In 14 years of working at Invest Atlanta, the organization’s CEO Dr. Eloisa Klementich has led tremendous gains. Klementich and the Invest Atlanta team has produced the creation of 11,383 affordable housing units, 66,900 jobs created or retained, and supported $7.1 million of small business funding and $8 billion dollars of new capital investment in the city.
Klementich recently spoke with with ADW to share insight on her journey with Invest Atlanta and its overall impact.
How were you originally introduced to Invest Atlanta?
It has been an amazing, almost 14 year ride here at invest Atlanta. I started out on the economic development team and had the privilege to work with amazing people. Now as the President/CEO for the organization, we get to work with the community, small businesses, and housing. So the spectrum is so wide, you’ll see us involved in many different types of things. But that’s what keeps everyday very exciting.
There are several initiatives that you all are working on. Of course, there’s the Greenbrier area and the MLK area, which were announced as opportunity zones. Can you give us some insight on that?
We’re trying to be very strategic about how we can be proactive when it comes to development and development opportunities. How do we ensure that development is for everyone. And so what we did is we made an application to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. We feel if we had extra incentives, we could attract more business opportunities along the corridor…In the early days, Midtown, where Technology Square is, they also had an opportunity zone. And now you look at what was created there. It all takes time. But it’s putting foundational opportunities that then make an interest in certain parts of Atlanta.
There was a recent study that said Atlanta is the top city for Black-owned businesses in the nation. What are your thoughts on that study and how Invest Atlanta has assisted those businesses?
So there’s several things that we’re trying to do. What we saw as a challenge for some of our businesses were in access to financing. But the second was access to technical assistance. So when COVID occurred, we drafted the program where you could get a grant for up to $40,000 and up to $10,000 for technical assistance … We also created a free technical assistance program, because we learned that it worked…We also recognized that a lot of our minority businesses, a lot of our Black-owned businesses in Atlanta lease their locations. So just like housing, if they lease and rent their location, they become very vulnerable to fluctuations in rent increase. So we started the downpayment assistance program through Wells Fargo that will help businesses. Also, we’re thinking of how can we make our legacy businesses successful to be able to stay in the city. We’re creating for the very first time an actually program that’s going to highlight all of the legacy businesses in the city of Atlanta.
For more information, visit Invest Atlanta
