From left, Olivia Ames, Rasheeda Creighton and Lisa Townes of Blck Street, a business support organization that has rebranded from its previous name, JWC Foundation. (Courtesy Toine Rob/Blck Street)
A local nonprofit that supports black entrepreneurs has taken on a new name and revamped its flagship program.
The JWC Foundation announced today its rebrand to Blck Street (stylized “BLCK Street”). The organization also opened the application period for its new Blck Street Business Lab, a business accelerator that focuses its programming on black-owned retail, hospitality and service businesses, and replaces a similar, licensed program that the group previously offered.
The inaugural session of the Business Lab starts in late August, and the first class would graduate from the 9-month program next May.
Executive Director Rasheeda Creighton said the Business Lab is geared toward the behind-the-scenes work of running a company, and is intended to fill what the group sees as a programming gap at typical accelerators.
“This program is intended to do what the rest of our work does, which is really focus on what it takes to run a business. That is a gap that we’ve identified and worked on for the past three years. There’s a lot of folks that can tell you how to build your product or your service, but there’s not as many people helping you really understand the back-end work of running a business,” Creighton said.
In addition to instruction on personal finance, how to access capital and legal basics, the program also emphasizes the personal growth and development of entrepreneurs, in contrast to the previous Community Business Academy program that JWC Foundation licensed from New Jersey-based Rising Tide Capital and was more geared toward product development, Creighton said.
“Where we really differ is we’re spending a lot more time on the business owner as a person. One of our first modules is built around understanding what you’re building and why, how you build if you’re building a side hustle versus something that you eventually want to be your full-time job,” Creighton said.
The Business Lab program was developed based on feedback from participants who went through the previous Community Business Academy program.
The program is open only to black business owners, who can face added challenges on top of the usual trials that come with entrepreneurship, said Lisa Townes, Blck Street’s director of programs.
“This Business Lab is the one program that is solely for entrepreneurs of color, because so many times they can’t get to the table. They don’t see themselves in the room. They need to know how to better maneuver. And so we try to help them build all of that in that program,” Townes said.
The accelerator is aimed at companies in their first three to five years in business. The cohorts are anticipated to be around 12 to 15 people, which Creighton said is the right number based on experience.
The Blck Street Summit is among the programming offered by the organization. (File photo courtesy of Blck Street)
“We have found that’s a sweet spot, because it allows people to build close relationships, particularly during the in-person side of it,” Creighton said.
The program starts with three months of in-person classwork, followed by six months of coaching in smaller groups. Unlike some similar initiatives, Business Lab won’t have pitch competition. Eligible participants can receive a $3,500 grant as part of the program.
The program fee is on a sliding scale that starts at $270 and goes up to $1,800, based on participants’ household income and size. The old Community Business Academy cost participants between $100 and $250 and ran for 12 weeks.
The new program was also developed with an eye toward growing the Business Lab concept beyond Richmond. Creighton said Business Lab is licensable and something Blck Street wants to see adopted by similar organizations operating in other cities.
“As we were really thinking about the next iteration of the organization, and where we’re going, what we’re focused on, one of the things that was important was scalability. So even from the very beginning when we launched, we always said we had this vision of going into other markets,” Creighton said.
That desire to grow also motivated the organization’s rebrand to resonate outside of Richmond.
JWC Foundation was founded by Creighton, Kelli Lemon and Melody Short in 2022, with the “JWC” initials a reference to the trio’s previously launched Jackson Ward Collective, which later came to operate as an arm of the foundation.
While Jackson Ward has local name recognition and was historically known to many Richmonders as the “Black Wall Street,” there are similar historic black commercial hubs also known as Black Wall Streets in other cities.
“Jackson Ward resonates here, but it doesn’t necessarily resonate from a scalability perspective,” Creighton said. “Everyone has their Black Wall Street experience, and so Blck Street allows us to resonate and expand in that way.”
The membership-based Jackson Ward Collective program is not continuing under the Blck Street banner, which Creighton said allows more energy to go into running Business Lab.
The organization’s annual conference, Blck Street Summit won’t be held this year but is planned to return in 2027. Also continuing is the organization’s recurring, free series focused on bookkeeping and financial planning.
The organization reported $409,000 in revenue and $576,000 in expenses in 2024, according to its latest available tax filings. About 70% of its revenue came from contributions and grants that year.
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