This is part two of a two-part series on higher education and minority contracting. The read or listen to the first part here.

As the first chief procurement officer of the University of Massachusetts, David Cho centralized spending across the system's five campuses, giving him the opportunity to analyze the diversity of its vendors.

What Cho found in that data earlier this year was admittedly not great. Like most schools, UMass has long said it’s committed to diversity and inclusion, but out of its $1 billion budget, UMass spends 2 percent on businesses owned by people of color.

“The difference between diversity and inclusion is that diversity is being at the party, inclusion is being invited to dance,” Cho said. “There's a ton more that we can do.”

UMass doesn’t yet have any results from Cho's efforts. Advocates say committed leadership from the top can make a difference, but making minority contracting a priority and reaching out to businesses may not be enough. Similar efforts by Emerson College, the Greater New England Supplier Diversity Council and the City of Boston have yielded meager results. The University of Connecticut has earned a regional reputation for minority contracting — because 6 percent of its spending goes to businesses owned by people of color.

Prompted by the national reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, college leaders in Massachusetts say they want to expand their racial equity mission statements to include minority contracting.

“I think that folks feel that that is a ready and good tactic to use,” said Rich Doherty, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Massachusetts. Many of its members belong to a statewide co-op that has 2 percent of its active contracts with minority-owned businesses.

“This is a really opportune time to do it with a change in [presidential] administration and just the heightened awareness on campus and in the communities,” he said. “Whatever numbers currently exist, we think it's fair to say they're going to expand significantly going forward.”

Doherty sees this crisis as an opportunity to spread colleges’ wealth to businesses owned by people of color, first, by raising awareness.

“I think it’ll hopefully increase the opportunities for schools to make sure that they're getting a broad range of bidders on their jobs,” he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court, though, has limited what colleges can do. If organizations accept federal funds, the court has ruled they can’t reserve contracts for minority businesses to address broad social and economic inequities.

One Black-owned business that has had a degree of success in obtaining college contracts, locally and in the Baltimore-Washington area, is WestNet. The Canton-based company, which Gordon Thompson founded in 1992, distributes medical supplies like equipment for life science labs and personal protective equipment.

Since March, WestNet has seen a huge demand for PPE, although one school has never contracted with him: Boston University, New England’s largest private school.

“I think they just have a different value towards small business and working with diverse business directly,” said Thompson, who’s been chasing a contract with BU practically since he founded his company.

A BU spokeswoman would not comment on specific contracts or say how much the university spends on businesses owned by people of color, but added the college says is preparing to launch a supplier diversity program.

Harvard already has one. "The university continues to make efforts to grow this program and increase the level of participation by minority- and women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs) and small businesses enterprise (SBE) in its procurement process," a university spokesperson said.

At UMass, Cho said he sees a moral obligation and a way to give people of color a greater chance to build wealth by giving them more opportunities. UMass hasn’t announced any targets or goals yet, but it has set supplier diversity requirements for all its bids.

“We've even launched technology, which enables suppliers who register with UMass to self-certify, so that [they can say], ‘Hey, we are a diverse supplier we’re either veteran-owned or we are [a] Black or brown business,” he said.

As the largest public college in the state, Cho says, UMass plans to help lead a statewide initiative to expand minority contracting with colleges. Lee Pelton, president of Emerson College, also intends to urge college leaders in the state to do the same.

GBH's Paul Singer and Diane Adame contributed to this report.