Some Sage advice - funding is the only way to get more Black women in tech

[Kathleen Martin]

I'm out of the inspiration game. I'm really in the money game now.

So says Dr Cameka Smith about her shift in focus for The BOSS Network, the organization she founded in 2009.
Smith’s original intention was to establish a community of professional and entrepreneurial black women, offering events, workshops and coaching to help this underrepresented group succeed in the business world. Smith identified a gap in the market for such an organization after leaving her previous career in education. After a decade working for Chicago Public Schools, Smith was one of the thousands of teachers and staff who lost their job when the recession hit in the late 2000s.
Having decided to go into business for herself full-time, Smith spent a lot of time talking to different entrepreneurs from minority communities:

Through all those conversations I was having with different people, it struck a chord with me: I'm an event planner, these are really great conversations. Maybe I should just create a series of events for women of color to talk about career life for us in business, starting a business, different challenges, how do we become successful.

Smith decided to launch an online forum and event series called BOSS - Bringing Out Successful Sisters, which now reaches over 200,000 women globally.
However, the last four years have seen Smith shift expand her focus from conversations and coaching to funding as she came to the realization that there is little point inspiring a whole bunch of women to start businesses, if those businesses were then failing due to a lack of capital to keep going:

A lot of the women I was working with were saying, we're workshopped out, we're coached out, if we don't have the funding to actually implement these resources and these learnings, we're just holding onto all this information.

This view is borne out by the data. Black women received a pitiful 0.34% of VC funding in 2021, according to Crunchbase, and there are only around 40 women of color, who have raised $1m+ for their ventures. This is despite the fact that more Black women start businesses than anyone else across the US.
 
Continue reading: https://diginomica.com/some-sage-advice-funding-only-way-get-more-black-women-tech