Opportunities Industrialization Center

OIC was founded on 1964, by Leon Sullivan, a civil rights leader and pastor of the Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia with an education and job training facility to help African Americans. Its first facility was a converted former jailhouse on 19th and Oxford Streets in North Philadelphia. The program was developed to provide job training and instruction in life skills to disadvantaged and disenfranchised peoples with few prospects, and helped place participants into the workforce. Sullivan discovered that thousands of African Americans and other Philadelphia residents in lower-income communities were unemployed, despite a surplus in job vacancies during that time. This led to the launch of a "selective patronage" campaign, i.e. a boycott against Philadelphia-area companies that were not practicing equal opportunity in employment.[6][7]

Expansion

Renovations to the dilapidated building were funded through donations from community organizers and citizens, and through a grant given by an anonymous donor. The programs provided by the Philadelphia center were replicated in other American cities, which provided employment training and job placement for economically disadvantaged, unemployed and unskilled people of all races. In 1969, Sullivan's concept led to the formation of the Opportunities Industrialization Centers International (OICI), which would expand its services to international communities based on the "self-help" philosophy that Sullivan founded OIC upon. In 1970, Sullivan established OIC of America, Inc. to serve as a national organization that would associated with OIC affiliate campuses across the United States and provide technical assistance centers for areas where the OIC model was replicated.[8][9]

Although OIC does not serve Black people exclusively, its history as part of the civil rights protests of the 1960s and a boycott to help desegregate white businesses in Philadelphia,[9] was continued in the 1970s with a Pan-African effort to help establish facilities in several African countries, "with the collective cultural capital and philanthropy raised by the people themselves in Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, and other nations".[10]