This new OICA endeavor will lead to economic power and freedom for low-income people nationwide and serve as a solution to America’s labor crisis.
OIC was founded in 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.
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.
[10][11] 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,[11] 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".