CHAPTER 2
Create S.P.A.C.E.

"Fail-Safe" Business Framework

The irony is that nothing about my life has been fail-safe. I have failed repeatedly. I've also always found a way to figure it out. As a single mom, you have no choice. If you don't figure out how to make it work, no one is going to do it for you. Being a single mom doesn't mean you don't have a community of people to support you, and it doesn't mean you can't create the community support you need. That's what building something that is fail-safe means. It means that independent doesn't mean alone. In Chapter 1, I mentioned going on government assistance, and I'd like to come back to that here. The average person has a really jacked-up perception of welfare or government assistance and the people on it. There is no shortage of nasty names, myths, and utterances about "those people" on welfare. I was one of "those people." Here's the thing, government assistance was a part of my journey to figuring it out. I wasn't just sitting around collecting a check and pushing out babies. Imagine going to the grocery store with your two-year-old and five-year-old. The kids are energetic and animated. We all know that kids are their best selves in the grocery store. Something about the grocery store and small children is a recipe for disaster. After making it out of the store without forgetting your pocketbook, a bag of groceries, or something else unexpectedly tragic happening you pull up to the front of your house. The kids have fallen asleep, and for a moment you enjoy the silence and peace in the car, but that is quickly disrupted when you realize you also have a car full of groceries. To make matters worse, you live on the second floor of your apartment building. How are you supposed to get all of the groceries in the house and watch the kids by yourself? You feel hopeless. Imagine it. There is no one to call. No one can come right now to help you. For a moment the only thing you know how to do is cry. This scenario isn't a one-off. It's something I had to figure out on multiple occasions. Today my oldest children are grown and thriving. I am grateful that I have a chef to prepare my meals and do the grocery shopping. I can pay people to be on my team. To manage the things I had to do on my own for so long. When I was on government assistance I always had a job. I cooked homemade meals for my kids. I worked side hustles before apps made it easy to find customers and build a business. I simply couldn't afford to raise two kids, have childcare, pay rent, buy food, and pay for food and shelter on the wages I was bringing in. I was, however, always motivated and innovative even when things felt hopeless all those years ago. One of the ways I thrived was through the community I built for myself and my family. I had strong family support as we'll discuss later on, but I also engaged other parents. I made friends at my kids', sporting events. I offered to babysit the kids of parents who played sports on the same teams as my kids. In return, they babysat when I needed it. In college, roommates who had become good friends helped me out with my children so that I could go to class and study. I've always understood that community is what it takes to thrive.

Researchers Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath have actually studied how employees thrive. They've found that thriving employees are highly energized, but they also know how to avoid burnout. More surprising is that these same researchers discovered that people who belong to coworking spaces report levels of thriving that approach an average of six on a seven-point scale. Over the last decade, coworking spaces have exploded. In a recent Harvard Business Review article several coworking space founders discussed why those who work out of these types of office spaces thrive. The reasons range from more autonomy, to job control, and feelings of being a part of a community. I hold a special place in my heart for coworking spaces as early on in building Black Girl Ventures, coworking spaces were some of the most accessible places to hold pitch competitions in various cities. They were easy to rent, relatively affordable, and they provided all the equipment that a traditional office would have. I remember one of my earliest pitch competitions in Philadelphia was held at a coworking space in Center City, with a skyline view. This was one of the first pitch competitions outside of my home base of the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia). What I view as important about the coworking space model is the community aspect. The entire foundation of a coworking space is built on the idea of community. You are a member, with perks and access to other members, and you can work independently or have access to others while in the space. All of these perks come back to the importance of community.

A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) points out that more than one-third of adults aged 45 and older feel lonely, and nearly one-fourth of adults aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated. According to the Centers for Disease Control loneliness is the feeling of being alone, regardless of the amount of social contact. Social isolation is a lack of social connections. Social isolation can lead to loneliness in some people, while others can feel lonely without being socially isolated. At the time of writing this book a recent survey released by Cigna found that 71 percent of millennials and almost 79 percent of Gen Z respondents reported feeling lonely-a significantly greater proportion than other generations. Further, YouGov.com data show that one in five millennials report having no friends. With data like this, it's not surprising that despite the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for coworking spaces continues to grow. This isn't surprising to me. What it shows is that people want to feel a part of a community. And community is what I know best. It's the foundation of Black Girl Ventures and why my company, despite the pandemic, was able to thrive and grow even stronger coming out of the pandemic crisis. Yes, we had to pivot like every other business, but what we had on our side was an engaged community of women that still wanted to connect, that wanted to see their businesses thrive, and that still needed a space to congregate, virtually. We didn't have to suddenly start trying to find our tribe as a business due to the pandemic; we had already created Black Girl Ventures with community as the staple. This was a huge advantage for us, and I am here to teach you how to use community building as the foundation of a sustainable business model. Before I deep-dive into some of the ways my team leaned into community during the pandemic in order to build a bigger and better organization, I want to take a moment to talk about how I have come to instructively build community and why it shows up in every facet of my entrepreneurship journey and personal life.

I'm from Durham, North Carolina. Yes, I know what the best barbeque tastes like, and yes, North Carolina has the best biscuits. I had a very Black upbringing. My mom's side of the family and my dad's side of the family are very different and speak to different social classes. However, one thing is the same, both sides feel like home for me. That sense of belonging is where I learned to innately lean on my community, and it shows up in nearly everything I do or create. I got community from both sides. As for my mom's side of the family, her generation grew up on government assistance. However, it didn't feel that way. The projects simply felt like community. It didn't feel crime-ridden or dangerous, it felt like the family was all under the same roof, under the same conditions, living as a tight-knit working family. That's the experience they had, and that's how it felt.

There is a forgotten history around how the United States government segregated America through public policy that created and remains responsible for what we call "the projects." For decades some of the poorest people in the United States have lived in subsidized housing developments often known as the projects or the ghetto. These communities are the result of racist policies employed by the government. There are myriad reasons for this, including the New Deal's National Housing Act of 1934 enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt. This and other housing programs of the 30s, 40s, and 50s were explicitly racist. The FHA had a manual, which explicitly said that it was risky to make mortgage loans in predominantly Black areas. So while the New Deal Housing Act promoted homeownership by providing federal backing of loans or guaranteed mortgages, from its inception, the FHA limited assistance to prospective white buyers (not Black buyers). As a result, Black people had a housing shortage coming out of the Great Depression, in which governmental policies funneled Black people into poorly constructed and underserved communities, or as we know them today, the projects. In addition to the FHA's racist policies and practices, federal housing projects from the 1930s onward were designed to keep Black Americans in neighborhoods with fewer education and job opportunities than white neighborhoods. At the same time, the government-sponsored Home Owners' Loan Corporation and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board used maps to deny lending and investment services to Black Americans-this,...