Through Amazon Business, the university is now using thousands of new small businesses to supply the institution.Īs part of HopkinsLocal, the university committed to increasing contracts with minority- and women-owned businesses. “We have such large spending power, it’s our responsibility to make sure that we are supporting our community,” says Burns. According to Burns, a local lab supplier in Baltimore has been able to hire four additional people due to the increased purchases on Amazon Business from the university. “By intentionally purchasing locally on Amazon Business, Johns Hopkins has created significant opportunities for small and local businesses here in the city,” says Crystal Burns, Small Business and Supplier Diversity Lead at Johns Hopkins University. The university spends around $1 billion in annual purchasing and has 5,000 active requisitioners that buy a diverse array of goods and services. As one of the largest employers in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins has a considerable impact on the local economy. The revenue that Johns Hopkins University has been able to channel toward small businesses isn’t a negligible amount or token gesture. “When small, local businesses sell on Amazon Business, they are suddenly on an equal playing field with the large businesses, and they have access to obtaining our business,” says Smith. In 2015 the university launched an initiative called HopkinsLocal to promote economic growth and employment in Baltimore.īy purchasing on Amazon Business, Johns Hopkins can more easily support local businesses because the university gains more visibility into their products and profile. But purchasing on Amazon Business helps the university pursue one of its major strategic goals, too: the ability to support Baltimore-area small businesses. Johns Hopkins University was drawn to Amazon Business for the convenience, selection, centralized management and fast delivery of business-specific products. University support for small, local businesses Johns Hopkins turned to Amazon Business in 2017 for the solution. To better fulfill its mission of research, education and patient care, the university needed a step up in its capabilities to purchase products like lab supplies, office products, maintenance repair items and IT peripherals. “The goal of our department is to support the university’s mission to teach students, empower research and discovery and improve medicine.” “We cannot enable science without a robust procurement supply chain,” says Brian Smith, Chief Procurement Officer at Johns Hopkins University. When considering what it takes to remain a leading scientific research university, it might not be obvious that procurement is an essential part-but the procurement team knows it is. The university is known for academic rigor, scientific advancements, award-winning alumni and faculty and receiving major federal research grants. Its long history hasn’t stopped it from staying on the leading edge of innovation. If we want a world that puts our health before profit, we can only rely on ourselves.Based in Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 as the first research university in the United States. The Covid pandemic showed us that the people in power were committed to prioritize profits over our lives and now, with the end of the Hopkins dashboard, they’ve done it again. This is the time to expand and build more resilient public health infrastructure, not destroy it. And yet this insufficient infrastructure that has been created to deal with global pandemics is being dismantled and replaced with at-home rapid tests sold by corporations for profit. And we are still in a time period when the pandemic hasn’t gone away and, with the rapid spread of bird flu in mammals, we are at a greater risk of another pandemic. It’s abysmal to see that it took two individuals on their own to create a way to collect and report on the pandemic where world governments failed. And yet it took only one day to create the dashboard. The dashboard was first created by JHU professor Lauren Gardner and grad student Ensheng Dong because “there was not a single dedicated COVID-19 tracking website by a public health authority anywhere,” said professor Gardner. It comes now because only New York, Arkansas, and Puerto Rico report daily data and, with the rise of at-home rapid tests, the flimsy infrastructure that existed to collect the data has become even more unreliable. On March 10, after 3 years the Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center (CRC) run by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) stopped collecting and reporting data on the pandemic.
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