YOU KNOW THE world of free-market Capitalism is changing dramatically when big city chambers of commerce begin making genuine commitments - backed by money and resources - to help small, minority owned businesses gain the skills and contacts necessary to become serious players in their regions' economies.

Indeed, the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce today is devoted to what Steve Leahy, its executive director, calls a "concerted effort" to help minority businesses at last gain entry to the region's elite spheres of business, where a cordial dinner and drinks with the right acquaintance might make the difference between a middle-class existence and winning a contract worth a few million dollars on the bottom line.

"We think it's the right thing to do," says Leahy. "We also think it's the smart thing to do."

This "new inclusiveness" is not only occurring in über-liberal Seattle, but is a growing trend across the country. "We're in a global competition for talent, for business and for money," says Joe Reagan, president and CEO of Greater Louisville Inc. in Kentucky. "As we're finding in Louisville, more and different voices at the table, more ideas, actually contribute to our competitive advantage. Inclusiveness in the business community is absolutely seen as an imperative these days."

To this end, the Seattle chamber is forging strategic alliances with smaller chambers of commerce, including the Washington State Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; the Filipino Chamber of Commerce of the Pacific Northwest; Tabor 100, an association of black-owned businesses; and the Greater Seattle Business Association, which represents lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender businesspeople (and is, with some 1,000 members, the largest gay chamber of commerce in the United States). Over time and with success, the Seattle chamber may widen its reach to include other small chambers, such as the local Japanese American Chamber of Commerce, the Seattle Chinese Chamber of Commerce and others.

Partly, it's because globalization and immigration have made parochial ways of doing business - discrimination included - socially and financially obsolete. Michael Verchot, director of the Business and Economic Development Center at the University of Washington School of Business, explains bluntly, "It's a demographic issue: 45 percent of people under 17 are people of color, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Minority-owned businesses are growing faster in Washington and the U.S. than business as a whole. The economic vitality of the state is going to be increasingly dependent on minority-owned businesses."

Both Verchot and Louisville's Reagan say that by 2050, more than half of all businesses in America will be minority businesses - except, of course, by then they will have become the majority. "If the population of who owns businesses is changing, then who is going to be the employer of tomorrow is changing," Verchot says. "That will be very important for our grandchildren."

And so, Verchot points out, "The whole issue of who's at the table, who's not at the table, who has access to investment dollars and who is invited to form strategic partnerships - these are really critical issues." Issues that, until now, have left minority business owners feeling frustrated and excluded.

"When it comes to large, lucrative contracts," says Dave Tyner, more matter-of-factly than bitterly, "small and minority businesses need not apply." To illustrate the scope of the problem, he points out that, in the public sector, "less than 1 percent of the $7 billion in state contracts have gone to minority firms. They can talk about promoting diversity all they want, but the figures speak for themselves."

Tyner's company, Tyrisco Inc., is the Largest minority-owned insurance brokerage in the Northwest. Though Tyrisco won the insurance contract on Seattle's doomed Monorail Project, which he says was the largest insurance contract in the history of the state of Washington that went to a minority brokerage, Tyner insists that "government contracts have been dominated by large firms that are not interested in the slightest in partnering with minority firms."