In 2004, Delta-21 relocated its corporate offices to the downtown Market Square district in Knoxville, Tennessee and renovated a three-story formerly abandoned building to serve as its corporate headquarters. Over the last five years, Delta-21 has steadily raised the economic status of HUBZone employees and the local community by providing employment opportunities and training initiatives to under served citizens of downtown Knoxville. These community building efforts benefit the city, state and federal government by taking individuals off of state and federal welfare programs, providing them with quality jobs and promoting long-term local investment, thereby improving the economic climate. To date, Delta-21′s support of the HUBZone program has resulted in a direct community investment of over 1.7 million dollars.

While Delta-21 conducts business activities with a broad spectrum of federal agencies, Delta-21’s goal is to do business locally, thereby strengthening the local economy. An equally important part of our corporate strategy is to accept accountability to the community. A community’s economic health can be judged by the strength, empowerment and diversity of its work force. By working to raise the standard of life, education, and technical skill level of our citizens, East Tennessee will continue to attract outside investment. Delta-21’s HUBZone initiatives are designed for these very purposes.

Created in Congress under the Historically Underutilized Business Zone Act of 1997, this program seeks to encourage economic development in historically underutilized business zones – or HUBZones – through the establishment of preferences for award of Federal contracts to small businesses located in these areas. The program mission is to provide Federal contracting opportunities for certain qualified small business concerns located in distressed communities in an effort to promote private sector investment and employment opportunities while ensuring that these contractors become viable businesses for the long term.

The HUBZone program is unique because it directs Federal contract dollars to small businesses located in areas of high unemployment and low-income to stimulate economic development. This combination provides a mechanism that reconciles the cost of providing Federal assistance to distressed communities with the need of the Federal Government to acquire products and services at fair prices. By using Federal procurement dollars to provide economic development, the HUBZone program is able to bridge the gap between the costs of Federal initiatives aimed at revitalizing distressed communities with the benefits of market-based economic development.

Since the creation of the first enterprise zones in the late 1970s, state, local, and Federal Government initiatives have attempted to spur employment and investment in lower-income areas through incentives. Employment and housing tax credit programs currently exist in virtually every state; however, the HUBZone program’s combination of small business procurement and geographic focus is without precedent. It represents the culmination and evolution of 40 years of economic development and procurement incentives. The requirements of the program ensure that Federal dollars are channeled to businesses located in distressed areas. Further, the employee residency requirement takes advantage of the socioeconomic theory of the “multiplier effect.” The multiplier effect asserts that each dollar injected directly into a local community is spent several times within that community, thereby ratcheting upward the overall economic impact of each dollar.

With more than 40 million Americans living in poverty, Delta-21, whose name signifies change for the 21st century, is striving to make a positive impact on the inner-city of Knoxville, and the surrounding rural counties.