Mo Harper-Desir
HUMBOLDT – The Black Humboldt non-profit group is into its second year of offering small business development assistance, connecting entrepreneurs and owners with the resources needed to advance their businesses.
Black Humboldt’s Business Cohorts program was described in an April 15 online presentation to the Community Economic Resilience Consortium.
The program brings business owners together with those who give financial, technical and marketing assistance, providing what the Black Humboldt website describes as “a space to learn, build and grow alongside others facing similar opportunities and challenges.”
The website says “this kind of support is especially important for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) business owners, who often navigate barriers that are layered and specific, including limited access to capital, smaller professional networks, lack of culturally relevant mentorship, and business education spaces that do not always reflect their lived realities.”
“To zoom in on the program a little bit, basically each cohort was one year long of meeting monthly to bi-monthly and learning skills together and practicing them,” said Mo Harper-Desir of Black Humboldt. “And so the first year was really focused on getting your business plan together, figuring out your product and your audience, and who’s your market.”
Another key part of last year’s cohort program was encouraging and building on savings.
Partnering with the North Coast Small Business Development Center, North Edge Business Financing and Community Development, one of the program’s funding contributors, matched every dollar saved by businesses with $3 of its funding.
Redwood Region Rise, the North Coast arm of a statewide economic development initiative, also provides funding.
Levia Love of Black Humboldt owns the Bling Brow Bar body waxing studio in Eureka and has been operating it since 2018. She said local businesses are “still needing a lot of support” following the COVID-19 pandemic years and the cohort program aims to provide it.
“For myself, being in the cohort last year and being in it this year has really helped me place myself in a space in Humboldt County where I’m actually thriving now,” she said.
“And especially this year with the marketing support that we have, I’m seeing a drastic difference even in just how people are engaging with my Instagram with my website.”
With help from an SBDC business liaison, Harper-Desir and Love, about 15 businesses are being coached four months into the second year of the cohort program.
“I know our collaborators have been stunned with some of the testimony that comes from the lived experience, specifically of black and brown small business owners,” said Harper-Desir, who described the program as “flourishing.”
Alluding to himself as “the poster boy of a middle-aged cisgender white dude,” Gregg Foster of the Redwood Region Economic Development Commission, the meeting’s host, asked if it’s “intimidating” for BIPOC business owners to seek financial and other forms of assistance.
“Are you opening a door that we can’t, or aren’t, necessarily able to open ourselves?” he asked.
“As a business owner in our community and being black and being queer, I found that I was hitting barriers to entry for having my business,” said Love. “And I definitely spoke to that in the first cohort and talked to the other businesses about it and was getting the feedback that we, as the businesses, do experience differences. And so having trusted community collaborators does help us get them to the right people.”
Black Humboldt’s annual Business on Blast networking event is also focused on linking business owners to assistance resources.
Susan Seaman of North Edge said while the agency won’t be able to provide the type of funding it did last year, it will help fund this year’s marketing assistance.
Love said last year’s financial support enabled her to buy ADA-accessible equipment for her business and other business owners have started up secondary businesses.
“It’s just beautiful to see how many people really took what we had to offer and ran with it and now we have all of these really rad businesses popping up in Humboldt,” she said.
