Martha de la Torre, co-founder of El Clasificado, was awarded the Marcia Lamb Inner City Innovation Award at the ICIC 2016 Conference
It is not often that three women of Latin American origin are part of a list of prominent business owners in the United States, even less so that they share the same heritage. However, at the annual Inner City 100 Conference and Awards ceremony, organized by ICIC (Initiative for a Competitive Inner City) and celebrated at the Aloft Boston Hotel, three Latinas with Ecuadorian ancestry were distinguished for the great community impact their companies had made in disadvantaged and low-income inner city areas.
Honored with the Marcia Lamb Inner City Innovation Award, was Martha de la Torre, co-founder of EC Hispanic Media and El Clasificado, a company that has been included seven times at the Inner City 100 List and is an ICIC Hall of Fame honoree.
De la Torre was recognized for the company’s innovations in business and commitment to the inner city communities in Southern California, while Mayra Khan’s company, Nova Enterprise, ranked 61st in the Inner City 100 list, and Nina Vaca, Chairman and CEO of the Pinnacle Group, served as a keynote speaker for the conference.
“We are honored to receive the Marcia Lamb Innovation award for recognizing how we have successfully been able to transform from a print business to a multimedia platform business serving the Latino community,” said De la Torre. “This transformation was challenging because not only did we have to invent new digital products but we had to re-engineer and upgrade our labor force. Technology often eliminates jobs, we are happy to say that with innovation and retraining we have created better job opportunities for our internal staff as well as new jobs for prospective inner city employees.”
These innovations and perseverance has driven the company to grow in 28 years to become the largest Spanish classified publication in the United States, distributing more than 510,000 copies weekly throughout Southern and Central California, and the second largest classified marketplace in the nation, with ElClasificado.com, according to SimilarWeb.com.
Additionally, the company continues to innovate in the digital realm through different initiatives such as the Quinceanera.com Party Planning mobile app, the MasClientes platform, which helps small and medium sized businesses expand their brands’ online presence, free business workshops to educate business owners about technology and resources to grow their companies, as well as non-profit events to help Hispanics maintain ties to their culture as they acclimate to the culture of the United States.
This year’s Inner City 100 list is celebrating its 18th edition and includes companies from all over the country such as Caduceus Healthcare from Atlanta, GA, which was ranked first for their efforts. This year, El Clasificado was chosen as a Finalist.
Contact: Alicia García de Angela | Director of Content and Communications | 1-888-987-4995 | [email protected].
About El Clasificado
El Clasificado, an EC Hispanic Media company, is a multi-media publication and advertising solutions company with advertising platforms in print, online, mobile, and grassroots events. More than 1.5 million readers utilize the free Spanish language publication every week, currently with a circulation of 510,000 in Central and Southern California. El Clasificado.com has 1.2 unique monthly visitors and over 32 million monthly pageviews.
About the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC)
ICIC is a national nonprofit founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School professor Michael E. Porter. ICIC’s mission is to promote economic prosperity in America’s inner cities through private sector investment that leads to jobs, income and wealth creation for local residents. Through its research on inner city economies, ICIC provides businesses, governments and investors with the most comprehensive and actionable information in the field about urban market opportunities. The organization supports urban businesses through the Inner City 100, Inner City Capital Connections and the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programs. Learn more at icic.org or @icicorg.
