Promoting Black Leadership Through Entrepreneurship
By Keisha Simms
This year, we decided to dedicate Black History Month by supporting the Black history makers of the future. As part of the Community Research Programme, we organised an event and design series called Promoting Black Leadership Through Entrepreneurship. If you are not already familiar, you can find out more about the Community Research Programme through some of our previous blogs and case studies.
This five-week programme set out to support the amazing team of researchers involved in the Community Research Programme by providing a space to share knowledge, ask critical questions and co-design for the future. By the end of the programme, our hope was that those who attended the sessions would be in a better position to run or start their own business.
We saw this programme as a real opportunity to share knowledge within the team, so we held a variety of themed discussions from ‘How to Pitch Your Idea’ to ‘Crowdfunding 101’. During these sessions, we had an obligation to ensure that each session was grounded in reality; particularly the realities for budding Black entrepreneurs. For example, when pitching an idea, how do you, as a Black entrepreneur, address assumptions an investor has made about your ability before you even start talking? Although we did not have a definitive answer to this question (and others of a similar nature), we were able to openly share our perspectives based on our own experiences and cultures.
One of our most action-oriented sessions, facilitated by Giles Piercy, Founder of Locality Matters, was ‘Tips and Tricks for Setting Up and Staying Open’. During this session, we explored that what we needed was to establish a business forum among the Community Research team where there is already a wealth of business knowledge and experience.
Off the back of this session, we are now co-designing a Business Forum as part of the Community Research Programme. Our first design session was an interactive workshop in which we:
Explored the different types of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial organisations that exist. For the types of entrepreneurs, we particularly focussed on the characteristics of Creators, Builders and Operators (although there are many more).
Mapped what each researcher would want to contribute and gain from the business forum.
Outlined how the business forum would operate in practice, from the frequency of meetings to the type of session facilitator.
Initially, the forum will focus on supporting the Community Researchers, but our vision is that the forum will expand beyond this group. We want to create a space that supports promising entrepreneurs from communities that traditionally lack access to information, resources and advocates.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, our biggest realisation from the first four weeks over this series was recognising the expertise that we already have sitting around the table within the Community Research team. While there is always value in hearing the experiences and advice of others, we also need to constantly ask ourselves how we can create the space to harness the knowledge we already have and how can we provide the necessary support structures to promote individuals reaching their full potential. At the heart of our business forum (as with the Community Research Programme) will be the belief that we already have all the answers and solutions we need – we can stop looking to others to tell us.
The final event in our Black History Month Programme was a panel discussion on Navigating a White Supremacist System as a Black Body Seeking Leadership, so stay tuned for our next blog. In the meantime, if you are interested in our business forum then please get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!
