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Show Overview:
Black-owned businesses need fuel to sustain, grow, and hire. If we support eliminating the Black wealth divide, we need to commit to buying from Black businesses. Our guest Kezia Williams, the founder of the Black UpStart, launched a new movement called “My Black Receipt” to promote buying from Black-owned businesses. She asks all communities (Black and Allies’ alike) to commit to showing support from Juneteenth through July 6, by buying from Black businesses and then uploading the receipt online. In this episode, we discuss how Kezia started The Black UpStart and My Black Receipt, and the importance of buying, creating and hiring in the Black-owned space.
About GFGF:
The Get Found Get Funded podcast is at the intersection of entrepreneurship and social justice where we focus on entrepreneurship as a possible path to wealth creation — specifically for Black and Latinx communities.
Featured Guest: Kezia Williams
Key Takeaways:
- There are 2.56 million black owned businesses but only a little over one hundred thousand of them have the capacity to hire one or more employees.
- Black entrepreneurs are less likely to get business loans based on their lack of collateral due to historical disadvantages.
- Black entrepreneurs rarely start businesses that would help circulate the black dollar.
- Kezia created the Black Upstart after being recruited to create an entrepreneurship program for college students, where the adults we’re more interested in the program than the scholarship.
- Buying from a black-owned business has been mostly viewed as a form of punishment towards corporations.
Timestamps:
- 1:00 Introduction
- 04:51 The impact of economic growth and wealth for black America.
- 13:03 The impact of the Coronavirus.
- 18:03 Kezia’s passion.
- 26:30 The Black Upstart.
- 49:30 My Black Receipt launch.
- 54:31 Black and Mainstream Media
- 01:06:46 Corporations response to Black Lives Matter
- 01:09:51 Outro
Items Mentioned in the Show:
Quotes From The Show:
- 18.5 million black people in the workforce are looking for jobs, but black employers employ fewer than a million people.
- It’s imperative that we teach black people not just how to start a business but how to start a business that can create jobs so we don’t have to go begging for other people to do for us what we are capable of doing for ourselves.
- I think with business owners, we can have these grandiose visions, right? But we also have to realize with every grandiose vision, the entrepreneur use what they have, start where they are, and do what they can.
- Our 1.3 Trillion dollars of spending authority should not be a blank check for other communities to sign.
- PPP was set up for white male business owners to win.
- We know that in America black life was too cheap to some people
- I realized that the hand that was feeding me at that time also had the power to starve me at that time.
- We punish white corporations who make a mistake by buying black.
- For me, buying black should not be a punishment for white corporations but a practice that we employ every single day.
- This feels a lot like Black Wall Street because we’re all in this together.
- We thought a Yelp endorsement would dilute the impact of it.
