A parking-garage bridge over a street in downtown Evanston. Photo: Eric Fredericks from Rancho Cordova, CA, United States / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Local contractors and small businesses who want to sell to Evanston’s largest public and institutional buyers were due a morning of instruction on Friday, March 27, 2015. The City of Evanston scheduled its third annual Procurement 101 workshop for 8 a.m. to noon in the Parasol Room, on the fourth floor of the Lorraine H. Morton Civic Center, 2100 Ridge Ave.
Check-in ran from 8 to 8:30 a.m., and presentations started at 8:30. The workshop was free.
Who was presenting
Five organizations were on the program: the City of Evanston, Northwestern University, Rotary International, and the school districts that serve Evanston, District 65 for elementary and middle schools and District 202 for the township high school. Each was expected to explain how it buys goods and services, what projects it expected to put out for bid, and what bidding practices vendors should know.
The aim was practical. A small firm that has never answered a request for proposals can lose out on paperwork alone. Putting five buyers on one agenda let a business owner compare requirements in a single morning.
Several of the presenters operate within a mile or two of each other. Rotary International keeps its world headquarters at 1560 Sherman Ave., in a building completed in 1977, and Northwestern’s Evanston campus sits along the lakefront to the east. Both school districts and the city are public bodies, so their purchasing follows formal bidding steps, and a session on process rather than a sales pitch was the workshop’s focus.
Attendees were not expected to arrive with a bid in hand. The morning was organized around learning what each organization buys, when its projects tend to come up, and how bidding works. This was the workshop’s third year, so the format was already familiar to some of the city’s contractors by 2015.
The committee behind it
The city’s Minority, Women and Evanston Business Enterprise Development Committee sponsored the event, which the city said was meant to widen opportunities for local businesses and contractors.
Registration was handled through the city’s website or by phone or text at 847-448-4311. Residents could also dial 3-1-1 within Evanston.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
