by Jamie R. Van Doren
On March 19, leaders from across Ohio gathered at Central State University in Wilberforce for the 2026 OMSDC Annual Meeting. Corporate executives, certified minority business owners, community partners, and regional officials filled the room for a program grounded in a single consistent idea: that the work of building stronger businesses and more connected supply chains is not a matter of goodwill alone. It is a matter of strategy, discipline, and follow-through.
The theme was Building Bridges to Economic Equity. By the end of the day, it felt less like a slogan than a working description of what was actually happening in the room.
President and CEO George R. Simms opened with an honest account of where OMSDC stands. The prior year brought real headwinds. 2026 is being approached differently — with sharper focus on three areas: advocating for supplier inclusion as a measurable business outcome, improving the quality of connections between corporate members and certified MBEs, and building the capability of minority businesses to compete, deliver, and scale. The language is familiar. The discipline is being treated as new.
“Unbelievable.”
Dr. Marie Cosgrove, PhD, resilience expert and author of Greater Fortune: Essential Lessons from the Entrepreneur Who Bought the Company That Fired Her, delivered the keynote, and she opened with a question that everyone in business gets asked constantly. How is business?
Her answer was a single word. She said it, and she asked the room to say it with her: Unbelievable.
Not as a deflection. As a philosophy. Business is better than you ever imagined? Unbelievable. You are in the hardest stretch of your professional life? Also unbelievable. The word holds both, and that is precisely the point. The way you frame your circumstances shapes what you are able to do with them — and that framing is a choice you make, not a condition you inherit.
Dr. Cosgrove has earned that philosophy at close range. She shared the story of her own birth, which began with her mother’s survival of a devastating car accident in Mexico. The injuries were severe enough that doctors recommended removing her from life support. During her mother’s recovery, they also advised against continuing the pregnancy. Her mother refused both recommendations. She woke up. She carried the pregnancy to term. Dr. Cosgrove described this not simply as a miracle, but as the foundational act of tenacity that has defined her life’s work. The story carries a theological dimension she does not shy away from: hope, she told the room, is not something that precedes faith. They are the same thing. They are an orientation toward the possible, available even when the evidence points the other way.
The professional chapter of her story lands with equal force. She was a single mother of four when she pleaded for a commission-based sales position at balanceback™, a medical device company. She got the job. She was later fired. Not for underperforming, but for making too much in commissions. When the company told her to accept a pay cut, she declined. She was let go. Rather than treating the firing as a verdict, she treated it as a moment of forced reflection. She started her own company. Two years later, she bought balanceback™. Skeptics predicted she would bankrupt herself and the company within six months. Today, balanceback™ is recognized as a world leader in fall prevention and brain and balance disorder diagnostic and treatment devices.
The point she kept returning to was not that everything works out. It is that setbacks, handled with intention, create the conditions for a different kind of growth than ordinary progress ever requires.
Hardwiring Inclusion to Results
The Corporate Impact Lab was led by Ralph G. Moore, President of RGMA, a Chicago-based firm that has spent more than four decades helping corporations build supplier inclusion strategies that hold up to scrutiny. His session addressed a question that quietly frustrates a lot of supplier inclusion work: how do you actually measure it, and how do you make the case to leadership when the numbers have to compete with every other priority on the table?
Moore’s argument cut through the usual framing. This is not a conversation about good values. It is a conversation about shareholder return. Minority consumers represent the fastest-growing market segment in the United States. The gap between what corporations spend with minority suppliers — roughly two percent of procurement — and the share of future consumer revenue growth driven by minority households — projected at thirty to fifty percent — represents a material business risk, not just a missed opportunity. Supply chain resilience, innovation capacity, pricing competitiveness, and community purchasing power all connect back to inclusion in ways that can be measured and communicated in terms that survive a budget cycle.
For nonprofits and mission-driven organizations, Moore made clear that the same logic applies at a different level. Supplier inclusion is not adjacent to mission. It is a direct expression of it, and it can be documented as such.
His session gave corporate attendees a framework for bringing that conversation to their own leadership — and gave MBEs a clearer picture of how to position their value in terms that resonate on the other side of the table.
Working Smarter
The MBE Impact Lab, facilitated by OMSDC’s Jamie Van Doren, focused on artificial intelligence as a practical business tool. The session addressed both the real risks of AI use (including context degradation, output drift, and the hard limits of machine judgment) and a working framework called SCOPE for structuring AI workflows in ways that produce more reliable, more usable results. Central to that conversation was a simple but counterintuitive principle: one chat, one job. Keeping each AI conversation focused on a single task, rather than letting a thread accumulate instructions, pivots, and prior outputs. The practice significantly reduces drift and hallucination while producing results that are more accurate and enterprise-ready.
Van Doren walked participants through a few steps of a live competitor and market analysis, using AI to map a competitive landscape, surface positioning opportunities. The ultimate outcome of the analysis being to help companies develop the kind of differentiation language that makes a corporate introduction land. The goal was direct: help MBEs ask for more, and give them something they could use the next morning.
That session was a first chapter, not a full course. OMSDC is developing a practical AI series for MBEs, and we want to hear what formats and topics would be most useful. A short survey is available at the link below. Those who complete it can download the Competitor Analysis AI Workflow one-pager — a step-by-step guide with detailed prompts and workflow instructions you can put to work immediately.
Take the survey and download the workflow
Connections Made Intentional
The afternoon also included the first pilot of MatchDesk, a curated one-on-one networking platform built to replace the randomness of open networking with something more deliberate. Forty-eight pre-scheduled meetings took place across the session. Not every introduction becomes an opportunity. The goal is to keep raising the number that do.
The Networking Reception, hosted by the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce, gave the room space to continue what the structured sessions had started. Some of the most useful conversations of the day happen in those margins.
Learn more about MatchDesk, and if it’s right for your next event.
Thank You to Our Sponsors
The annual meeting doesn’t happen without the organizations willing to invest in it, and this year’s sponsor community reflected genuine commitment to the work.
Honda anchored the program as the Empowerment Bundle Sponsor. Advancement Bundle Sponsors Franklin County Board of Commissioners, OhioHealth, and P&G provided essential program-level support. Investment Bundle Sponsors NiSource and Rockwell Automation, along with Advocate Bundle Sponsors Duke Energy, Gilbane, Turner Construction, and the Port of Greater Cincinnati, each contributed to making the day possible.
The investment of OMSDC’s own MBE community was equally visible. Vanguard Sponsor Unicon, Trendsetter Sponsors Commodity Management Services, EE Ward, EOX Vantage, Hightower Petroleum Co., kANU Investments, and Unified Building Technologies, and Innovator Sponsors Big Kitty Labs, Bob Ross Auto Group, Diversified System, and Virtual Technologies Group all brought meaningful support to the table. Supporter sponsors RCF and The Rising Tide Group rounded out the community. A note of appreciation as well to MAI, 3C Industries, and W3R, whose conversations about partnership reflect the kind of ongoing engagement that builds something over time.
The Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce hosted the Networking Reception. Capitaved Impressions documented the day.
The conversations that began in Wilberforce will continue. That’s the point of our work.
Dr. Cosgrove’s extremely personal story left an everlasting impression on the room. Regardless of the headwinds push forward and prosper!