BURLINGAME, Calif., April 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- ECC was recently awarded the 2011 Frances Perkins Vanguard Award by the Small Business Administration (SBA). The award recognizes firms for their excellence in using woman-owned small businesses (WOSBs) as prime contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers. ECC will receive the award at the SBA's National Small Business Week in Washington, D.C., May 19, 2011.

ECC has steadily increased its WOSB participation in the Federal marketplace. The firm's WOSB utilization rate has grown along with its workload, subcontracting hundreds of millions of dollars to qualified WOSBs.  Further, ECC continually surpasses the government-established five-percent WOSB goal – in 2008 by 500 percent and most recently in 2009 and 2010 by approximately 100 percent.

"We are excited to have been chosen by the SBA to receive the Frances Perkins Vanguard Award," stated Glenn Sweatt, ECC's General Counsel. "ECC has invested significant resources in developing a robust small business program, and this award is a humbling validation that those efforts have been very effective at providing meaningful business opportunities for qualified woman-owned businesses across the country."

The 2011 Frances Perkins Vanguard Award represents ECC's fourth major small business award within the past 4 years. Other awards include the 2008 Dwight D. Eisenhower Award for Excellence, presented by the SBA; the Large Business Award for 2008, presented by the Society of American Military Engineers; and the Inaugural Prime Subcontracting Award for 2007, presented by the Department of Defense Office of the Under Secretary of Defense/Office of Small Business Programs. All of these awards demonstrate ECC's commitment to achieving and exceeding government-established small business utilization goals.

ECC was founded as an 8(a) small business in 1985 to provide clients with comprehensive environmental remediation and engineering services. Since then, ECC has grown to become a successful large business, expanding its core capabilities to include construction, design-build, energy, and munitions response services. As a worldwide Federal constructor and remediation contractor, ECC has demonstrated the technical and managerial breadth and expertise to complete a variety of large-scale, concurrent projects throughout the United States and across the globe.

For more information, please visit www.ecc.net. ECC—Never Compromising Safety

SOURCE ECC