New Mount Vernon and Iona College Partnership to Help Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses
Iona College and the City of Mount Vernon kicked off an exciting new partnership with a forum at City Hall last night thanks to The Business Council of Westchester and its new Westchester Innovation Network initiative (WIN).
Iona students and faculty are working closely with city leaders to support the success of Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses (MWBEs) in Mount Vernon.
After hearing about the challenges that business owners face, students from Iona’s Hynes Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation are now going to the drawing board to come up with solutions to help.
"We're going to put it into key bullet points and that's how we're going to narrow it down to one big problem, and from that one big problem, we're going to see what we can do to solve that problem," said Iona College student Isaiah Williams.
Stay tuned for more as this partnership unfolds! Thanks to News12 for covering the forum here.
Read more about this exciting partnership
ABOUT IONA
Founded in 1940, Iona University is a master's-granting private, Catholic, coeducational institution of learning in the tradition of the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers. Iona's 45-acre New Rochelle campus and 28-acre Bronxville campus are just 20 miles north of Midtown Manhattan. With a total enrollment of nearly 4,000 students and an alumni base of more than 50,000 around the world, Iona is a diverse community of learners and scholars dedicated to academic excellence and the values of justice, peace and service. Iona is highly accredited, offering undergraduate degrees in liberal arts, science and business administration, as well as Master of Arts, Master of Science and Master of Business Administration degrees and numerous advanced certificate programs. Iona students enjoy small class sizes, engaged professors and a wide array of academic programs across the School of Arts & Science; LaPenta School of Business; NewYork-Presbyterian Iona School of Health Sciences; and Hynes Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Iona is widely recognized in prestigious rankings, including The Princeton Review’s 2025 national list of “The Best 390 Colleges” and The Wall Street Journal/College Pulse’s “2024 Best Colleges in America,” which ranked Iona at #66 in the nation overall and #8 in the nation among Catholic schools. Iona’s LaPenta School of Business is also accredited by AACSB International, a recognition awarded to just six percent of business schools worldwide. In addition, The Princeton Review recognized Iona’s on-campus MBA program as a “Best Business School for 2023.” Iona also offers a fully online MBA program for even greater flexibility. In July 2021, Iona announced the establishment of the NewYork-Presbyterian Iona School of Health Sciences, which is now principally located on Iona’s Bronxville campus in collaboration with NewYork-Presbyterian. Connecting to its Irish heritage, the University also recently announced it is expanding abroad with a new campus in County Mayo, Ireland. A school on the rise, Iona officially changed its status from College to University on July 1, 2022, reflecting the growth of its academic programs and the prestige of an Iona education.