Oakland Black Business Fund

I'm applying for the elevate prize to further our mission of championing Economic Justice for Black communities across the United States. 

Oakland Black Business Fund addresses historical economic injustices for Black communities and Black communities by providing direct access to capital and technical for Black businesses that play a critical role in sustaining general wealth creation for Black communities. 

If selected as a winner, we would use the Elevate Prize funding to distribute capital to Black businesses in Oakland and establish additional tailored technical assistance programs lead by talented Black small business owners in Oakland. 

We have currently raised $450K towards or current milestone of $1 Million dollars to serve 250 Black businesses in Oakland. We would use the Elevate Prize funding to help close our remaining $550K funding gap so that we can focus more of our efforts on running and refining the program instead of constantly fundraising for to further our progress. 

Elevate's support will ideally help us to optimize our operational workflows, establish networks with other innovative leaders, and amplify our mission to a much broader network as we prepare to replicate our model to other cities across the United States. 

I'm an award winning artist, entrepreneur, and investor born and raised in Oalkand, California. I am the Founder of Oakstop; a Black owned and operated business that uses commercial real estate as a platform for economic development and community empowerment by providing workspace, meeting/event space, and creative space for entrepreneurs and communities of color. 

As part of my work with Oakstop, I co-founded the Oakland Black Business Fund, a grantmaking initiative focused on empowering black businesses with capital, technical assistance, and growth strategy. The platform includes a technical assistance program focused on paying Black technical assistance providers to support Black fund recipients. 

I was named Executive of the Year (2020) by the San Francisco Business Times for my work with Oakstop and Oakland Black Business Fund, particularly for my commitment to serving and uplifting the community during COVID-19. Oakstop received the Small Business of the Year Award (2020) from State Assemblymember Rob Bonta for its consistent track record for serving community and local nonprofits with affordable culturally competent space. 

I graduated from University of Pennsylvania, after studying Business, Communications, and Design. Creativity has always been my passion and I infuse into everything I do to serve my community. 

Oakland Black Business Fund is a Black-led grantmaking initiative, providing capital, technical assistance, and growth strategy to Black businesses in Oakland, California.

The initiative was incited by disproportionate rates of closure for Black businesses during COVID-19, further exacerbating vulnerabilities caused by the historical lack of access to capital for Black communities. Our goals are 1) to establish economic resilience for Black businesses and 2) to position these businesses to receive ongoing government, private, or institutional funding. By focusing on Oakland, we aim to strengthen the local economy through the revitalization of Black owned businesses.

Our unique approach to technical assistance builds relationships between Black businesses by pairing them with Black technical assistance providers, who add value to these businesses while earning income from our grant funding. The technical assistance providers, who are also local entrepreneurs, often apply for our grants to further stabilize their businesses. The initiative therefore fosters a sustainable ecosystem of Black businesses.

Since June 2020, we raised $450K from 1,800+ donors and deployed $265K to 80 businesses across 35 Oakland neighborhoods. We plan to raise a total of $1M to serve 250 Black businesses in Oakland before scaling the model to other cities across the country. 

The innovative aspects of our work lie in our focus on using non-repayable capital to facilitate business growth and in our peer-to-peer technical assistance model.

Our peer-to-peer approach to technical assistance is built around our ability to connect Black small businesses with Black service providers in their local business ecosystem to keep resources within the community and encourage true economic growth. 

The unique and disruptive aspect is that we recognize the existing Black business owners as the best suited providers of technical assistance, given their lived experience as business owners and their ability to relate directly to the service population. Therefore, we pay those Black business owners to provide needed services to their peers. Typically, this dynamic is difficult to achieve without a program like ours, as the economic burden of paying for service would either fall on the recipient of services or on the business providing the services, often at a discount or for no fee at all. 

Via our technical assistance model, we’ve funded Oakland-based black accountants, bookkeepers, web developers, lawyers, electricians, photographers, public relations specialists, project managers, cleaning services, marketing consultants and office space lessors to deliver technical assistance to small businesses in their own communities.

Our next steps focus on leveraging our technical assistance ecosystem to position 250 Oakland businesses for increased resilience and access to capital.

As an organization dedicated to the mission of increasing access to capital for Black businesses, Oakland Black Business Fund is focused on creating and sustaining more Black businesses in Oakland that will ultimately create more jobs in the Black community, and in turn contribute to our larger local and national economy. According to a recent Brookings Institute study, Black businesses in America stand to generate an additional $5.9 Trillion per year if the proportion of Black businesses (2.2% of all businesses) was proportionate to the percentage of Black Americans in the country (14.2% of US population). That would secure economic justice for Black Americans and significantly increase our country’s gross domestic product. 

We infuse this vision into our work, with a focus on perfecting our model in Oakland for cultivating prosperous Black business ecosystems, with the intention of replicating it to other cities throughout the country. Replicating this model to other cities facilitates a vision for economic justice focused on increasing the number of Black businesses in America by 650% to be proportionate with America’s Black population.

Oakland Black Business Fund currently serves 105 Black businesses in Oakland after less than twelve months of operation. Our funding application is simple and fast (5-10 questions, 15min total) to make the application as accessible as possible. Our eligibility criteria are simple: applicants must be a Black owned business and must be based in Oakland. We focus on distributing funds as broadly as possible (as opposed to targeting specific criteria) as part of our mission to cultivate a vast ecosystem of Black businesses in Oakland. 

In one Year, Oakland Black Business Fund anticipates serving 300 Black businesses, including our total number of businesses served in Oakland and at least 25 Black businesses in another city where can effectively replicate our model. We are already in talks with residents and representatives of other cities across the US (Richmond, CA Los Angeles CA, San Jose CA, Columbus OH, Richmond VA), who have asked us to replicate the model to their cities based on the strategic positioning of Black-led organizations to whom they are directly connected. 

We anticipate that replicating to other cities will spur further interest from other cities allowing us to serve even more Black businesses throughout the country. 

We measure progress by tracking data related to economic growth from the point of initial funding and on an ongoing basis as we continue supporting the businesses with technical assistance aimed at increasing economic resilience. We define resilience as the degree to which businesses are able remain open, remain in Oakland (given high costs of real estate), and retain or increase the number of jobs provided. We assess growth through tracking revenue data over time, # of customers served over time, and the business's ability to procure capital over time via government programs, financial institutions, or private investors. We use surveys as the primary form of data collection in addition to regular check-ins with the businesses (via phone or in-person) to get a more in-depth understanding of their progress in developing their product offerings, seizing new business development opportunities, or forming new partnerships within the Black business ecosystem.

Our technical assistance approach also allows us to effectively measure progress, because we define specific technical assistance projects with the business and assistance provider and then conduct exit surveys with each of them at the end of the project to assess the impact that the assistance will have on the business.

The barriers for our organization are mostly related to our ability to broaden our work in terms of # of businesses served and replicating the program to other cities. 

The two largest barriers in achieving this are 1) difficulty accessing larger funding sources ($100K+) and 2) limited staffing capacity for processing applications.

We plan to address our barrier to larger funding sources by hiring a dedicated development specialist to lead grant writing and major donor engagement. We currently have development volunteers with limited capacity and experience. We've identified a development specialist, who is one of our technical assistance providers. Hiring this candidate (another local Black professional), illustrates the value of our program's Black business network. 

We plan to address our barrier to application processing by hiring a dedicated employee to focus on responding to applicants and connecting them to technical assistance providers. Our Business Relations Lead currently manages the process, but a dedicated team member will expedite it. 

The Elevate Prize will help us overcome these barriers through additional funding (for distributing grants and hiring staff) and opening doors to a network that can connect us to better funding sources and organizations, who can support our replication to other cities. 

As an Elevate prize winner, we would leverage the platform and resources to share our story and impact after one year of creating a successful proof of concept. 

We would co-create story telling campaigns about our businesses and how our model has enabled their active participation in a local Black business ecosystem. Whenever our businesses are in the press, we immediately see a spike in donations. We experienced this recently when featured in a VentureBeat article that highlighted Sistah Sci-Fi, the first Black-owned online bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy. 

We would co-create campaigns about the unique impacts of our Black peer-to-peer technical assistance model and why it should replicate to other cities. We haven't publicly promoted the concept of replication, so a strategic media campaign about replication would engage a broader audience interested in bringing us to their cities and cultivate a fanbase that we could direct towards a related crowdfunding campaign. Additionally, we could crowdsource nominations for the first city for replication.

Ultimately, the timing of the Elevate Prize, one year after our launch, would provide meaningful validation with organizations outside of the Bay Area, which will be critical to our ongoing growth as we replicate. 

As an organization focused on economic justice for Black businesses, we're intent on having a Black leadership team as a racial equity measure, acknowledging that a number of organizations focused on funding for Black communities or minority owned businesses are not led by people who come from the constituent communities. Our leadership team is made up of two Black females and two Black males, all of which are based in Oakland. 

In addition to our core leadership team, we have a very diverse set of committee leaders (many of which are not Black), who we pulled from a pool of community activists who stepped forward with a desire to follow Black leadership working towards economic justice for Black communities. As a Black-led organization, we feel it's important embrace participation from non-Black team members as an opportunity to educate them on our perspective for how to best serve Black communities. 

As we bring on more team members, we will prioritize Black employees to ensure that the limited funds that we do have for staffing go towards stabilizing income for Black Oakland residents. We will also hire non-Black employees if they clearly demonstrate unique expertise and alignment with our values and goals. 

Our team is well positioned for solving the problem of economic injustice given our existing track record of supporting Black entrepreneurs in Oakland. 

We have backgrounds as entrepreneurs, investors, community activists, real estate developers, creatives, techies, and marketers. Skills in accounting/finance, business development, community development,  management, media, and project management have been critical to our success. 

My experiences as a Black Oakland native and entrepreneur have provided valuable insights into understanding the experiences of Black entrepreneurs. I built and scaled my business, Oakstop, over the course of 7+ years without any outside capital, experiencing the difficulties in accessing capital from traditional funders and the challenges of operating a business without the capital resources that my other non-Black counterparts relied on. Therefore, I understand the perspectives of the businesses we serve and am sensitive to how they view the idea of capitalizing their businesses. 

Through Oakstop, we provide resources and business support services to Black businesses through our coworking offerings and professional networks. As an existing convener of Black businesses, we cultivate an active ecosystem of business owners and service providers that have direct relevance to Oakland Black Business Fund's mission of solving the problem of economic injustice for Black businesses. 

Oakland Black Business Fund started with a large crowdfunding campaign that publicized our mission of distributing capital to Black businesses. After qucickly raising $100K+ in two weeks, we did not have paid staff to support the urgency of our mission. 

Our crowdfunding campaign also garnered offers from 125+ donors willing to volunteer, but we had not considered a structure for managing them. 

I saw this as an opportunity to build capacity and get valuable feedback on our approach. Every time I called a volunteer to pitch our vision and support needs, I listened for the parts that most inspired/motivated them, and then refined the pitch accordingly for the next call. 

After the first 10 calls, I trained two volunteers to call 10 more volunteers, and repeated the process until we reached 125+ 

With an engaged database of informed volunteers, I organized committees that met independently to work towards specific objectives. 

These committees helped us overcome many of our initial capacity challenges, and we have consistently restructured the volunteer program in response to volunteer feedback and shifting capacity issues. We have cultivated leaders within our volunteer base that remain committed to our success after seeing our commitment to managing their involvement. 

• East Bay Community Foundation: Inclusive Economy Showcase — The Inclusive Economy Showcase highlights entrepreneurs of color and community-based companies and organizations who are building and shaping an inclusive economy in our region.

• Bay Area Capital Connections: Invest In Community — The 12th annual Bay Area Capital Connections Conference highlighted existing and future models of economic and social change in the Bay Area, working towards an equitable, dignified, and vibrant economy for all.

The Invest In Community Panel addressed the fact that there is a disconnect between mainstream capital markets and the value of BIPOC businesses. While the financial industry has recently made strides toward funding parity, many community-based businesses of color are still left out. How can large-scale capital investment be balanced with a business to business approach so that funds aren’t lost? What is the role of community capital in local investment?

• Center for Transformative Action's UNFINISHED Conference: Keeping Oakland BIPOC, What Does It Take? — UNFINISHED features 60+ thought leaders that are evolving and disrupting systems in the pursuit of profound change in our nation. These unstoppable leaders from every background and sector have one thing in common, they are committed to creating a positive social impact in their lifetimes.

The Center for Transformative Action at Mills College (CTA) brings together students, thought and practice leaders, policymakers, and others to share ideas for building profitable, sustainable organizations and effective nonprofits to address social, racial, environmental, and policy problems. The CTA cultivates multi-sector collaborations and is an amplifier, convener, and partner for organizations and people that are actualizing social justice and equity.

• Valence Network: Building the Next Generation of Investors through Equity Crowdfunding — As equity crowdfunding is quickly staking its ground in venture capital, Marquesa Finch, Founder and CEO of Pyrium, and Trevor Parham, Founder and CEO of Oakstop and Co-Founder and General Partner at The Oakland Black Business Fund, discuss what equity crowdfunding means for developing more investors of color in the retail investing market. Moving into the era of the retail investor, more and more business financing will be backed by regular people. It is an opportunity for anyone who is interested in participating in the venture process to benefit off the success of high growth companies. In light of recent events like Robinhood’s explosive growth, Bitcoin’s popularity, and the now infamous GameStop short squeeze, it’s clear that we are at the dawn of the era of the retail investor.

As an Elevate Prize Winner, the funding will help us achieve our goals by closing our $550K gap towards our $1,000,000 funding milestone, which will then allow us to provider more in-depth services to our current grantees and allow us to reach our current goal of 250 businesses in Oakland. 

Furthermore, the funding will allow us to hire Development staff for ongoing fundraising and to expand our Applications team to increase our response rate and efficiency in processing new applications.  

We primarily partner with corporations interested in making a capital contribution to our work and providing services to our businesses. Our recent VentureBeat article further explains this approach.

• Target — Provided a grant of $100K for unrestricted use, and we have also partnered with them on the Target pro bono program, which is committed to providing robust capacity-building support to BIPOC-owned small businesses. Our grantees make up more than half of the businesses in Target's Oakland probgram.

• Community Bank of the Bay — Provided a grant of $20K and we also partnered with them on a media campaign to encourage more entrepreneurs of color to apply for PPP loans. The campaign 

• Square — Provided a grant of $5K and we also partner with them on providing point of sale systems to our businesses and program in which our businesses are able to sign up through us to receive free credit card processing on their Square transactions. 

• Xero — Provided a grant of $10K and we also partner with them on connecting our Black business owners to other local Black accountants who use Xero's software to build accounting infrastructure for their businesses.