Description

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Offering a revolution in Black business financing, this book centers the entrepreneur and responds to the systemic failures surrounding Black wealth building.

There is a huge racial wealth gap in America today. Owning a business is one of the best ways to build wealth—but entrepreneurs need capital. And investing in Black companies is obstructed by systemic racism and implicit biases that continue to create barriers to success.

Merging historical information and data, along with tactical examples and explanations, this practical guide shows us what needs to be done in order to change the way we support Black companies and how we think about wealth.

Norwood calls for investors to move away from extractive, individualistic, exploitative approaches to capital and entrepreneurship. She asks us to move toward transformational, restorative, regenerative, and interdependent relationships to repair the impacts of systemic racism. Investors, large and small, need to say to Black business owners, “we believe in you.”

With an entrepreneur-centric approach, Believe-In-You Money challenges the system failure surrounding Black companies. It’s a guide on how Black entrepreneurs can be supported in sustainable ways and offers a shift in the way we think about who can be an investor, while aiming to change our personal relationships with money.

About the Author

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Jessica Norwood is the Founder of the Runway Project, a financial activist, and social entrepreneur who was awarded the Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship for Economic Disruption. An immediate past fellow of RSF Social Finance Integrated Capital, Jessica speaks worldwide on the intersection of culture and investing, emerging leadership, community investing and African American wealth creation. Featured in Essence Magazine, NPR, Next City, and Fast Company, Jessica is a lifelong Fellow of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and Southern University College of Business, as well as the Political Power Fellow of the Hip Hop Archive at the Hutchinson Institute of Harvard University.

Praise For…

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“Jessica brings personality, courageous storytelling, and inspiration to the financial space in a way no one ever has before.”
—Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University
 
“Jessica Norwood has inspired me to relinquish my trained scarcity around resources and helped me to understand that we must transform our financial systems as we transform our relationship to ourselves and the planet. Community is the pathway to mutual, sustainable abundance.”
—adrienne maree brown, Author of Emergent Strategy
 
“Black people have given an immeasurable amount of unpaid labor and blood to this country and the capital we invest should honor that. Jessica is the right person and this is the right time for this conversation.”
—LaTosha Brown, Co-founder of Black Voters Matters

“The inspiring story of how Jessica created RUNWAY reminds you to ‘Trust Black Women.’ You will never see investing the same way after you learn about the work Jessica and the team at RUNWAY is doing.”
—Tarana Burke, founder of the MeToo movement