MEBO Society by With Distinction Foundation

Our funding from the Elevate Prize will be dedicated to :

1) Building out our With Distinction Foundation team and hiring so we can focus on scaling our accelerator and creating additional/supporting our existing successful programs. 

2) Technology: 

- Finishing out our digital platform and  building out our app in order to provide a safe space for our growing community  

- Building our data automation portal so we can churn out our community & member reports/studies more efficiently 

3) Educational resources : curriculum creation, speaker fees, workshop hosts in order to continue providing our enriching content and experiences for our members & founders

4) Our office space: establishing a space where our members can cowork and create community in person - safely

My vision for With Distinction Foundation is for us to ultimately serve as a premiere source to accelerate, support and promote Black & POC entrepreneurs with early-to-mid staged companies. We are on a mission to catalyze and increase enterprising organizations led by diverse founders and teams building world changing solutions by providing capital access and support to companies that can capitalize on our support to scale their business. My goal is to have With Distinction Foundation and our programs like MEBO Society provide 1) ACCESS: Increase ease of business entry and serve as a premier small & minority business first stop & pipeline resource  ; 2) FUNDING: Provide direct funding or business growth opportunities from partners, our our own funding & grant sources ; 3) DATA: Provide annual progress & impact report that becomes the go-to source for minority SMB in Northeast US & beyond 4) COMMUNITY: Create and foster unparalleled safe community of collaboration, creativity and connection. The vision for myself is to live a life of ease and service and enabling, harnessing and providing opportunities for Black and minority women and men to follow their entrepreneurial dreams and launch and maintain equitable businesses. 

With Distinction Foundation, a CT-based 501c3 founded in 2016. We’re focused on global education, providing financial resources and harnessing professional & personal community for Black, latinx & POC entrepreneurs and professionals.  

Our goals are to increase the ease of access to funding, resources and data to lend to the storytelling of disenfranchised and underrepresented founders a nd professionals. 

One of our more successful programs we've been running since 2018 is  MEBO Society ( Minority Entrepreneurs and Business Owners) - created to help encourage increased economic power to Black & POC  entrepreneurs through our custom programming (educational webinars, events, custom campaigns), supportive community (MEBO Society app + digital platforms), dynamic resources (MEBO Society Accelerator, MEBO Society Grant), and our expansive MEBO Society network (includes our partners & advisors with investment value over over $1B).  Our goal is to dismantle the statistic that 8 out of 10 of Black owned businesses fail after the first 18 months by providing the resources to go from SMB - enterprise through our nuanced curriculum built to address the issues as POC and womxn founders.

We have a disruptive approach by focusing on business that purposely target  POC consumers ( especially in international markets) and are in scaling mode. We offer entrepreneurship education program, serving tech driven or tech enabled startup founders and their teams through mentorship, specialized curriculums, and for those companies chosen-- non dilutive capital investment. Our program enables founders to completely reevaluate product, sales/marketing, and growth strategies, prepare for investment pitches and connect them to our network of partners. We differentiate ourselves by offering one of the only programs for underrepresented founders  focused on expounding on the business fundamentals coupled with a trained focus on scaling our  small business into medium (100+ employees) and ultimately enterprise (global, 1K+) companies. We are focused on helping to take our small businesses to these next levels by addressing prominent issues faced by POC business owners. Our nuanced scale-focused curriculum includes topics such as:

• Building global company with POC audience demo

• Succession planning + Defining Business Success
  

• Creative Funding

• Team Building & Development: Building World-class Diverse & Distributed Teams

• Demystifying DEI: Past The Black Square

• Allyship & Sisterhood in Business

• Wellness for a POC Founders

and more.

With Distinction Foundation's success is building an ecosystem that serves as a pipeline for business progression for severely marginalized, underfunded and underrepresented groups. We provide an ecosystem of connectivity through our technology, our educational programming and a network which leads to the end goal of creating jobs, scaling global businesses and providing economic power to minority entrepreneurs and business owners who ultimately want to build global business created in, supported by and are thriving .