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Accelerator

Supporting organizations who are developing models to close the racial wealth gap by removing social, financial, and political barriers.

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Accelerating Justice: Spotlighting the Economic Future We Deserve

August 13, 2024 01:00 PM EST

You’re invited to a virtual event featuring BIPOC women on the front lines of building a just economic future. Through our Accelerator program we aim to shine a light on their strategies and solutions, and we hope you’ll join us to learn about how each organization is contributing to an economic system that allows everyone to thrive.

Through our three-month-long accelerator program, Common Future invests in a cohort of 10 BIPOC women and non-binary-led organizations that are actively working to dismantle economic inequality by giving power back to communities left out of prosperity.

We are no longer accepting applications and have already kicked-off the 2024 the cohort.
Sign up to our newsletter for updates on our next recruitment round!

We believe in an economy in which power is accessible to all, no matter their race and class.
That’s why the Common Future Accelerator—2024 Cohort supports organizations developing models to close the racial wealth gap by removing social, financial, and political barriers that stand in the way of transformative change.

Organizations chosen to participate in the Common Future Accelerator receive:

$50K in unrestricted grants

An ecosystem of support

Peer to peer community

Top of its class personal coaching

World-class mentorship for growth

“At the beginning of the program we had $0 dollars and now we have a $250K budget. In 12 weeks I was able to pay myself to work on this full time and we successfully launched with an event featuring Heather McGhee with 500+ attendees.”

Jeremy Al-Haj, Founder of Missouri Workers Center

If your organization is committed to closing the racial wealth gap in your community, you can express interest in future Accelerator cohorts by sending us a note.

Last October, building on the success of our 2023 Accelerator program, we announced the search for 10 BIPOC women or nonbinary-led organizations working on models that address the racial wealth gap.

For our 2023 cohort, we received over 264 applications nationwide. This year, that number surged to over 500 applications, speaking to the need for unrestricted capital and community for BIPOC leaders doing this work. We need programs like this now more than ever.

Participants

Black Wildflowers Fund is a non-profit focused on removing systemic barriers for Black educators who want to pursue leadership pathways and design innovative schools—without compromising their freedom, power, identity, or financial security. They are creating a liberatory education movement that invests in the limitless potential of Black children and Black leaders through their grant programs and community of practice.

www.blackwildflowers.org

CannaBronx was founded to ensure that the communities most impacted by the war on drugs are at the forefront of realizing equity and truly benefit from this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape New York’s cannabis industry from the ground up. They believe in a future where the very community members who have been most impacted by the criminalization of marijuana can heal from generations of trauma and be at the front of the line to build community wealth, economic and immigrant justice, health, and beyond.

www.cannabronx.org

Fit to Navigate empowers BIPOC communities incarcerated or re-entering society. They co-create programs with them, ensuring cultural relevance and ownership by providing wellness education programs designed to empower individuals and spark transformation in Ohio communities affected by the criminal justice system, while creating a path to entrepreneurship, sustainable wages, and reduced recidivism for all underfunded communities in Ohio. Graduates have become educators, architects of their future, and changemakers in their communities.

www.fittonavigate.com

Forward Cities believes that every entrepreneur deserves an equitable chance to launch and grow a business that generates wealth for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Together with their partners, they are organizing action-learning networks that provide dynamic opportunities for the champions of this work within and across communities to share lessons learned, acquire effective new tools and strategies, and test promising models and approaches designed to generate new knowledge and insights that can inform the work of the networks and build the field.

www.forwardcities.org

ReMix IDEAS is building a supportive ecosystem for Black-owned businesses in Arkansas by disrupting cycles of intergenerational poverty and creating pathways for economic mobility through business ownership. They do this by building supportive ecosystems, inspiring and educating Black entrepreneurs to start, grow, and scale their businesses, and leveraging strategic partnerships in the community to create meaningful, transformative, and measurable coordinated actions that lead to economic mobility for Black communities in Arkansas.

remixideas.com

United for a Fair Economy’s Grassroots Organizing School of Alabama (GOSA) is addressing the need for organizer-leaders from Alabama’s Black, Latinx, and immigrant communities to advance base-building initiatives that promote economic justice. GOSA will resource existing Black- and Brown-led community-based organizations with BIPOC organizers who have the skills and economic analyses to mobilize communities for systemic changes.

www.faireconomy.org

WisConnect provides Black women entrepreneurs with the tools needed to sustainably scale their businesses through a supportive, nurturing environment that offers childcare, promotes health and wellness, supplies affordable commercial retail space, and provides leadership and investment opportunities. They are able to create this dynamic business environment through their cooperative governance structure, their robust professional network, their access to major redevelopment projects within historically disinvested communities, and their connections to global trading opportunities at their sister sites located across the world.

wisconnect.co

Worker Justice Wisconsin is building worker power in solidarity with labor and faith allies. Many of the workers they partner with not only lack a voice, but also regularly experience wage theft, discrimination and unsafe working conditions. They offer several programs to combat these injustices collectively: workers’ rights trainings, direct worker organizing on the job, and incubation of worker cooperatives. They embrace a dual prong approach–organizing and incubation–so that workers can resist exploitation today and move toward a worker-led economy in the future.

workerjustice.org

Past Participants

Black-led CDFIs (Community Development Financial Institutions) face challenges similar to those they serve in growing their asset bases so that they can provide sufficient capital and services to their BIPOC markets.

The Alliance supports and empowers Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) CEOs to lead and grow their institutional operations and social impact toward eliminating racial economic injustice through its programs and services—including the Black Renaissance Fund, which can raise, grant and lend capital to its members.

Participants: Amber Bond, Executive VP & COO / BRF Director and Janice Dsouza, Vice President of Marketing and Communications

www.aaacdfi.org

East Boston is one of the city’s fastest gentrifying neighborhoods. Yet, the pre-pandemic poverty rate was as high as 19%, with undocumented and English-limited immigrants experiencing greater discrimination.

The Cooperative Center for Development and Solidarity - CCDS is a non-profit organization that helps build and create worker-owned cooperatives by empowering immigrant and women residents to take control of their lives.

Participants: Luz Zambrano, General Coordinator

www.ccdseastboston.org

For Native American entrepreneurs doing business on sovereign Native land, there are significant barriers to obtaining capital due to the lack of local financial institutions, a lack of credit and collateral to prove eligibility, and a lack of investment in entrepreneurship.

Change Labs is a Native-led organization providing workspace, tools, and resources for Indigenous entrepreneurs, including a new initiative to deploy capital to Navajo startup and growth companies.

Participants: Jessica Stago, Co-Founder and Heather Flamming, Executive Director

www.nativestartup.org

Homeownership is an important wealth-building tool that can be passed down over generations, and Black families have been systematically discriminated against throughout the home-buying process for generations, preventing them from utilizing this wealth-building tool.

Community Empowerment Fund is working to end the racial wealth gap by supporting over 3,000 Members annually, in reaching their employment, housing, and finance goals in Durham and Orange Counties, North Carolina. Their approach combines person-centered support with advocacy and financial services that pursue equity.

Participants: Donna Carrington, Executive Director and ari rosenberg, Director of Development and Finance

www.communityef.org

Food industry labor—either as unpaid labor, informal business, or underpaid back-of-house staff—has been historically undervalued, and shouldered almost exclusively by low-income women and by people-of-color.

The COOK Alliance has led the charge to pass the country’s first law allowing people to sell cooked meals from their homes, creating an innovative form of culinary entrepreneurship accessible to all, and particularly empowering for homemakers, caretakers, women, people of color, and immigrants.

Participants: Roya Bagheri, Executive Director

cookalliance.org

Native women earn $.60 for every dollar earned by white men which will cost them nearly $1M over a 40-year career. According to census data, “close to 27% of Native Americans live in poverty. That's significantly more than the rest of the country, which averages close to 15%.”This community is among the lowest labor force participation (less than 60% in 2018) compared with any other major racial group in the United States, resulting in cycles of generational poverty and poorer health and economic outcomes.

The Hozhonigo Institute is working to create a world where all Native women have access to the workforce and entrepreneurship.They seek to remove barriers through their community driven programs that will provide Native women with training and skills that can provide economic security for the long term.

Participants: Onawa Haynes, CEO and Founder

www.hozhonigo.com

For financial institutions , serving the bottom 40% of Americans is a regulatory requirement and a difficult necessity. To meet these requirements, financial institutions use Miren to monitor their investments in low to moderate income communities for the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and CDFI Fund re-certification exams.

Their mission is to facilitate the flow of capital into underserved communities through products like home mortgages, small business loans, and affordable housing development.

Participants: Gabriela Ariana Campoverde, Founder and CEO

www.getmiren.com

A long history of racial discrimination and extractive lending practices has resulted in land loss and limited access to land for Black people. Since 1910, Black-owned land acreage decreased from 16 Million acres to just 4.7 Million with the total loss over the past 100 years estimated to be worth approximately $326 Billion. Through the work of the Resource Commons, the National Black Food & Justice Alliance, a coalition of Black-led food justice organizations and farmers working collectively towards Black food sovereignty and land justice, is providing land and non-extractive capital to Black farmers.

Through the work of the Resource Commons, the National Black Food & Justice Alliance, a coalition of Black-led food justice organizations and farmers working collectively towards Black food sovereignty and land justice, is providing land and non-extractive capital to Black farmers.

Participants: Kenya Crumerl, Director of Black Land & Power

blackfoodjustice.org

There are some 23 Million underserved urban farmers of color in the U.S., and that number includes 72,000 smallholders on plots 3.5 to five acres. They don’t have access to the same equipment, nor encouragement, to undertake climate-smart practices that large, commercial farms do—and they’re losing financial ground and resilience to climate change.

SEED has developed a handheld soil carbon sensor, a first-of-its-kind for urban and underserved smallholder farmers to democratize access to climate-smart Innovation and the carbon credit market.

Participants: Sabrina Williams, CEO and Andraleia, Chief Brand Officer

www.seedbox.systems

In Georgia, Black women earn only $0.63 on the dollar to white men, and children born into poverty in ATL only have a four percent chance of making it out of poverty.

Tender Foundation is providing a safety net for single mamas living on the margins in Atlanta by providing $500 a month through a re-imagined Universal Basic Income model.

Participants: Jaycina Almond, Founder and Chaniece Davis, Business Operations Manager

www.thetenderfoundation.com

Insights from the Accelerator Program

7/13/2023

Empowering BIPOC Women Entrepreneurs

Accelerator

The power of an all-BIPOC, all-women accelerator cohort, and why it was so transformational.

3/07/2023

Meet the 10 BIPOC-Woman-Led Organizations Tackling Economic Inequality Through Community Wealth Building

Accelerator

After receiving over 264 applications from across the country, and a rigorous 10 week selection, we found 10 organizations led by BIPOC women who we truly believe are here to change those very systems in order to help close our country’s racial wealth gap.

11/10/2022

Embracing Equity: A Retrospective on Program Application and Selection

Accelerator

Policy Incubator

To better understand how we’re doing things differently, we interviewed a handful of our organization’s leaders across different sectors. From policy to participatory investing, we pulled four anchors that ground our collective insights and best practices for program application and selection.

Join us!

Accelerating Justice: Spotlighting the Economic Future We Deserve

Through our three-month-long accelerator program, Common Future invests in a cohort of 10 BIPOC women and non-binary-led organizations that are actively working to dismantle economic inequality by giving power back to communities left out of prosperity.

Common Future Email List

Participants

Insights from the Accelerator Program

Empowering BIPOC Women Entrepreneurs

Meet the 10 BIPOC-Woman-Led Organizations Tackling Economic Inequality Through Community Wealth Building

Embracing Equity: A Retrospective on Program Application and Selection