Black Girl Ventures (BGV) Foundation

BGV’s entrepreneurs - or founders - are levers for wealth and job creation, but systemic racism blunts access to financial, social, and human resources. Still, Black/Brown woman-identifying founders persist, launching at rates higher than their non-minority peers. Now is the time to build entrepreneurial ecosystems shaped by the wants and needs of founders and their communities.

Our outside-in process - from grassroots to systemic change - will tap national and community stakeholders to create a Community Capacity Index, measuring the factors and conditions a community possesses or lacks to support entrepreneurs. The Index’s macro-alignment and micro-adaptability will enhance our impact, guide our growth, and build the national movement BGV is leading. 

Groups like the Kauffman Foundation have laid out overarching components of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. BGV will expand those components, but more importantly get to the root of founder experiences, self-identity, and needs.

The combined result will include the people, resources, access points, stories, and culture, while also determining other needs that must be met in order for Black/Brown women entrepreneurs to thrive. For example, over the past two years of the pandemic and social unrest, many of our current founders identified mental health as the greatest barrier to professional growth. In response, BGV created social support systems and access to medical professionals. While some components remain consistent - such as equitable capital - some will change as founder businesses grow and evolve. It is the Index, a baseline from which to measure, that will guide our growth and programming.

Black/Brown woman-identifying entrepreneurs lack:

• Access to capital: the median seed round for Black women is $125,000 and for Latinas is $200,000. The national median is $2.5MM .

• Access to networks: white founders in the US have access to $142K while Black founders have access to merely $11K from personal networks, often referred to as the “friends and family round,” and a common source of start-up capital.

• Mentors and educational resources.

This inequity at the launch stage continues throughout the lifetime of the business. In 2014, minority-owned businesses averaged $67,800 in revenue; by 2020 the average had dropped to $64,900. For comparison, non-minority women-owned businesses averaged $198,500 in 2014 and had jumped to an average of nearly $220,000 by 2020. Beyond the impact on entrepreneur women of color, this disparity has an enormous impact on the U.S. economy. Four million new jobs and $981 billion in revenue would be added if the average revenue of minority women-owned businesses even matched only that of white women-owned firms. Finally, the disparity widens the wealth gap. Women as a whole own 32 cents on the dollar compared to men. Black and Brown women own less than a penny on the dollar compared to white men.

We know the what, how, and some of the why. We know that COVID-19 has exacerbated the challenges. But there are gaps in the research, and nuances to the solutions. BGV’s Index will help fill the gaps.

BGV’s programming as a whole addresses all five priority areas of the Challenge. We provide social, human, and financial capital through pitch competitions and grant programs; community through BGV Connect, including mentorship, support groups, and resources; and capacity building, through education, boot camps/workshops, the BGV JetPack curriculum, and hiring assistance. The Community Capacity Index will specifically connect small business owners with community networks that can help improve coordination, collaboration, and knowledge sharing through the development, implementation, and dissemination during the first iteration of the Index. 

Furthermore, the Index will be a necessary first step for BGV and other champions to advocate for and shape policy that removes structural barriers, and increases access to resources and infrastructure. While BGV’s mission supports individual entrepreneurs, their families, and their communities, we know that working for systemic change is equally as important to make a lasting impact. The Index will continuously provide data to support the push for changes in policies - especially at the local level - and for advocates to promote Black/Brown women entrepreneurs in the private and public sectors.

Likewise, BGV is preparing college-aged students for entrepreneurship through our partnership with the NBA Foundation and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). These Student Visionaries are connected to the BGV Community including more established founders, their investors, and mentors across sectors. The Index will partially focus on this section of the population to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurial champions both in the market and the halls of government.

Key demographics of BGV founders include:

• 97% of participants identify as Black or African American;

• 2% of participants identify as Latina/X;

• 1% of participants identify as Asian or Pacific Islander;

• 100% of participants identify as women;

• 98 % are between the ages of 25- and 44-years-old;

• 2 % are between the ages of 16- and 24-years-old; and

• 60% make under $50K annually when launching their businesses.

All founders who engage in BGV Pitch Programming must also meet the following requirements.

• Participants must have an operating business that generates revenue not to exceed $1,000,000.

• Businesses must be 51% owned by a founder that identifies as a Black/Brown woman.

• Businesses must be past the ideation stage (a fully developed idea with customers or ready for customers).

There are market vulnerabilities that have kept our participants from achieving the same financial success as their white, male entrepreneurial counterparts. Adding the systemic racism and burgeoning wage gap, these market vulnerabilities prevent Black/Brown women from succeeding at rates similar to their white counterparts. 

The Community Capacity Index will continue to better understand their needs and address them on an ongoing basis. This especially is important during unprecedented, universal obstacles such as the pandemic or economic downturns, as well as more targeted but no less important challenges such as regional unrest or changes in technology.

Finally, we are defined and our progress is built around women's’ voices, ideas, challenges, and inspirations. To embrace our founders’ needs holistically, we understand that it will take multiple solutions addressing multiple problems facing founders to create lasting change. Therefore BGV seeks to address the founder, the community/ecosystem, and the national, systemic gender inequities and racial challenges simultaneously.

Listed: North Carolina (Durham), Maryland (Baltimore), Georgia (Atlanta), Florida (Miami), Alabama (Birmingham), Texas (Houston and Austin), Ohio (Cincinnati), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Washington, D.C.

Not listed: Michigan (Detroit), California (Los Angeles)

Sustain. 

Black Girl Ventures’ (BGV) mission is to provide Black/Brown woman-identifying founders with access to community, capital, and capacity-building to meet business milestones that lead to economic advancement through entrepreneurship. BGV scales tech-enabled, revenue-generating businesses under $1MM to create racial and gender equity, and promote an inclusive free market ecosystem.

Our country was built by entrepreneurs overcoming barriers with ideas that push progress and prosperity. Yet, entrepreneurial opportunities remain elusive for women and founders-of-color. Black/Brown women founders are underrepresented, underserved, and unbanked. We exist to change that paradigm.

Our Community Capacity Index project is linear: assess community environments, build partnerships, determine best solutions for the market, implement and track those solutions while ecosystem building, and elevate BGV founders and their communities through entrepreneurship, increasing equity and investment. 

It addresses elements that are known but absent from current research on Black and Brown woman-identifying founders: how a market’s ecosystem promotes inequity and creates high-barrier access for Black/Brown women entrepreneurs; what non-economic factors prevent founders from succeeding; do regional challenges exist and, if so, how do we address them. Unpacking unexplored data, analyzing the “why,” and measuring the answers is at the heart of the Index.

Our Index will be transparent, instructional, and racially pedagogic. Market indicators will inform Black/Brown woman-identifying entrepreneurs - quantitatively and anecdotally - the challenges and opportunities within their communities; then BGV can better map their paths forward. It will also be able to draw from solutions learned from BGV’s national constellation of communities, while remaining hyper-local and specific to the strengths and weaknesses of that particular community. For that market’s public officials, business leaders, investors, and community leaders, the realities of their city will be laid bare spurring dialogue, policy, investment, and social change. BGV will be there too with our own deployment of resources and talent to ensure action, building of a more equitable ecosystem, and support and community for founders.

The Index will give BGV the information to scale in the most needed markets. Each solution crafted using the Index will form an expanding, shareable library of knowledge and ideas which will inform and enhance how we support a new community, deploying our services in intensity and sequencing that address the greatest needs quickly and effectively. 

The Index will then chart localized progress as we monitor and target elements that linger even with BGV interventions as well as policy and investment improvements. By creating a vibrant community and expanding capital, capacity, and networks, more founders will grow their businesses, hire more people from the community, and provide needed services and products.

In 2021, BGV directly funded and supported 148 small business owned by Black/Brown women. An additional 4,400 small businesses were served through access to social capital and training. We have currently served 96 small businesses in 2022 and are on course to exceed our 2021 numbers by year end. If the trend continues, we’ll be directly supporting 400 founders and serving nearly 11,000 small businesses over the next five (5) years.

The Communities we serve are both physical, such as the Black and Brown neighborhoods of Atlanta, GA; Houston, TX; and Los Angeles, CA. Likewise, our Community is digital, made up of our Black/Brown founders (including our alumni), our programmatic and funding partners, our mentors, and volunteers. Because our solution is to benefit Black/Brown women across communities, it will be Black/Brown women who guide the design, implementation, and dissemination of the Index.

Partnerships, especially at the corporate level, are key stakeholders in our work. That includes using the resources provided to fuel our programming and support founders. But the ability to elevate the conversation about BGV founders, providing on-ramps to more capital and customers, as well as diversifying the supply chain, are all enhanced with rich relationships from within the corporate sector.

Our place-based solutions are not always physical, although the Community Capacity Index aims to address regional challenges faced by our Black/Brown women founders. For instance, the challenges faced by our founders in Birmingham, AL (e.g., racial poverty gaps and low Black home ownership) are and will be quite different from those faced by our founders in New York City (e.g., high cost-of-living). Despite regional differences, we anticipate, based on our experience with founders over the last six (6) years, that many of the challenges - as well as the opportunities - will supersede regional boundaries. Again, mental health was a universal concern for all founders starting in 2020 with the onset of the pandemic and the social unrest caused by the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd (among others). Likewise, Black/Brown women hold a cultural significance within families and communities and that “place” must be addressed when developing and analyzing the data collected for the Community Capacity Index.

At BGV, proximate leadership means we are who we serve. Our board, staff, and partners are primarily Black/Brown women. BGV was founded by Shelly Omilâdè Bell, a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist, who understands the dual needs of our founders as Black/Brown women and as entrepreneurs. The BGV team is guided by the insights and experiences of Omilâdè as well as the entire team’s connection to our COMMUNITY. 

BGV Fellows are recruited, selected, trained and then deployed as long-standing members of the community for which they will serve. They already have substantial connections, relationships, community understanding, and passion for their home. These are beneficial for the fellowship period as well as for the long run. Fellow graduates are now even more connected to their community, with greater skills and deeper relationships to continue their ecosystem-building work, founder support, and advocacy. It’s a direct investment in individual communities. Equally important, Fellows do not horde their knowledge, but share it with the founders they are recruiting and supporting. They work to create an “each one, teach one” model for growing the long-term entrepreneurial knowledge and sustainability of underrepresented founders by cultivating local leadership. The challenges, relationships, opportunities, and localized work in each community are distinct. Another reason that Fellows are from the community, for the community. 

BGV’s staff, board, and investors are passion-connected to the work as they often come from the same communities, experiencing the same barriers and inequities as our founders. As all of these pieces of the BGV community herald from all over the country, we learn from all of their perspectives and life experiences. In fact, BGV intentionally celebrates that not all Black/Brown experiences are the same - whether that be a board member or recently welcomed founder. Each adds to the dialogue and evolution of our programming. This core principle is extended to the Index itself - data collected is more than checked boxes, but collecting, combining, and elevating the spectrum of experiences to reveal a market’s landscape for BGV founders.

BGV is built on racial equity. By working with Black/Brown woman-identifying founders - and growing supportive communities - we address their needs to combat systemic racism and inequity. The Index uses comprehensive data to point to inequity with precision. By engaging civil servants and business leaders, we elevate the systemic racial realities and work together on solutions. We democratize entrepreneurship. By creating space for crowd-sourced investments, we advance BGV-supported businesses and elevate our founders. 

BGV engages communities as they exist, while strengthening supportive elements within the communities. The most critical voices are the BGV founders who guide our programming through flash feedback, ongoing dialogue, and data on scalability and ongoing needs, core to advancing our mission and enhancing our programming. The potential of the Index is to provide a more comprehensive, a more nuanced, and a deeper understanding of founders and their communities, from small start-ups to local policies. 

Success for BGV is defined in three distinct ways.

1. Successfully designing and launching the Community Capacity Index. Building a platform where we can efficiently and continuously collect information from current and new communities, refine and improve the results, and use the Index to make systemic change at the local, state, and national levels.

2. Quantitative success through the number of founders funded, communities engaged, money raised, and women served. Success in the number of partnerships and markets. 

3. Incremental success in democratizing entrepreneurship. Continuing to allow communities to vote with their dollars and to grow those dollars and the number of people giving them. Providing jobs in Black/Brown woman-identifying owned businesses. 

It is through this continued growth and impact at the grassroots level that BGV will make systemic changes with the Index.

In five years, our goals include:

1. The continuation of the Index with updated data and dashboards. The Index will reach at least 100,000 Black/Brown business owners through BGV programming, and will be used by local governments, academia, and the private sector to understand Black/Brown woman-owned businesses.

2. Directly supporting 400 founders through funding and an additional 11,000 through our training/workshops, events, and community platforms. 

3. Raising $30,000,000 investment dollars to flow to founder businesses and communities. These dollars will help create thousands of jobs and elevate 150,000 families, growing multi-generational wealth.  Founder dollars will circulate within and uplift Black and Brown neighborhoods nationwide.

BGV is who we serve. Our team - board, staff, and partners - is led and consists primarily of Black/Brown women. The vast majority of our funders and investors also are people-of-color. BGV was founded by Shelly Omilâdè Bell, a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist, who understands both the needs of our founders and how to leverage technology and networks to create systems that connect entrepreneurs to resources and to each other. She founded BGV after she was unable to properly fund one of her own start-ups and realized the importance of networks for the entrepreneurial community. She has assembled a team of highly-skilled, passionate professionals.

We are defined and our progress is built around our founders’ voices, ideas, challenges, and inspirations. If a program doesn’t meet their needs, an open dialogue with our founders allows us to adjust until it works or we end it. We are not in love with our programs more than their impact in the community.  

Likewise, BGV is partner-centric. We engage with other nonprofit organizations such as SEED Spot, research organizations such as Aspen Institute, and corporate partners such as Nike, Experian, and Truist. We are set up to engage those experts outside of the BGV wheelhouse and yet have the leadership chops and trust from our Communities to oversee and successfully launch a project such as the Community Capacity Index.

BGV is applying to the Inspire Awards because we believe in the work that we do and the impact that it has had for our Communities, and because we see the need for something like the Community Capacity Index, a project that we've been ideating for the last 12 months. 

A partnership with Truist Foundation and MIT Solve would be beneficial in a number of ways, most notably:

1. Access to additional resource partners, mentors, and coaches not only for the BGV team but for our founders.

2. Learning and development modules aimed at refining business model, theory of change, and plans for scaling as we sophisticate and expand to even more Communities. 

3. A monitoring and evaluation track to not only strengthen BGV programming but to make the Community Capacity Index more comprehensive and impactful for Black/Brown communities, and the allies who support them.

4. Brand expansion by participating in flagship events, build peer networks, and the Retreat.

As discussed, our financial backers have done far more than cut checks. They are, at times, the backbone of much of our programming and inspirations themselves on what our founders can become.

Because of the nature of the project, Monitoring and Evaluation is our foremost need from partners. We are in discussions with Aspen Institute’s Urban Innovation Team to help with research, data collection, and analysis, but any other expertise would be welcome. Since this is an ongoing project, additional partners are key to not only its initial success but also its sustainability. 

Likewise, we want to ensure that the Index is disseminated across the country, especially to those Communities that are most in need of entrepreneurial support. Public relations assistance will be key in realizing our goal for 100,000 Black/Brown women founders to access and leverage the Index to launch or sustain their own small businesses. It also will be instrumental in reaching local policy-makers to help dismantle the systems that have prevented Black/Brown women from achieving their full entrepreneurial potential. 

For this project, research institutions are key partners to its success. We currently are in discussions with Aspen Institute’s Urban Innovations Team to play that role. Likewise, we will need developers and UX designers to help design and launch an interactive dashboard for the data to live and be accessed and used nationwide. BGV has many of these latter partners on our “bench” who have helped us develop other proprietary platforms such as Raisify and our Supplier Diversity Pipeline.

Finally, BGV always is interested in partnering with professionals who can act as mentors to our founders as well as provide “wraparound” support such as, as mentioned earlier, mental health offerings. And, as discussed, many of these mentors and  experts have come from our corporate partners, who have judged Pitch Programs, joined a Customer Discovery Blitz, or just provided 1:1 time with a Black/Brown woman founder.