A region revitalized, a region re-imagined, striving, thriving, innovating, collaborating, elevating and accelerating, the greater Lehigh Valley is home to businesses that are booming and pain changes that are forging the future.

This is Lehigh Valley Rising.

BSI Corporate Benefits is a proud supporter of Lehigh Valley Rising.

Additional support provided by St Luke's University Health Network and by Adam's outdoor advertising.

In 1970, Kent State University was first to celebrate Black History Month.

Ever since, February has been a time to reflect on and highlight the accomplishments of African Americans both past and present.

This month on Lehigh Valley Rising, we're shining a spotlight on local black owned businesses and business leaders making a difference in our community and around the globe.

First up, Faces International.

It's a marketing and development firm whose clients include Olympus, the United Way, Woods Construction and the City of Allentown.

They’re a one stop shop for branding, messaging and development with a strong focus on diversity, equity and inclusion.

Faces International helps clients knit these threads together to create the enduring fabric of a successful business or organization.

*Music* When we say marketing and development, we don't see a difference from the marketing aspect.

If I talked about the logo that people are creating, there's a story behind it.

If I talked about a website, there's a story that you're telling.

For us, that's all part of development as well.

How are you developing your tools, your skills, your knowledge of the community around you so that when you're writing something on your website or you're creating a logo, you're keeping those folks in mind, right?

Basically what we saw was a market gap and an opportunity to create a firm that was going to really be able to really work on the entire ecosystem of collaboration from business strategies, marketing strategies, PR strategies.

So some of the services we offer in addition to building out websites, logos, creating campaigns to tell stories is diversity education, right?

Business consultation and really personal development and personal development, because we really, truly believe that even in that space, communication, diversity go hand in hand.

So when we talk about the notes from from A to Z as an organization, we truly believe that it's all part of the same alphabet.

And so when we interacted with the Book Corporation, it was a need for them to be more effective in their DEI work, making sure that as they're going out and getting new business in the construction world, that the individuals that are hiring them are also seeing the work that they're doing from a diversity equity and inclusion page.

The good thing with us is that we've had historical knowledge of the organization and what they've done.

So we know that they've made great community impact.

They had a great partnership down in Philadelphia with Chairman Shoemaker, 51% minority owned business.

They also have the William Allen Construction Company, which is a construction company that was started in William Allen High School to help basically young individuals from diverse backgrounds understand what construction is more than the hammers and the nails.

That really allowed me to understand the power that this group had to make a positive impact and a change that was necessary.

We also noticed from that program they hired two male Latin students that work for them right now.

We also noticed that they had about almost 30 to 33% women within their organization.

Don't ever think that this is for you, because once you put your foot on the ground, that's all you need.

And then your passion that takes over.

So if we think of industry norms and we think about equity, equity is not just looking at what people look like, what sense of what color they are, equities, all levels.

It really becomes a second nature focus of our teams to make sure that we include diversity at all levels of the project.

So that's the lens that we put on the boards and say, what do we have and what our assets?

Are there things in your history that we can point to to say It's always been there, we just didn't tell the story the same way.

So that's how we help develop folks.

Campaign is really digging deep and finding out where you want to go, what you want to do, what have you done?

We want it to be very, very clear that there are no limits to our strength.

There's no limits to our work, and there's no limits really to our capacity in the sense of what we can take on in different areas that we can be.

We're working anywhere from like your mom and pops in Allentown local to nonprofits, community organizations, to working with Olympians, to working with our products.

I would say on the profit side, it is normally a product.

It's a direct selling a product.

Now the nonprofits are selling a product, but we have to tell that story a little bit differently.

So so being a black owned marketing firm in particular has its extreme positives, right?

And then on the flip side, there are things that that we believe get in the way of other people's visions of who we are and thoughts of what we what we can't provide.

We lost out on a contract that didn't make sense to us.

This organization wanted to reach more men of color for mentorship.

I didn't really think we'd have to work that hard for that one.

I'm like, Wow, Well, we're men of color.

We do mentorship, actually.

We work in the community, and we didn't get the contract.

It really kind of set us back to say, Well, man, we're not even gonna get the ones that we should get.

That doesn't really make sense.

And why is that?

And we felt it was undervalued and we felt that it was almost a check the box situation that you were going to interview us to check the box.

Vision 2030 was a very powerful evolution for us.

We walked into the city of Allentown and straight up told them, If you're just here to check the box, we don't want to work with you.

Check the box and we'll walk out.

Right now.

Give credit to the city of Allentown leadership.

At that point, they didn't want to check the box.

We sat down, we presented and we won the contract.

Allentown needs you.

Your participation and your voice will help shape what this city becomes in the next ten years.

Vision 2030 for us was the first time I felt that we had a big contract that was out in the light.

We worked with school districts and big companies before, but it was a lot of internal work.

But this was for everyone to see.

So the first thing that we did was we came up with our slogan, Your City, Your Voice.

Allentown, your city.

Your city.

To.

That, your city.

Your voice, your voice.

We went down to kids.

We said, What's the youngest kid we can find to go ahead that we can put on camera to show that this is your city to your future?

Look, if we're thinking about what Vision 2030 means, is it really what's going to affect me or is it really what's going to affect that person?

That was six when we put that video in right now.

Right.

It goes hand in hand.

The work that we're doing.

We can't do it without community.

Us black men like, we have the responsibility that's on our shoulders to always kind of put our best foot forward.

And when we're thinking about community, this is where we come from.

US Specialty Formulations in Allentown is working on something that could change the world.

An oral vaccine for the coronavirus.

For co-founder Kyle Flanigan, it's the culmination of a lifelong love of science and discovery.

People need vaccines that are readily accessible, that have long storage times, that are easy to administer, to take, that have a long efficacy, a long, effective date to a long shelf life and aren't invasive.

I mean, the biggest thing is no one likes getting stabbed with a needle to get a vaccine.

Yeah, you can do it, but not everyone likes it.

So we created an oral vaccine platform called Kinder.

It's a kinder way to vaccinate.

Working in the U.S. specialty formulations, or as we affectionately call it, USSF has been a fantastic experience for me.

We have customers that we manufacture sterile pharmaceuticals for, or just pharmaceuticals in general.

In the vaccine world, we do fermentation and purification, we do oral formulations.

So the formulations that you drink.

Normally say you're a large pharma company, you set up your facility to make a lot of wed. USSF It's one of the few places where they can get this specialty attention to what they particularly need.

With the oral vaccines, we can apply it to lots of different targets.

RSV who Bay Strep, COVID 19, many different targets.

It's harnessing the power of the mucosal immune system, which is really your first line of defense against any pathogen.

Your eyes, your nose or mouth.

Most diseases will enter through a mucosal surface.

So so really harnessing the immune system there is really needing these diseases at the point of entry.

And then shelf life and stability.

There's 8 billion people on the planet and probably six and a half of them aren't around a high level hospital or high level pharmacy that has a -80 freezer or -20 freezer.

Our oral vaccine doesn't require any cold chain storage.

You know, it's stable up to 60 C, so that's 140, about 140 F. If you're in that environment.

Taking the vaccine is a very different you have other concerns.

You know, with having an oral system.

Maybe you want to manufacture things in Africa so it doesn't have to travel so far or you don't need maybe a pharmaceutical grade factory that maybe they have a beverage doing factory that can make this.

So you can see how it can ease the burden on getting it distributed throughout the world to really control pandemics in a more timely fashion if there is a resurgence.

So this is our QC lab, our analytical lab.

As a minority, I think one of the biggest challenges is raising money.

There's studies out there that show this, right?

It's a lot harder to raise money for us, so we're effectively self-financed.

We started with a pretty low amount for us for for this.

You know, it's about $200,000, right?

With health care, you know, the equipment you see behind me is a lot of money, right?

We have a variety of really cool toys, but instruments HPLCs, we have particle counters here.

We have a spectrophotometer.

There are some mixture.

We have the booty butler.

This is a 100 liter fermenter at the size we are now.

And with what we were trying to do, we blow through those amounts of funds fairly quickly.

A lot of our funding is soft, so instead of taking profits, we put it back into the company.

So for our oral vaccine, you know, we self-funded our clinical phase one.

Now we're to a point we'll be fully informed and able to set up our clinical phase two and three phase twos and phase three.

Those are thousands of people, tens of millions of dollars without funding.

It is unlikely we would be able to move into the phase two and phase three.

We moved into this 41,000 square foot building out of Ben Franklin Tech Ventures.

We started at Ben Franklin in a single lab, and our clean room was about 600 square feet.

This room around us was the entire size of our original clean room.

It was a great move.

It allowed us to expand our customer base.

We could handle larger projects, and that spurned our growth, right?

We can hire more people, but we do have to refit the building and bring it up to what we consider the gold standard.

We're planning a massive renovations.

Everything you see around will be torn out and go into a dumpster and we'll be replacing with our hard walled designs that we have in place already.

Ultimately, this site we have plans for about 120-130 people on site.

Really free and in invigorate this site, this area of south Allentown.

And it brings some more jobs here and have an exciting place for people to work.

And it's a high technology.

You know, there's not a lot of places to eat around here.

So any of the investors looking to put restaurants around, that would be great.

At USSF, everyone working here, they see and hear from our customers the direct impact they have on having better outcomes for people beating the medicines that we make.

We get letters from from doctors and patients saying, I haven't been able to get this for years.

Thank you so much for, you know, making this for us.

This is a challenging field, a challenging segment, and it takes desire and commitment to to complete the task that we have.

Now let's meet another local hero who's giving back to his hometown, Dwayne Jones.

He's the founder and CEO of Preventive Measures, an organization that helps folks from all walks of life access, mental health care and home care.

Dwayne's journey Curious slowly began at an Allentown barbershop.

It's the sixth mass shooting in California in less than two weeks.

COVID 19.

The death toll is expected to keep rising.

So mental health is a major issue that's plaguing the entire country.

But we're also one step away from leading mental health services.

If we can remove the stigma and we can educate people, it's going to go a long way in solving a lot of different problems.

Preventive measures is an outpatient and mental health and home health provider.

We provide services in Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Georgia.

Collectively, we have about 3000 clients or so and we provide therapy services, psychiatric services, medication management, and also in-home care for seniors and other individuals needing additional support in the home and preventive measures.

We meet you where you are.

Preventive measures was really the vision of Dwayne Jones.

I am the president and CEO of Preventive Measures, Allentown, it’s home.

I grew up on second Street in the seventies.

This is the house I was raised in a very diverse community.

I was kind of forced to learn how to speak Spanish, some Syrian, because all those folks were kind of part of that community.

I learned a lot from my father.

He didn't have his biological father in his life growing up, So I feel like he put a lot of emphasis on mentorship, whether it be him receiving it or dishing it out.

One of my first mentors, Clyde Bosket, was one of the longest standing African-American barbershops in the Allentown area.

At home, I would cut my grandfather's hair every now and then, and it was just kind of, Hey, I want to learn how to cut hair.

I remember driving home from college and getting my hours barbering under under Clyde.

I get in and and I have some sneakers on and he says, No, you can't.

You can't work today.

Look at your feet.

And I'd be like, these like, you wear tie up shoes in here.

I got sent home the first time I was mentored by him because I wasn't dressed properly.

Same thing with Dwayne.

He wore flip flops to the shop one day.

It's a classic Go home, grandson.

And that's.

That's one of the lasting memories I could see that we both adopted about being professional, about barbering itself.

Mr. Clyde made sure of that.

And that's what was passed down to me, was him teaching me professionalism.

I like being able to, one, connect with people, and I don't I don't think there's anything like you being a part of someone feeling good about themselves.

The Barbershop reflected your community.

And communities of color.

The barbershop is therapy, right?

The barbershop is the place where you can feel you can be vulnerable or you can express yourself.

Or you can just be, you know, who you are.

Hey, this is therapeutic.

I'm not licensed therapist, but guess what?

They talk to you anyway.

They give you their whole life story.

Something might be troubling them.

And guess what They'll see at the end of the haircut, man.

Thank you for listening.

Or thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

That's all it takes.

It doesn't take a whole lot.

They leave here feeling tons.

Tons of difference.

I loved being a barber, but I realized that that same feeling of making people feel better about themselves was in the mental health practice.

I had opened up an office in D.C. in 2010, and I was still running the barber shop on 15th and Liberty.

What I realize is people didn't recognize me as that here because they had never seen that, never seen an African-American who owned an outpatient mental health clinic.

First of all, mental health, that that was a taboo to talk about in our community and then to own a mental health clinic.

That was just unheard of.

Me being in the D.C. market, there were several African-Americans who owned mental health clinics and and were psychiatrist.

And so that environment really exposed me to owning businesses at a different level.

And he's always actively seeking people who he admires and who he inspires to be like.

And he is just open to those conversations, which makes it so easy, right, to to help him better himself.

I think that professional in the barbershop is a big reason why we're here.

He really is building a legacy.

He builds careers for people, not just jobs.

I'm honored to be a part of it.

I'm really looking to become an organization that is nationally known to build nonprofit partnerships and work in communities that are not only working with mental health clients, but working with people to improve their lives.

The foundation at this particular point is has scholarships that we give to students as well as to employees.

We want to be able to expand on mental health care.

So the foundation is a way for us to be able to give more.

I think black philanthropy is an opportunity to expose communities to something new.

Philanthropy and blacks and not being on the side of receiving, but now being on the side of giving.

And Dwayne's gift is absolutely his spirit of service and giving.

This is where he grew up.

This is where he has a lot of ties.

It's where he feels comfortable.

I think he just made it a point to come back to where it all started.

You know, obviously, it sounds very cliché to give back to your own community, but where else would you do it?

In 1981, Dieruff High School tied for the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference Championship with the mayor's and Whitehall leading the charge was a young quarterback who later switched positions in college.

His role as a wide receiver attracted the attention of the NFL.

His determination, speed and sheer athleticism ultimately earned him a place in the NFL Hall of Fame.

And yet this local kid made good, who became a great wide receiver.

Never forgot where he came from.

Joining us over Zoom from his home in California is Andre Reed.

Andre, thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure.

You know, you're originally from the Lehigh Valley.

Why do you feel it's important to give back to your hometown?

Well, number one, most people, when they do something great, a lot of times because of what they're doing, they can it's not that they forget where they're from, but all the different distractions that they have.

Your home is kind of it becomes further and further away in a and a certain point.

But my family, I have a family that's very, very involved in the community.

Mm hmm.

And my dad always said to me, if you ever do something good in life and you have a chance to make a difference, take advantage of that, because it's you're going to be known for that more than you than you will be for what you did in your profession.

So obviously, I took that to heart.

My two brothers are very active in the community and, you know, I wanted to come back and not only give back, but be a part of this community that I grew up in that gave me a lot and taught me a lot about life.

Let's talk a little bit about your your post-football career and some of the local philanthropy you've done.

Mm hmm.

Well, you know, I had my own foundation, the Andre Reed Foundation, charitable Foundation, which is really geared towards kids.

I don't know if people know, but they're in the valley.

I grew up as a club kid, as a boys and girls club kid.

And.

And the Boys and Girls Club was so instrumental in my life.

They were kind of the foundation that I needed to step on the bricks, that I needed to keep stepping on to, to achieve anything I wanted in life.

And they always instilled in me that you can do anything you want to do if you put your mind to it and you believe in yourself.

And they gave me that kind of attitude.

And to this day, I'm a boys and Girls Club kid at heart.

So they were very instrumental in my my upbringing there in the valley.

And I have a reading program that impacts 5000 kids a day across the country teaching these kids how important reading is.

We're not all going to be pro athletes, but we all can be great at what we do.

You know, you've been off the field for two decades now, but one look at your Twitter feed and it's obvious you still love this game.

Yeah.

What do you love most about it?

I mean, I don't know.

Can condense it into a few words, but yeah, that passion is still there.

When it's when it's and you for your life.

You can't help but love.

You know, what's what's going on?

I think I was born to do it.

I was born to be a football player.

I was born to, you know, football was my life.

And, you know, with the grace of the good graces of God, it became not only my life, but the it was a passion of mine.

And I was able to do it for a long time.

He gave me a good graces of playing, you know, 17 years in the NFL and see, I started playing when I was seven years old down near Bucky Boyle Park.

And my last game as a professional athlete was when I was 37.

So I almost played 31 years of football.

So it's I was very blessed.

Earlier in the show, we spoke with one of your former high school teammates, Dwayne Jones.

He's gone on to become very successful.

And your dad was his coach?

Yes.

In fact, you both cite your dad as an important inspiration in growing up.

How important are positive role models in a young athletes life?

I think you spoke on that.

But if you want to elaborate.

So important.

We live in a world now that there's so much pressure on on people especially.

I mean, we wouldn't even want to be a high school kid Now.

There's so much pressure on you to do this, to be there, to do that.

You need those positive role models in your life.

The pressure is just immense support because once you get out of a certain place, you have a whole new big conglomerate of things that you have to deal with.

That's the way it is in this world and you have to be ready for that.

So I think the one thing that as parents that we have to teach our kids is don't be afraid to fail because it is going to happen.

You know, some of our greatest athletes and greatest entrepreneurs have failed many times, and you just got to stay the course.

If that's your passion, you're going to find out that if you stay the course, maybe you might not reach to a certain point what you want.

But there's going to be a bunch of olive branches that you're going to be able to hold onto for the journey that you have had.

So in life lessons.

That's what needs to me.

That's what needs to be taught more in schools.

This is what life is about.

Well, you've had a great life.

It continues to be great.

You had terrific role models that you followed, but you've become a great role model for these kids as well.

So I want to thank you for joining us, Andre.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

You guys are doing a great job.

Thank you for having me.

And you are.

It's good to be on here.

That's it for this episode of Lehigh Valley Rising.

You can catch this and many more episodes online at PBS 39, dawg.

I'm Grover Silcox.

Thanks for watching.

BCI.

Corporate Benefits is a proud supporter of Lehigh Valley Rising.

Additional support provided by St Luke's University Health Network and by Adam's outdoor advertising.