National News

 Top Supplier Diversity Professional, Affiliate Council and Minority Businesses Also Honored

ATLANTA, GEORGIA – (Inquiring News Staff Report - November 4, 2011) - The National Minority Supplier Development Council, Inc.®, (NMSDC®) presented Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc. (TEMA) with the prestigious “Corporation of the Year” award at a black-tie awards banquet to cap its four-day conference and business opportunity fair in Atlanta, Georgia.

 Photo: NMSDC President Joset Wright (center) presents the Corporation of the Year award to Shigeki Terashi, president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc.

NMSDC’s Corporation of the Year award is the most sought-after honor for major corporations that are dedicated to improving the overall participation of Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American suppliers in the global corporate supply chain.

“This recognition is reserved for corporations that fully embrace the value that minority suppliers bring to the corporate supply chain,” said NMSDC President Joset Wright. “Toyota’s commitment to supplier diversity and minority supplier development is firmly embedded in the corporate culture. Its comprehensive, world-class supplier diversity process is worthy of replication.”

In winning the award, TEMA demonstrated a strong commitment to building capacity and capability of minority businesses within their corporation and in partnership with NMSDC. The company led two modules of NMSDC’s Centers of Excellence program – a network of regional business modules comprised of corporate supplier diversity/purchasing executives and minority business enterprise (MBE) owners. The program uses NMSDC “best practices” for minority supplier development to enhance corporate supplier diversity processes and build capacity for MBEs. To date, seven participating MBEs companies were awarded business directly with Toyota. The automaker also sponsored two companies in NMSDC’s Corporate Plus® program, a special classification for minority businesses with proven success in executing national contracts and the capacity to handle more.

TEMA showed its commitment to the growth of minority suppliers by spending $1.5 billion with MBEs in 2010 – a 36% increase over its 2009 spend. The increase earned TEMA entry into the Billion Dollar Roundtable, and was realized during a challenging time for the company. During this down time, the company also deployed resources to its supply base that saved 40,000 jobs and ensured readiness for return to normal production. Additionally, the automaker facilitated the creation of four new minority joint ventures that will provide more than $250M in new MBE spend annually. TEMA also increased spend with professional service MBEs by adding spend in areas such as marketing, accounting and legal services.

With a focus on Tier 2, the automaker added more stringent measures to hold their direct suppliers more accountable for utilizing minority suppliers. The result was an increase of more than 30% in Tier 2 spend. In support of Tier 2, TEMA hosts an annual diverse business exchange to help their suppliers connect with potential certified minority businesses. A “best practice” for second tier minority business development, last year’s event resulted in more than $60 million in new contracts for minority businesses.

Active engagement with the NMSDC network also contributed to TEMA’s selection as Corporation of the Year. The company participates with NMSDC and its affiliate councils, holding corporate membership with 10 councils and executive leadership roles with four. TEMA’s senior executives lead the company’s commitment to minority businesses and shared internal best practices with their peers by speaking at eight events last year. At its banquet, NMSDC also presented awards for individual leadership in Minority Supplier Development, Suppliers of the Year and Regional Council of the Year.

Marianne Strobel, assistant vice president of global supplier diversity at AT&T, received the Minority Supplier Development Leader of the Year award in recognition of exemplary development programs for minority business owners, as well as exceptional leadership and impact throughout corporate America. AT&T is a member of the Billion Dollar Roundtable, and also spent $1.3 billion with its Tier 2 suppliers in 2010.

Four top minority businesses were recognized as National Suppliers of the Year in recognition of their business acumen and excellence in community service. They are: Circle One, Inc., of Atlanta, Georgia, in the category for businesses with sales less than $1 million; Way To Be Designs, LLC of Hayward, California, among firms with $1 million to $10 million in sales; Homestead Packaging Solutions, Inc., of Roswell, Georgia, in the category for businesses with sales between $10 million and $50 million; and Group O, Inc., in Milan, Illionis, for firms with sales greater than $50 million.

Twelve minority businesses were honored as Regional Suppliers of the Year. They are BridgeWork Partners, Lewisville, Texas; C.D. Moody Construction Company, Inc., Lithonia, Georgia; D.W. Morgan Company, Pleasanton, California; Gonzalez Saggio & Harlan, LLP, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Multicultural Entrepreneurial Institute, Inc. (MEI), Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Red Brown Klé, Inc., Milwaukee, Wisconsin; República, LLC, Miami, Florida; SHI International Corp., Somerset, New Jersey; SearchPros Staffing, LLC, Citrus Heights, California; Superior Maintenance Company (SMC), Elizabethtown, Kentucky; TKT & Associates, Inc., Louisville, Kentucky; and Translation Plus, Inc., Hackensack, New Jersey.

The Dallas/Fort Worth Minority Supplier Development Council earned Regional Council of the Year honors for providing outstanding service to hundreds of corporations and minority businesses in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metropolitan area.
About NMSDC: Providing a direct link between corporate America and minority-owned businesses is the primary objective of the National Minority Supplier Development Council, one of the country’s leading business membership organizations. It was chartered in 1972 to provide increased procurement and business opportunities for minority businesses of all sizes. The NMSDC Network includes a national office in New York and 37 Regional Councils across the country. There are 3,500 corporate members throughout the network, including America’s top publicly-owned, privately-owned and foreign-owned companies as well as universities, hospitals and other buying institutions. The Regional Councils certify and match more than 16,000 minority-owned businesses with member corporations that want to purchase their goods and services. For more information about NMSDC, call (212) 944-2430 or visit the Web site at www.nmsdc.org.

Asian and Black Teens Have Lowest Rates Of Drug Use: Study

By Steve Elliot

Asian and black teenagers in the United States are less likely to use drugs or alcohol than adolescents of other races, a new study has found.

The survey of 72,561 teens found that American Indian (Native American) youth had the highest rates of drug or alcohol use, with 48 percent reporting they had used the substances in the past year. That was followed by 39 percent of whites, 37 percent of Hispanics, 36 percent of mixed-race teens, 32 percent of blacks and just 24 percent of Asians, according to the research published on Monday in Archives of General Psychiatry, reports Nicole Ostrow at Bloomberg.

The findings that black teens are less likely to drink or use drugs than whites may help defeat stereotypes and help programs "focus on the subgroups of adolescents who are at greater risk," according to study author Dan Blazer (cool last name there, Dan), a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Caroalina.

Overall, 37 percent of the teens in the study -- 27,705 of them -- said they had used alcohol or drugs in the past year, researchers said.

"This is a very real public health problem and all of us need to be concerned about it," Blazer said last week. "We need to be looking for it and we need to be trying to jump in to do what we can to get these kids into treatment and turn them around while they're still adolescents."

About 90 percent of adults with alcohol and drug problems started using before the age of 18, and half started before the age of 15, according to the Partnership at Drugfree.org, a nonprofit that gives parents anti-drug information on prevention, intervention, treatment and recovery for teens.

Researchers used information from the annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health from 2005 to 2008, the only American survey designed to provide yearly estimates of substance use in the United Stastes. The survey asks about alcohol and nine classes of drugs, including marijuana, inhalants, heroin and prescription painkillers. The study includes youth ages 12 to 17.

About 37 percent of American Indian teens reported using alcohol in the past year, compared with 35 percent of whites and 32 percent of Hispanics, 31 percent of mixed race, 25 percent of blacks and 19 percent of Asians.

For drug use, about 31 percent of American Indians used in the past year, followed by 23 percent of those who consider themselves mixed race and 20 percent of whites, according to the study. About 19 percent of black teens, 18 percent of Hispanic teens and 12 percent of Asian teens admitted they had used drugs in the past year.

Use isn't equal across all Native American tribes, according to Blazer, but he said it's impossible to tell which American Indian teens by tribe were using drugs and alcohol.

"What surprised us most was the relatively lower rate of use among African Americans," Blazer said. "The public perception is that that's not the case."

Prescription opioid painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin have replaced inhalants as the second most commonly used drugs among teens behind marijuana, according to the study.

Teens who used heroin were the most likely to develop addiction or abuse, the research found.

Marijuana use, which was used at twice the rate of most other drugs in the study, also supposedly resulted in "addiction or abuse" by the definition of the study, based on escalation of use, legal problems or interference with other activities.

But who knows -- all that could mean is, they smoked more pot at the end of the year than at the beginning, which would qualify as "escalation of use" without having any particular consequences except being high more often, not that horrible an outcome if it's marijuana we're talking about.

Blazer said more studies are needed to determine which "treatments" work best for kids who have drug and alcohol problems.

The study was funded by grants from -- guess who? -- the infamous National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which refuses to fund any studies which might show positive attributes of cannabis. It is NIDA's stated and official policy to only fund studies which look for bad things about marijuana.

NIDA, which oversees 85 percent of the world's research on controlled substances, reaffirmed its longstanding policy to The New York Times.

"As the National Institute on Drug Abuse, our focus is primarily on the negative consequences of marijuana use," a spokesperson told the Times in 2010. "We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial medical effects of marijuana."

In the federal government's mindset, any use of marijuana is "abuse" which requires "treatment" -- in, of course, expensive "drug rehab" facilities which treat marijuana use as if it's an "addiction" right up there with heroin, methamphetamine or crack cocaine.