Operation All Access, expanding opportunities for minority and women owned businesses, was held Thursday at the Geary County Convention Center.

Around 200 minority and women business owners attended the summit including the owners of Holy Smoke Barbecue in Junction City, Kevin Guy and Robert Bailey.

Bailey explained that he learned that there are opportunities out there for small minority owned businesses,” Just making the connections and that’s what this is doing, is that we’re making the connections, putting the name with the face and actually seeing that yes, there are opportunities out there for us to grow.”

Governor Sam Brownback was the guest speaker during lunch. He spoke about child hood poverty and how he doesn’t believe it has been addressed properly,”Here’s a topic that has been static in this state and nationwide since the war on poverty began virtually. We’ve put a lot of money into it and we haven’t found a right way to deal with it.”

He listed three things that should be addressed,”Family structure, education and jobs. You kind of get all three of them right the likely hood of you being in poverty, the children being in poverty, is less than 10 percent. If you get one or two of them wrong the numbers go up.”

The event was organized by the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and Geary County Commission.

Larry Hicks, Conference co-chair and Geary County Commissioner said that this is an event that he would like to see grow and get a greater outreach to a more urban area such as Riley and Saline County,” We believe that were only scratching the surface of the real potential that exists here. But it has to be something that we engage in a consistent basis.”