A lifelong advocate for the business efforts of women and minorities, Marian Parker Diggs created the Marian Parker Diggs Entrepreneurial Fund to stimulate entrepreneurship. The fund is a monument to her contributions to the minority business community. It was created in 1998 and benefits the POISE Foundation, a community foundation built to foster self-sustaining in Pittsburgh’s Black community through advocacy, collective giving, grantmaking, and leadership.
While in Pittsburgh, Diggs helped found the Phi Chi Theta Sorority for Women in Business and Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. She held leadership positions in Pittsburgh’s Business and Job Development Corp., which worked to create opportunity in the inner city in the 1960s. she worked for 15 years with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Minority Business Development Agency and its previous iteration, the Office of Minority Business Enterprise. She held supervisory positions in Los Angeles, California, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., and was awarded the Department of Commerce’s Bronze Medal award for distinguished service in 1986. She died in 1997.
Read more about Marian Parker Diggs’s life here.