black girls breathing

My organization, black girls breathing, is at an exciting tipping point. 

With a global community of 15k Black women, we were able to act quickly and be a critical and real-time resource to this demographic experiencing extreme isolation, collective grief, race-related traumas during COVID-19. We shifted our business model to offer free and sliding scale mental health care services in March 2020. This month, we’re announcing our plan to impact 1M Black women and girls by 2025. This grant will help propel our mission and support our operating budget as we continue to build upon existing corporate relationships and pitch for multi-year corporate partnerships to fund our work. As we navigate lead times with securing those multi-year contracts, this grant in the meantime would allow us to scale our proven and tested (and continuously tested and refined) business and marketing strategies in order for us to stay in target with meeting our goal.

This grant would also enable me to offer one or two full-time positions to our seven-member core team members (though we have a total of 10 contractors, some for specialty projects) as well. 

I started black girls breathing in 2018. 

While working in NYC and experiencing high levels of stress related to my work, I found breathwork. The effects of actively and intentionally breathing and soothing my taxed nervous system would be a tool that supported me throughout my serial entrepreneurial journey. 

After receiving my breathwork training, I was inspired to bring this preventative tool back to my community. Knowing how Black women are 30-50% more likely to die from health challenges that have been linked back to chronic stress more than any other demographic, I saw the great opportunity in teaching techniques that would positively impact their mental and physical health that they could incorporate into their daily lives.

Heading into our third year, the individual stories that are shared by our community of how our work (and having free and low-cost access to this work) has changed their lives further inspires me and my team to get this work out to as many Black women as possible. Using our corporate, non-profit and start-up backgrounds to be a nimble and strategic organization, our vision to impact 1M Black women and girls by 2025 is one we know is attainable with proper funding.

Black women, who make up 13% population in the U.S., disproportionately deal with health inequities than any other group. And we're seeing similar issues of lack of access for this demographic globally.

90% of our community members stated they have health insurance, yet 28% stated that they had consistent access to mental health care support outside of black girls breathing (569 survey respondents). 

We can and must fill this gap.

We know Black women lack options when it comes to receiving mental health care that offers solutions to their specific mental health issues experienced. Whether they are under-insured, cannot afford out-of-pocket costs or limited options within their network of provider, etc. their needs are not being met. 

We currently host 2 virtual breathwork circles per month with 1 of those sessions featuring a licensed therapist. 

Breathwork is an active meditational tool that's used to activate the parasympathetic nervous system (the part of our nervous system whose job it is to kick in when anxiety and stress tax the body). Just like a muscle, consistent practice activating this part of our nervous system can rewire its response to future stressors and heal the effect of past emotional traumas. 

Differing from other solutions in the market, our work and resources are provided in real-time. Current organizations we see offering mental health care support to Black women for free or low-cost require an application process that could take up to six months.

We know the daily emotional challenges experienced by this demographic at work and home require more immediate care to prevent health challenges stemming from prolonged chronic stress.

The technological systems we will build out and with our facilitator program serving areas where our members reside, we will provide even more real-time solutions than we are currently.

We also have a research arm where we've been collecting data from this demographic on various topics. There also is a huge gap when it comes to available data on Black women that could aid in policy and programming change for insurance providers and having case studies for other potential solutions to be created. With our data reports, we are already presenting this statistically significant research to insurance providers and health organizations to impact more widespread change (beyond just our individual work). We are the only organization in the industry with a structure to handle this issue two-fold.

In each year of our existence, we've been able to grow our community, using case studies of our work's impact and effectiveness to continue scaling our efforts. Under Armour, Visa, and Athleta are corporations we've partnered with / received grant funding from in 2020. With those funds, we've further refined our marketing and development strategy; understanding the acquisition cost of reaching someone in our target demographic with our work and delving deeper into current gaps of access within the healthcare system. Given that knowledge, our approach to achieving our 1M goal include:

• scaling our virtual breathwork circles (able to reach large number of our target market at one time which also fosters a sense of community, a key benefit our audience says has helped them in their mental health journey)

• launching our breathwork facilitator program to scale number of available Black women practitioners

• expanding into new channels: schools, partner community organizations also serving our target market, insurance / healthcare providers and employee assistance programs

• key bgb host cities for in-person cities; using bgb breathwork facilitator program to host sessions in key markets

• develop black girls breathing app: further connect our offerings and real-time access to resources for daily preventative tools