Anasa Scott-Laude is Managing Director and Co-Founder of a business venture with her husband called ILE Consulting Group LLC, a nonprofit community development consulting company. With a focus on the social perspective of entrepreneurship and helping nonprofits and small businesses, ILE Consulting Group’s mission is to help companies leverage partnerships and funds to solve issues they face. By addressing these challenges, the companies are better able to serve the communities they want to help.
The company, which has been around since 2016, utilizes, research and evaluation to resolve organizational challenges.
We’re helping organizations pinpoint deficits around the capacity like staffing. We may bring in people who have the expertise around technology needed for them to do their work and provide high quality community services.
Anasa’s entrepreneurial spirit blossomed as a student at the City College of New York. In 2009, she graduated as an Economics and Finance major through the B.A./M.A. program offered at the Colin Powell School. In the Environmental Entrepreneurship Program, which was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), she worked on community development projects and became interested in and bringing sustainable building design and products to underserved communities.
Courtesy of Anasa’s LinkedIn
She gained extensive experience in higher education administration and in roles as a leader and co-founder of startups by working in schools and teaching courses. “There was this excitement and encouragement that we were capable, talented enough and that the world needed us,” she said.
Following graduation, she continued being involved in business, and she gradually grew into wanting her own. As a professor for a course she attended as a student, she paired students with startups in Harlem. For example, some of her students previously worked with Harlem Grown and through the research and projects they supported the growth of their programs.
Through her work, Laude fostered the students’ entrepreneurial drives as some students used their experience as a stepping-stone for their own careers. One student founded a social venture and also lead the entrepreneurship program at Queens College. A second student is the deputy program director of entrepreneurship at NYU.
Entrepreneurship is innovation that brings together resources, people, technology and ways of doing things that creates change and value that can be social or economic.
ILE Consulting Group specializes in data-driven strategic planning and fund development. Laude achieves this by matching companies with people that specialize in areas the companies are trying to improve on, including technological implications. “If you’re really helping people, they’re at the core,” Laude notes.
In the private and public sectors, Laude notes that both have fallen short in “truly engaging the people in designing and playing a major role in evaluating the impact of nonprofit programs.
Laude has supported clients by connecting them with the resources required to build capacity. In fact, she noticed the pandemic created the need for additional training and technology for organizations supporting vulnerable clients, so this is another problem she is helping businesses deal with.
How do you quickly ramp up services, how to retrain staff, get the right technology and maintain compliance and ethics around how to use that tech to serve people.
Laude’s company has recently created an internship program for the upcoming fall. She hopes the program will help entrepreneurial students from HBCU’s and other minority-serving institutions gain an opportunity to get exposed to community development.
M’Niyah is a journalism major and psychology minor at CUNY Baruch College. In addition to writing for The RICC, she’s Managing Editor and contributor for Baruch’s award-winning Dollars & Sense Magazine. She writes for Baruch’s independent, student-run newspaper, The Ticker and has bylines in Daily Planet, a nonprofit news organization.