Spotlight On: Germaine Smith-Baugh, President & CEO, Urban League of Broward County
March 2025 — In an interview with Invest:, Germaine Smith-Baugh, president and CEO of the Urban League of Broward County, talked about the organization’s focus on education, entrepreneurship, jobs, justice, housing, and health to strengthen communities in Broward County. She also talked about the Urban League’s C3M concept to increase access to money, management, and market to help small businesses grow.
What key milestones did the Urban League of Broward County reach in the past year?
Growth has been a part of the Urban League’s story in the past 12 months. Growth is not always easy. It can be painful at times, but it is worth it. We have concentrated strongly on housing affordability. We received approvals to construct 469 units of affordable workforce housing on 20 acres of property in Oakland Park. That development will be the largest number of affordable housing units done by a private entity in Broward’s history. We are excited about how that will help define how families live, work, and play in Broward County.
Technology and innovation have been at the forefront of the Urban League. The social impact sector is a way to grow our community, and technology and innovation must be part of that. We have been working with Microsoft and iBridge to develop a platform to measure our impact on families. That platform will not only transform how the Urban League works, but also be helpful to other human-serving nonprofits of medium and large sizes.
The Urban League will mark its 50th year of impact in this community in 2025. We have taken the time to look at where we are, where we have been, and where we want to be as we prepare for the next 12 months of celebration, impact, and future innovation.
How do the Urban League’s education and youth development program help young people gain the skills they need to succeed?
Our work is based on six pillars: education, entrepreneurship, jobs, justice, housing, and health. We operate around 18 programs across those pillars. In the case of education, the services we provide are focused on helping young people matriculate to their next grade level, graduate from high school, and move forward with their next life choice, whether that is going to university or college, joining the Armed Forces, opening their own business, or something else.
We primarily do that work through afterschool, summer, and college-enrichment programming. You will see us working primarily in elementary, middle, and high schools, delivering those programs. We have college tours and college experience programs because our goal is to move students through the education system and to provide wraparound services so they are successful at graduating from high school and doing something afterward.
How does the Urban League connect its different areas of work to empower communities in Broward County?
The most important work of the Urban League is focused on family units. Family units may be single moms or dads, two-parent families, grandmas raising grandchildren, or something else. Education, entrepreneurship, jobs, justice, housing, and health as well as the intersectionality between those pillars lie on those family units. When you can change the trajectory of a family, family by family, you get a block. Then, block by block, you have a neighborhood, and neighborhood by neighborhood, you empower communities and change lives. The more we can be family-centric and programmatically agnostic, the stronger our communities will be.
What initiatives does the Urban League have in place to help build a strong entrepreneur community in Broward County?
Through its Central County Community Development Corporation (CCCDC), the Urban League is the only headquartered community development financial institution in Broward County. The CCCD is certified by the U.S. Department of Treasury to lend capital to small businesses, and particularly to minority- and women-owned businesses. We can lend throughout the state of Florida, but our primary area is in the South Florida region. Banks and other entities invest in the Urban League through the CCCD so that we can lend those resources to small businesses.
Our goal is to ensure that businesses can grow from a capital perspective, hire, and expand in the market. Our entrepreneurship C3M concept focuses on access to money, management, and market because those pillars help small businesses grow. Our CCCD Financial Institution provides access to money. Access to management is the technical support that we provide in areas such as accounting, technology, legal, and marketing. Finally, in terms of access to the market, the Urban League can take advantage of its connections to supplier diversity streams and corporations to access those markets and link them to businesses.
How is the Urban League helping individuals in Broward County enter the workforce?
In terms of the jobs pillar, we aim to ensure that individuals we work with have access to training and education. That moves them toward earning living wages. Those living wages should enable them to sustain and help their families to thrive. We work closely with our higher education institutions, such as Broward College, Florida Atlantic University, and other training entities. Those entities come in and provide training to the community in our building, which makes it more easily accessible to the community as a whole.
Additionally, we provide access not only to training but also to soft skills. People may have the hard, technical skills, but they also need to be able to write the resumes that get them an opportunity and the interview skills that get them through the door. We make sure that we go through the entire spectrum of skills. The point is that adults get jobs that earn them a living wage, and they take the assets they acquire from that job and use those resources to build more assets for themselves and their families.
How effective have the Urban League’s housing programs in Broward County been in terms of homeownership and wealth accumulation?
There are three main ways that people who are on the fringes accumulate wealth: getting a job, starting a business, or purchasing a home that becomes the largest asset that most families have. Our housing programs include housing counseling opportunities that help people walk through the process of homeownership since we are a HUD-certified counseling agency. If people go through the eight-hour training that we provide, many cities will provide downpayment vouchers. We help people get prepared for the home-purchasing experience, to repair their credit so that they can be eligible for the mortgages necessary to purchase homes.
We also engage in affordable housing development because we want families to have access to affordable homes. That is the key for Broward County since affordability is a huge issue. We need to figure out how to bring more housing affordability online in terms of both rentals and homeownership.
What have been the most important effects of the Urban League’s efforts to build stronger and safer communities in Broward County?
Our justice programs are primarily focused on young people. Instead of focusing on youths downstream after they’ve committed a crime, we address things midstream. A lot of the work focuses on helping young people and communities rebuild their relationships with law enforcement. We hold community events and group work in which our local law enforcement entities work with us and with young people to show that law enforcement can be about community-building instead of just surveillance.
We also run a very effective first-time offender program so that young people who have found themselves in trouble are referred to us. Their criminal cases may be sealed if they are successful with the program, which can have a positive impact on those individuals and their families. Their life does not have to spiral out of control after making a mistake. Additionally, we have a youth hate crime program that aims to get young people to think about what goes on around them and how they can have a positive impact on their community.
How does the Urban League ensure that preventive healthcare resources are available to those who need them the most?
The intersectionality of our pillars is important. Nevertheless, none of it matters without health. Our work in health is primarily in prevention in terms of sharing information on chronic disease prevention throughout our programming and group activities in the community. Our strongest area is maternal health. We run an aggressive maternal health program focused on birthing healthy babies. Healthy births are a challenge for minority women, so our goal is to work with our women and families so they have healthy outcomes for themselves and their children.
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