00:00You give us a sense of the backstory of how y'all started in business to put you in a position to write that multi-billion dollar check to buy Essence.
00:12Everybody does the salute in New Orleans, but tell us how it started and the principles of business, black business, that you and your family operated from.
00:23It started right up in Harlem on 125th and 5th. I'm originally from Liberia, West Africa, born and raised, came here when I was 17 as a refugee, went to college, got a scholarship to go to college.
00:40When I graduated, we had a full-blown civil war in both Liberia and Sierra Leone, which is where my mother and my grandmother are from.
00:47My grandmother had made and sold different hair and skin preps using shea butter and African black soap.
00:54We started selling it as a street vendor on a card table up in Harlem on 125th and 5th and built it into what many of you today know as Shea Moisture and Nubian Heritage.
01:10My mother and I and my college roommate and the rest of my family, my sister, my brother, my cousins, we built that, but we built that on the premise of two things.
01:31One is we had all of these women in these villages in Africa collecting the shea butter, doing the dangerous work and not getting paid for it, and sending it here.
01:43The other side of it is we had all of these women here in the U.S. using the product, using the shea butter, using these ingredients, benefiting from the product, but not benefiting from the economics of it.
01:56So we launched what we called community commerce model, which was we wanted to take care of the women in Africa that were providing the raw material, and we wanted to take care of the women here who were buying our products.
02:11And so community commerce for us meant that we would take 10% of our top line revenue and invest it back in black women exclusively.
02:22We did that with our supply chain, and today there's some 80,000 plus women in those cooperatives where we do manufacturing, we do education, we do safety, we do all the things that it takes for them to build an infrastructure and move up that chain.
02:49And then when we sold the business here, we launched our first fund, which was $100 million, focused on investing exclusively in black women in 2017, I think it was.
03:03And we're now on our second one, which is approaching 300, again, focused on investing in our communities.
03:12So the model is called community commerce, and it's basically just thinking about how we connect the dots within our communities, but on a global basis.
03:22Give him a hand on that.
03:31When you have made these connections, explain to us the formula, because one of the things that impresses me, you have sessions out on the island every summer, and you and Alfonso have invited me.
03:44We have young, aspiring people that you have people come in from different areas of our community to talk about how to do what the methods are and to have them focus on what their journey is going to be.
04:00And you have actually seen some of them leave these sessions and build something.
04:06And, you know, it's like we say biblically how you can cast your seed, some hit rock, but some hit fertile land.
04:14And that reminds me that every year when I go out to your session, talk about your sessions and some of the outcomes that you witnessed.
04:23Yeah, you know, it's really fascinating to see what separation of black people does to us and to contrast that with connecting black people together and what that does to us.
04:42And we are a being of community.
04:50When we're together and we're working together is when we're the strongest and when we produce the most.
04:54It's when we're the most successful.
04:56It's when we're the happiest, because that's who we are as a people, globally.
05:03And so what we try to do every year is focus on bringing young black entrepreneurs together so that, A, they know each other, B, they can build relationships and support each other and help each other develop their businesses.
05:19Because we launched this fund, we're able to bring these young people together.
05:25And the results of that have now been quite astonishing.
05:31Because of that now, we've created somewhere around 35 to 38 black millionaires in the past three, four years.
05:41We've had two astronomical exits, or they've had these astronomical exits, totaling over $1.3 billion in the past 12 months.
05:56So when we come together and when we work together and when we invest in each other and we support each other and we actually build things together, we're the strongest.
06:06When we're not doing that, we're the weakest.
06:09And so our focus is how do we get more of us together?
06:13How do we understand each other's differences, appreciate them, but connect around our similarities and our commonalities?
06:22And that, for us, is how you drive this community, the black community, and our culture forward.
06:29And that's how we take ownership of the value that we bring to this country.
06:33Alfonso, David, tell us where the concept and then what is the practicality of what we're doing with the Black Economic Council.
06:49So everything that Rich said is why we do this work.
06:55And although we have achieved significant progress in the economic space, unfortunately, we're seeing significant regression.
07:05So when you look at, just as a contrast, Martin Luther King gave a speech on Washington in the 1960s.
07:14The wealth gap between black people and white people was 8 to 1.
07:20Today, the wealth gap between white and black people is 12 to 1.
07:28I'm talking about the wealth gap.
07:31And don't get confused because many people talk about the wage gap, which is different.
07:39How much I'm making at a job is very different than whether or not I'm building generational wealth.
07:44And what we're trying to do with the Council for Economic Opportunity and Social Justice is bring together organizations,
07:53legacy organizations from the National Action Network to Vote.org, from the NAACP to an LGBTQ organization, right?
08:02Focusing on how do we bring all of these groups together to develop one concrete narrative and strategic plan to push back against the right-wing attacks.
08:13I hope you all see what's happening.
08:16There are lawsuits being filed every single day with one purpose, to dismantle, strategically dismantle, laws and policies that have been in place to support people of color.
08:29What they're looking to do is to essentially say that every single statute and regulation in this country has to be race-neutral.
08:38That's the goal.
08:41And so what we're doing on the Council is bringing organizations together to push back.
08:46Think about legislation, think about litigation, think about communications, and come up with a strategic plan to push back.
08:53Because the other side is well-funded and well-organized.
08:57And so we need to make sure we're just as funded and just as organized to push back against the right-wing attacks.
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