Birmingham’s A.G. Gaston Conference: 20 Years and Counting

Sponsored Content Robert Dickerson, Executive Director, Birmingham Business Resource Center Reflecting on 20 years of consecutive and successful AG Gaston Conferences, as church folk would say, I feel highly blessed.  The conference started with an idea of providing a platform for economic empowerment, and I can honestly say that when we started a 20-year anniversary was nowhere in our thinking. A conference on economic empowerment was something we thought was important when we started, and that belief hasn’t changed. We get personal satisfaction from holding this conference each year, but most important is that it is something we still believe benefits our community. Reflecting over the past two decades, some things have changed, the first is, I went from a man of 50 plus to a man of 70 plus, living has a way of reminding you that time stops for no one, however the one thing that has not changed, is that while we have improved over the years, we haven’t changed, and I am proud of that fact. The focal point of our conference has remained A G Gaston, the man and his accomplishments used as a north star to guide us toward “Economic Empowerment through Enterprise Development”,...