-: My name is Aniyia Williams
and I am the executive director of Black and Brown Founders.
So we help Black and Latinx people launch and build
tech companies.
And really what our core idea behind that is
that we know that these communities typically struggle
with access to resources and to capital,
really access to money in general.
And money doesn't typically flow abundantly
within our communities but there is a lot of opportunity
in the tech industry and a lot of people have great ideas
that could be solving problems in this space,
so we help them understand tactically how they can launch
and start to grow and build businesses
when they're coming into it with modest resources.
So as we are looking into what we're moving in the future,
I'm actually really excited because what we're working
on right now is actually launching an online platform
that's going to have all of the kinds of information
that we share with people when we bring them together
in real life and doing more hands on training
and coaching programs for the entrepreneurs
that are gonna actually help them get from point A
to point B, with our team of people assisting them
during that journey and guiding them and being able to also
assess what their strengths and weaknesses are,
what areas they could learn more about that will
help them build stronger businesses.
They way that we're measuring that is by wanting to see
entrepreneurs having repeatable revenue at a certain level
and that number that we've said is our initial goal is,
we want to see at least 10% of the businesses or excuse me,
the entrepreneurs that we're serving in our community,
making a least half a million dollars or more
in annual revenue for their business and hiring jobs,
like hiring at least three full time people.
But as we look forward, we're actually right now
in heavy planning and execution of this new initiative
that we're launching, so we're kind of all hands on deck
on that and that could look like product planning,
it could look like shoring up operations around
how we can support that as a team and still making sure
that we're supporting our additional programs.
And that's also writing grants and looking for funding
for those things because we are a non-profit.