Nisha Blackwell and Katie Johnson joined Bridgeway Capital’s Creative Business Accelerator program because they saw first-hand how well the program worked. Both had benefited from it in the past, Johnson as a small-batch ceramic tile manufacturer at Braddock Tiles, and Blackwell as the owner of Knotzland Bowtie Co.
During UMA’s 2019 Milwaukee Gathering, Blackwell told the audience that the Creative Business Accelerator “felt like home.” “Nothing really felt quite like it was honing in on the maker side of it, the craft business side of it,” she said, referring to other business support programs she’d participated in in the past.
Today Blackwell and Johnson are leading the launch of a new initiative that applies the successful elements of the Creative Business Accelerator specifically to African American manufacturers and makers.
The program is called ORIGINS. It connects entrepreneurs to grants, loans, and production space so they can realize greater business success, creative fulfillment, and community impact.
Johnson’s interest in this field can be traced to her time at Braddock Tiles, a mission-driven tile manufacturer located outside Pittsburgh, that provided employment and job-readiness skills to disadvantaged young adults.
She says ORIGINS is treading towards a similar kind of community impact. She saw the first glimpses of that when they interviewed their first maker-in-residence, Selima Dawson, proprietor of Blakbird Jewelry.
Johnson asked her if she’d had trouble accessing space for her business in the past. Dawson told her she’d never thought to look. She never imagined her business growing to a point where it would need it.
With help from ORIGINS, Dawson now has her mind set on growing to the point that she can hire another African American woman and give her a good-paying career path in the crafts. Johnson and Blackwell joined UMA’s Pathways to Patient Capital cohort to provide insight on how they plan to help Dawson and others achieve that success, while also learning about the struggles and successes of other mission-driven financial programs across the country.
“I firmly believe that there is a ripple effect with this work, that by creating access to resources in a thoughtful, intentional, and meaningful way, they will in turn open up opportunities for other people in the community,” said Johnson.
This case study was co-authored by Mark Foggin and Johnny Magdaleno and originally published in 2020 as part of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance’s “Forging Fairness: How community-based lenders are centering both inclusion and manufacturing to promote equity [link to report].” This report highlights the work of practitioners in UMA’s Pathways to Patient Capital cohort, and approaches these leaders are taking to help entrepreneurs of color–including makers and manufacturers–get access to the capital and know-how they need to realize their business ideas and plans at scale.