Mary Brisbee Burrows advocates economic vitality for Black women

Dr. Mary Brisbee Burrows brings Women’s Empowerment Weekend to the Rochester Riverside Convention Center in honor of Women’s History Month.

In honor of Women’s History Month, Mary Brisbee Burrows will be hosting a Women’s Empowerment Weekend this weekend that will help connect Black women in business with local resources to build wealth.

For Brisbee Burrows, social work and counseling were not always a part of her career. She first joined Alternatives for Battered Women, now called Willow, as a paralegal and helped with cultural sensitivity training. After receiving much praise for her work, she joined ABW full-time piloting a program that assisted women who are at-risk and living with domestic violence.

After seeing the number of disparities in community resources for Black women and experiencing hardships of her own, this inspired her to work on how she could share her knowledge and resources with other women in the community.

Now, as the co-founder of The Legacy Drama House and curator of Women’s Empowerment Weekend, Brisbee-Burrows shares her thoughts on why Black women need to be able to thrive economically and how that benefits the community. Her answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Why do you think economic vitality is important for Black women?

It’s really worth it for the rest economy overall. When you have a strong, healthy woman that is vibrant economically and she is happy and she is thriving, well, that has a trickle-down effect to the family, to the children. It could reduce our children being slaughtered on the street. Our children killing other people on the street. Our men from being incarcerated. I mean, it has a whole trajectory to change lives.

What sparked the idea for Women’s Empowerment Weekend?

One of the things that I discovered is I’m an intelligent woman with all this advanced education. I own this business and I’m still working full time, so I’m doing well, but I’m still struggling with things that I should know about when it comes to business. I’m like, okay, if I’m struggling, what about my sister down the street who doesn’t have the same level of education, and has a deficiency when it comes to trying to navigate these social spaces?

So I came up with the idea of an event that just really focused on building up the wealth of Black women and bringing them information that they could use. So whether that be investments, whether she’s trying to just expand her portfolio or learn how can I make my life insurance policy work for me? Maybe I’m already in business, but I want to learn how to scale my business upwards. Maybe I’m just starting in business and I just want to know the steps that I need to use to get me there.

When you talk about finances, it can sometimes be kind of boring, right? I wanted to make sure that the atmosphere of the expo was inviting and engaging, but not intimidating. So I thought, well, how can I best do that? Because I don’t know all of those things, but I know women in each of these capacities, so I always call myself the glue.

What are the communal benefits of hosting events like Women’s Empowerment Weekend?

It helps build more stamina, you know, it’s not padding Mary’s pockets. This creates a trajectory of economic development for the whole region. So all these women, last year we had almost 300 women. They’re going to get their hair done, they’re going to get their nails done, they’re going to get an outfit. Women were staying at the Hyatt downtown. Somebody’s benefiting from all that. There are beneficiaries all over the place, but that’s just leading up to the event. Afterward, what are they going to be doing as far as building these businesses up?

What can the city and local governments do more of to help Black women in business?

They can do a whole lot more, but I think a lot of it starts with access. We need to know about what programs and services are out there; making sure that you get that information out to the people so that they’re educated. Then wherever those programs and services are advertised, they need to be in spaces where black women are. That means advertising in the media that we use the most.

Realize that everybody is coming from different walks of life and different levels of education, so having information that’s complicated and so legalese that people can’t follow it. Not saying being insulting in your paperwork, but eliminate all the multiple-syllable stuff.

Don’t just have DEI efforts that look nice, a DEI doesn’t mean that we’re gonna have a Black History Soul Food Dinner in February. No, we need to put teeth in our legislation and in our policies that is really going to impact change. Let’s look at our recruitment. Let’s look at our promotion. You know what I mean? Look at things at on a macro and micro level all across the board.

And having programs and resources in place that don’t have a lot of barriers in them. I received something the other day by an organization, It was a nomination to help Black woman-owned businesses, get finances, but the minimum amount to qualify was a hundred thousand dollars, so I’m like, well, you’re already cutting it off.

What was the inspiration behind The Legacy Drama House?

Six years ago, myself and two of my sisters wound up buying the Legacy Drama House. Well, at the time it was called the Dazzle Theater. So we wound up buying the facility, renaming it, remodeling it, renovating it, and making it a space for the community to come out and celebrate their life’s rites of passage.

So that way, you know, we folks didn’t have to go out of our neighborhood, to celebrate. They can celebrate right there down the street and it was Black-owned and operated.

What sorts of programming can we look forward to at The Legacy Drama House?

Birthday parties, baby showers, concerts, fashion shows, you name it, we have the events there. In another arm of the facility, folks can rent out the space and have their events, but we’re also doing our own events, and those are community-centered. We’ve been doing that for six years so we’ve had everything from voter registration drives to breast cancer awareness events. Upcoming soon we’re having a lupus awareness event.

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