Paving Success Pathway for Black Womens

In an effort to increase diversity and inclusion within the global innovation ecosystem, we elevate and empower women esoecially black female leaders toward financial success and idea conception to business implementation and towards investment. Our project/business solution advances women from aspiration to investment.

The Majority of startup media platforms, conferences, incubators, accelerators and other venture programs lack diversity and cultural competency. Investors and firms are unable to support the early stage financing needs of black female due to high transaction costs and limited deal flow. Most diversity-focused groups and programs do not offer a pipeline to investment; rather they focus solely on networking and business remediation. Our solution is aimed to provide awareness, promotion, support and resources for Black women financially sustainable startups. 

Many black women entrepreneurs are facing a double bias due to both their race and gender. This in turn creates difficulties when it comes to obtaining funding, reaching out to network and potential partners. Networking events attended by very few women of color, if any, can also deter their them from making the right connections. It’s precisely the lack of access to these networks, as well as not having the right tools and resources to navigate them, that can prevent perfectly viable businesses from surviving.

Many women of color are often striving alone in industries and businesses dominated by men. As such, they are often talked down to, and have to constantly prove their worth and qualifications. 

Different research confirms that investors actually prefer entrepreneurial pitches by attractive men. Black Women entrepreneurs get offered smaller loans across every product, from the same groups. Another factor that slows growth: a lack of educational resources and mentors to help black women entrepreneurs ramp up their business knowledge is also a pressing factor which slow down the growth of black female entrepreneurs. 

We aim for the following solutions..

• We want a black women to feel for themselves as "Be yourself, and have confidence in who you are". Therefore we will work on building the capacity of black entrepreneur, providing educational resources and mentorship to help black women entrepreneurs ramp up their business knowledge.
• Because the black women looking for business investors should build confidence through a great team and business plan, therefore we envision to work with key champions among black women and improve their business ethics and ultimately to become strong founders. If they have experts on their founding team that can execute the business well, investors will have confidence in their business. 
• Get more female investors to support one another, we will help in building a network of female owned businesses and create enabling environment for black women to run their entrepreneurship initiatives. 

• Help these black women in finding the safety nets and best insurance support which can secure their financial assets and as well as give them confidence to maintain sustainability in investments and finances. 

Most black women young leader have wonderful ideas and initiatives but lack access toward the investment and venture capitalist due to their minority status, gender biased and lack of confidence.

This business/project is intended to serve marginalized population especially targeting black women entrepreneurs inclusively who are facing challenges in the way of their entrepreneurship journey . This solution will help them first of all to develop their capacity to learn basic business and entrepreneurial ethics, provide them the relevant knowledge resources, link them to the safety nets to insure safety for their investments and financial assets, connect them to the network of interested venture capitalist and firms especially female owned businesses and ultimately help them to run successfully their business and initiatives.

 Most startup media platforms, conferences, incubators, accelerators and other venture programs lack diversity and cultural competency. Most diversity-focused groups and programs do not offer a pipeline to investment.

The highest affected in youth are Black Female Founders. There is no full support for them to find the proper way to startup their initiative, find the relevant network and how they can secure and ensure safety to get financial sustainability. 

Our proposed solution is proposing to enable these black women to know the way, show the way and go the way toward business success and financial independence.

We are currently less than 50 people including our volunteers.  Since the organisation is small, therefore we are outsourcing most of work to online experts and freelancers. Once we have resources to pay, we will bring more people to our team. 

We have established established a sense of belonging for everyone within our organisation. We believe that for each individual to bring their best self forward, a sense of belonging must first be established.

We believe this world is shared village and every person has god gifted uniqueness and strength and it include no boundary for color, creed and culture. We celebrate the diversity. 

One of our core value is to ensure every individual must see and understand their role in organisation culture. By this, we mean, identifying differences in employee experience and values across the organization so that change can be made relevant for each person and knowing that lasting change must activate different parts of the system — top down, bottom up, and middle out — in different ways.

Our Solution is different and innovative. Our organisation is designed to increase the diversity, help every human being we can reach and develop them personally and professionally. Our unique identity is to work with women especially black female leader and our unique approach is "helping black women help themselves. Under our professional development porgram of our organisation, we are intended to provide critical industry knowledge, mentorship, and business development tools to help fledgling startups succeed especially black female leaders. 

Hope, Love, and Dream, Inc.is created by black female leader who is also a successful black female entrepreneurs with experience in support system development, individual self-help/self development, mental health and extensive experience providing individual, couple, families in different issues they are facing within community. As being leaded by a black female leader, ee understand the cultural issues facing black women founders.

We will work on technology is in the form of a digital engagement platform, online knowledge base e-libraries etc. We are planning to scale to using AI in the near future to maintain a larger scale of customers and beneficiaries much more efficiently. We will later focus on the IT solutions to assist in maintaining compliance at a much deeper and efficient level for all beneficiaries of our organisation and programs.

We are intended to work on technology that will pave a digital platform for black female entrepreneurs to digitally engaged for learning opportunities, connecting with their networks, reach to their capital investors and as well to nurture their entrepreneurial skills. This technology will also help in external communication and marketing the skills of these black female entrepreneurs and showcasing the innovations and ideas.  

Artificial Intelligence is taking a high and digital engagement become a high demand for such initiatives nowadays. In addition COVID-19 will change the whole business working styles and lifestyle of office environment because of social distancing most of the business are going virtual and online. Therefore this digital and social media platform, e-learning and prototypes apps will be pioneer for such type of initiatives and projects. 

Goal/Impact: To create enabling environment where the rights of black female founders are protected and the can become innovative entrepreneurs to serve the community and to boost the contribute in boosting the country's economy. 

Purpose/Outcome: To pave the way way for black female entrepreneurs to build their capacity, support them in finding the right networks, exploring investment opportunities and connect them to the relevant safety nets and insurance to secure their finances. 

Results/Outputs

Black female entrepreneurs have built their confidence through secured and insured their investments and financial assets and start their way toward financial independence.

Black female entrepreneurs received the relevant trainings, education resources and awareness session to build their business development capacity and start up their initiatives. 

Black female entrepreneurs are connected to the network of investment firms and venture capitalist to showcase their initiatives and find the investments.

We are planning to serve 60,000 people within our next year. Within 5 years we are planning to triple the amount served at 180,000.  (These are modest estimates)

Our long term goal is to empower and work with families and individuals impacted by incarceration to develop a successful future through individual, couple, and family therapy, personal development, and professional development. By assisting those affected by incarceration, we aim to serve, build, and strengthen’ individuals, families and communities by improving social bonds.

 COVID-19 and some unrest due to recent ethnic conflict are among the upcoming burning barriers.

Financing such initiative is a barriers since we have started this business on small investment. We have great ideas, initiatives and potentials but biggest barrier so far is funding this initiative.

To overcome pandemic and ethnic crisis, we are engaging digitally and bringing most of our services virtual. At the same time we have started advocating for peace a different platform and advocating for gender equality. 

For financial challenge, we are optimistic to win this funding, prize and also have started grants and investment research to boost up the financial resources. 

Most of our team members has worked on different initiatives. Since things were not very structural before as compared to today we are, and now due to the developed result based management framework, we are going to evaluate the real outcome of our programs we have completed so far and those which are running especially those which are related to working with marginalized women in Ohio State. 

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We consider well positioned toward this solution because we are team of like minded person, mostly belong to same community, most of my team members are women and we as ourselves has passed through the same difficulties which a normal vulnerable women is passing especially a black female entrepreneurs through therefore we knows, what are the problem and what can be the best possible solution.

We are well connected to same type of organisation and at the soonest possible we are going to get in a strategic partnership, alliance and consortium.

The business model is developed from the understanding that re-entry s is one of the main routes to a lot of our social ills in the at-risk communities. There is a growing need for quality education, Community Services and Behavioral Health, empowerment and mentoring services through a well-structured and easily practicable measures; and there exists a substantial opportunity to cater for these needs, adopting innovative concept.

Our nonprofit business model is on a belief which is "to empower and work with families and individuals impacted by incarceration to develop a successful future through individual, couple, and family therapy, personal development, and professional development. By assisting those affected by incarceration, we aim to serve, build, and strengthen’ individuals, families and communities by improving social bonds."

Our path to financial sustainability involves billing Medicaid/Medicaid and private insurance companies for individual, couples, family, and group therapy services.  We also plan to charge fee-based services for our consultation services to federal, state, county, city, and private correctional facilities on enhancing family engagement services.  We will also offer Forensic Evaluation services as a fee-based service as well.  This will help sustain the organization as well as the other program areas of personal development and professional development services.  We also plan to offer fundraiser, identify investors, apply for grants, and solicit donations.

We are fundraising from individual donors, fundraising events, government contracts, institutional funding etc but it is very limited as for this year it is only reached to 100,000 USD. 

We need almost three fold of this amount to reach the programs we are targeted and this why we are reaching to different funders and donors to fund our initiatives. We have now started strong resources mobilisation and we are confident, we will reach soon to our financial sustainability. 

As earlier mentioned, we are fundraising from individual donors, fundraising events, government contracts, institutional funding etc but it is very limited as for this year it is only reached to 100,000 USD. 

At this time, we have begun to raise funds by selling Black Lives Matter signs.  We also have plans to sale T-Shirts to help generate revenue.  Our board of directors are also contributed to the revenue of the organization.

We are reaching to different funders and donors to fund our initiatives. We have now started strong resources mobilisation and we are confident, we will reach soon to our financial sustainability. We are targeting to raise 300,000 USD by next year. 

Our budget (including the program and operational cost) forecasted for next year will be in between 250,000 USD to 300,000. The major percentage (almost 85%) will go to program cost as we are decreasing time to time our administrative expenses.

We believe Reimagining Pathways to Employment in the US Challenge is the best and fit platform and challenge prize to bring this solution because no other platform will understand better the issues of marginalized young and black female entrepreneurs, other than solve. This fund will enable us to seed this initiative project and enable to serve the black female leaders. 

We are intended to expand our partnership network where other partner, who have the same shared goals should come together, share resources and provide expertise we lack and as well provide financial support and assistance.

We would like to partner with the following organizations (this is not a fully encompassed list):

•  Birthright Africa organization https://birthrightafrica.org/
• National Council for Behavioral Health https://www.TheNationalCouncil.org
• https://www.Homelessfamiliesfoundationorg 
• Affordable Housing Trust for Columbus and Franklin County https://www.hztrust.org

We have almost the same shared goals and I am confident they can help us in our initiative in technical and also possibly in financial terms.