💖Motivation Meows💖
Hello, and welcome to yet another edition of The Black Cat.
Here is some exciting Black news.
Topicals founder Olamide Olowe launched a new platform, Cost of Doing Business, to help provide business resources to aspiring entrepreneurs. Speaking of platforms for founders, Luna Clervaux-Morris has launched Femme Noire to offer training and mentorship to Black women looking to launch businesses. Tiana Tukes, co-founder of LGBTQ+ VC, is now a lecturer at Spelman College — one of the first openly Black trans women to teach at the storied institution. Finally, HERide has become the first Black-owned rideshare company to secure a contract with the Atlanta airport.
Side note: Afrotech has opened applications for its AfroTech Future 50 list, which seeks to highlight the most influential Black innovators across various sectors. If you want to nominate someone — or yourself — please do so HERE.
This month, I’m reading: L’Ouvre by Emile Zola
This weekend, I’m listening to: Cowboy Carter by Beyoncé
💢From the Chatterbox💢
I remember the rules clearly: Don’t wear burgundy or denim. Do not touch the prisoners unless they touch you. Don’t make any promises. No running. No navy. No internet access.
The rules were for my visit to a women’s prison, where I agreed to watch and judge an inmate pitch competition. An investor first told me about the program while we were sitting in a New York café. He let it slip that he volunteered with an organization called Defy Ventures, which helped incarcerated women build entrepreneurship skills so they could go on and start their own businesses one day. He told me to let him know if I was ever interested in volunteering and, if so, I could come to Graduation — the final day of the program where the women pitch their companies to curious outsiders. That day was special to the women — and to the organization. It was a day of families coming in and cake being made. It also was the first and only time many of the women would ever wear a cap and gown. There was also the added joy that the winner of the pitch competition would receive a substantial sum of commissary money
I was to serve as a judge, analyzing pitches and giving feedback alongside a group of other writers and tech workers who agreed to volunteer that day. Some had been there before; others were new, like me. The slowly rose as the bus made its way down the highway, with a soft orange glow trying to break through the otherwise stubbornly gray clouds of the morning. I knew we were close to the prison when we turned into a driveway that looked like it led to a manicured forest. Thick trees hid any life behind these walls, and soon, we, too, disappeared among the fall foliage. I started thinking that I was now out of sight, out of mind, just like millions of people this nation has locked up behind bars. Some of the women I would meet would be released and go on to maybe launch companies, but most would have no choice but to take the cash and spend another day, another month, another year behind bars. I have to admit, the U.S. prison-industrial complex scares me, and here I was, among some of the most voiceless of our society, our most obscure, our most forgotten. Even when prisoners leave, they are landlocked to the fringes of society. I came that day to see the pitch competition and to also see if the rumors were true: If this was the real America.
Wearing pink pants and a black turtleneck, I joined a group of people in the waiting lobby. Security was kind. One guard’s radio went off — a fight broke out — they easefully slipped away and came back as if nothing happened. Smiling, they held us for just a moment and then led us into another room. The electronic doors opened gradually and closed with an unhurried pace. I looked to my left and saw the room where prisoners met with their families — a long room with long brown tables and plain walls. I started thinking about the intense lack of privacy these women had stripped from them — bathrooms with windows, recorded conversations, and guards watching their every move. The prison was very clean, looking freshly bleached, with shoes squeaking with each measured step. Frankly, it looked like my high school, which was rumored to have been designed by a prison architect.
But I knew the prison was putting on a show for us today. The courtyard we walked through was silent, with vast dorm-looking buildings standing completely still. If there was a fight anywhere on campus, all traces of it had been eliminated. Security tried to make conversation as they escorted us to the gym. One told us that prisoners are the ones who translate braille for the entire country, and I thought about every time I’ve traced my fingers along those dotted lines and how that was the result of the 13th Amendment. We made it to the gym, where the women were waiting for us, dressed in navy and burgundy. They cheered as we entered the room, and we had to dance to our seats. We smiled, gave brief introductions, and then the program began.
Everyone broke into small groups, and the women—around 30 of them—rotated to pitch their ideas to each of us. It was impersonally personal, with clear unspoken dynamics: they laughed, grinned, and cracked jokes but often let slip what life was like behind bars. They hated the food, commissary prices were high, and women were very mean behind bars. We couldn’t hug them, ask too many personal questions, or tell them too much about ourselves. They could only pitch us practical ideas, meaning no one could launch a software company because the women didn’t have computer access. They, instead, told us about more relatable businesses that I actually found refreshing, compared to the world of venture and startups that are always trying to digitize, always trying to find the next trend. The women spoke about knitting companies where some proceeds would go to helping incarcerated women; there were food trucks and recyclable furniture companies. Here presented a class divide. Pitches and business ideas were only as good as the information these women could access. Those with families who came by often could give more detailed ideas since their families would provide research. Those with no one had more sparse ideas, but the ambition was all the same.
Ambition is the same everywhere, and their scrappiness would have been adored even outside the prison walls. I started thinking about how these women would be on the Silicon Valley circuit; no doubt some of them had billion-dollar ideas. I spoke to a founder recently about his furniture recycling business and how he had raised millions for it. I thought only of that woman and how nothing separated the two besides life circumstances. Then, the reality of life for women also hit: the odds were low that these investors would give them the time of day given their gender. Plus, there was the overall uncertainty in how investors would perceive them. Would an investor jump to write a check to a brilliant Black woman with a criminal record the same way they do to white felons who go on and on again with their business ideas after a life of white-collar crime? There are already a lot of investors who know about this prison program, too, and one woman wrote about it back in 2016 — what has happened since then? It seems like those promises, like so many of these people, were forgotten.
Venture capital is not the only opportunity to get funding, but the life of a former inmate trying to launch even a regular business is not easy. Criminal records often make it challenging to access capital and sometimes even just support. But starting a business could be a lifeline: formerly incarcerated people have incredibly high unemployment rates, and the lack of opportunities importantly impacts Black people. Starting a business is at least a way to employ oneself. Others are getting the hint, and I’ve started to hear more about entrepreneurship programs in prisons. I loved the idea that these women were building such incredible skills and admired the way Defy Ventures worked to put this program together and give these women an opportunity to show themselves as the business leaders they are.
There were great strides taken to humanize the women: for one, they were just women, not prisoners, and we were only separated by circumstance. I was careful not to ponder too much about what was clearly on everyone’s mind: What did these women do to get locked up? Some still had baby cheeks, while others had the look of time passed on their faces. During a lunchbreak game, everyone was instructed to take a step forward if they related to a fact and look around to see how much we all had in common. The women were on one side, and we were on the other. “How many people have drunk driven before,” the program coordinator asked, and people on both sides took a step to now look each other face to face. As we learned more about the fabrics of our lives, it became clear that another unspoken factor was the situations many of the women came from and how that greatly influencer where they had ended up. Unstable childhoods, domestic violence — the pipeline showing how this nation failed its most innocent and most vulnerable. After the game, I sat next to a woman who immediately told me what happened to her. It was as if she had been waiting for someone to talk to, for someone to care. She told me she was another victim of the prison system and had served nine out of her 20-year sentence as she awaited her new trial in a few months. Until then, she was just someone just waiting around until the courts were ready to listen.
Suddenly, the program continued, and we had to pick a winner. The woman with the recyclable furniture company won, and the tech guy in my group called it one of the best pitches he’d ever heard. We all smiled proudly as she smiled, holding her commissary check for a few hundred dollars. One person asked when she officially planned to start the company, and she gave a little knowing smile — she let slip to us that she’d already been in for fourteen years, with no hint of how long she had left.
💫Kitty Talk💫
Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met:
Capital B, “How Black American Migrants Are Faring in Mexico”
New York Times, “The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance”
The Economist, “Making accounting sexy again.”