CLLCTIVLY

CLLCTIVLY powers, connects, and bolsters Black-led social change leaders–those leading nonprofit organizations and small businesses–through its cloud-based platform, CONNECT.  Strengthening a new infrastructure for Black-led social change in Baltimore, Maryland, we provide six benefits to Black social change agents: trusted relationships, resource mobilization, community advocacy, capacity building, opportunities and partnerships, and a skills-share database. 

CONNECT presents social-change leaders with peers, community, and funders to forge trusted relationships. Through these connected networks, users gain access to grants and funders. Users are welcomed to use the existing network to advance policies that improve lives and strengthen the Greater Baltimore community. Building capacity through the network, Black social change leaders leverage and strengthen collective organizational capacity and impact by using the expertise and skillset of members. CONNECT also allows members to search and post opportunities for jobs or partnerships, and crowdsource help on challenges. Finally, CLLCTIVLY curates a database of knowledge and skills for members. 

We know that supporting proximate leaders who address community needs and entrepreneurs who create local businesses are critical components of building a community’s wealth. Although many residents in Greater Baltimore are community-focused and entrepreneurial, they usually encounter structural barriers that prevent their ideas to move from ideation to fruition. By connecting them to a platform that offers trusted relationships, resource mobilization, community advocacy, capacity building, opportunities and partnerships, and a skills-share database, CLLCTIVLY strengthens their ability to succeed.

Black communities across the U.S have disproportionately suffered from underinvestment, both in the philanthropic and private sectors. Less than two percent of funding by the nation’s largest foundations is specifically targeted at Black communities – according to Rich Cohen in his study "Dimensions of Racial Equity in Foundation Grantmaking". 

Black entrepreneurs face an identical challenge. In 2020, Crunchbase, a business intelligence site, documented that Black startup entrepreneurs received $1 billion of the record $147 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. startups–a meager 0.6 percent. Traditional businesses that depend on commercial loans also encounter a similar problem: only 31% of small Black businesses received all the funding they applied for, compared with 49% of white-owned businesses, 39% of Asian-owned firms and 35% of Latino-owned businesses, according to a 2019 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Some studies have pointed out that biases play a role in these statistics as well as structural racism that reinforces impediments in processes and policies that cut-off access to Black leaders and business owners. These disparities negatively affect almost 23,600 Black entrepreneurs in Baltimore City. 47% of Baltimore’s small businesses are Black-owned, according to the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship.

With CONNECT, CLLCTIVLY brings Black-led social change leaders together to circumvent these harmful practices by creating a network that offers capacity building, opportunities, and partnerships

CONNECT is a unique platform that fosters collaboration among Black-led nonprofit organizations and Black-owned businesses to support them with connections and opportunities while countering the systemic underinvestment of Black social change leaders. CONNECT aligns well with the Challenge’s goal of supporting non-profit organizations that are transformatively supporting the growth, development, and sustainability of BIPOC-led and women-led businesses in the U.S. 

Specifically, CLLCTIVLY addresses two critical dimensions of the historical exclusion of businesses owned by Black individuals: 1) connecting Black social change leaders so they can leverage each other’s strengths; and 2) providing them access to capital. Mainstream funders and investors often disregard the ingenuity of Black leaders. CLLCTIVLY believes in Black genius, and trusts that proximate Black leaders hold key solutions to the problems our communities face. CONNECT serves as a platform to unite these leaders, leverage their strengths and connections, share resources and opportunities, give them the ability to crowdsource problems, and offer professional development opportunities through a skills-share database and training. 

Additionally, CONNECT actively sources and shares grants and investment opportunities. We are learning that most of these leaders work with limited staff capacity and face challenges in knowing about funding opportunities since they are preoccupied with other business operations. 

Both of these dimensions are geared toward one objective: circumventing the systemic underinvestment of Black social change leaders through collaboration and the sharing of capital information.

For decades, the philanthropic community, commercial banks, and private equity firms have overlooked Greater Baltimore’s Black-led non-profit organizations and Black-owned businesses. CLLCTIVLY stands in the gap by serving these same leaders, who lack critical funding to invest in their organizations or businesses. In both the philanthropic and for-profit sectors, people of color face eligibility, staffing, and, or grant monitoring requirements that are unattainable or simply challenging, given organizational capacity. Often struggling to find financial assistance, they have to choose between supporting themselves financially or continuing to pour into their communities or businesses. Through CONNECT, CLLCTIVLY will bring these leaders together to ensure their success.

Maryland

sustain small businesses.

CLLCTIVLY’s mission is to end the fragmentation and duplication of nonprofit programming, empower them to learn from and about each other, and serve as  a resource for the Greater Baltimore community that seeks to find, fund, and partner with Black social change organizations. Our theory of change states that by creating an ecosystem that ameliorates the challenges that under-resourced Black-led and Black-owned organizations and businesses face, organizations will become stronger and meet community needs – all with a racial equity framework that facilitates narrative change.We have enrolled 100+ organizations in our asset map/directory, received 200,000+ website visits, awarded 200+ grants, and invested over $500,000 in Black-led organizations in Baltimore since our founding in 2019. However, we know there is much more to do if we are to redress centuries of underinvestment. CLLCTIVLY will continue to champion and implement a robust ecosystem that builds relationships based on trust, not transactions, and practice participatory liberation as a guiding principle.