who by then was on the Center’s Board, invited me to speak at the summit.

Fast forward to this year, and we can see the results of this work as the Minority Business Executive Program drew 30 participants from seven states as well as the Philippines and the Dominican Republic. This program is just the second executive education program to be endorsed by the National Minority Supplier Development Council and is just the 3rd of its kind in the US.

Earlier this year the center became the official research partner for the Billion Dollar Roundtable where it provides data to grow the effectiveness of corporate supply chain efforts in diversity.

Microsoft has been an invaluable partner in helping us to become a national center of excellence in developing businesses in under-served communities and in advancing student careers.

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