Black Girl Ventures Founder, Omi Bell, on Creating Capital, Capacity and Community

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we interviewed some of our Nasdaq Foundation partners and grant recipients about their roles, diverse backgrounds, and the importance of their work in helping women make history. We spoke with Omi Bell, Founder and CEO of Black Girl Ventures, on how her company helps female founders of color accelerate their businesses.

Tell us about Black Girl Ventures. What is its core mission?

Black Girl Ventures (BVG) was launched in 2016 by me, Shelly “Omi” Bell, to create access to capital for Black and Brown women founders. Our goal is to impact 100,000 women by 2030 by focusing on capital, capacity and community. The lack of access to all three of these braided challenges creates a toxic ecosystem for Black and Brown women entrepreneurs. 

In response, BGV scales tech-enabled, revenue-generating businesses under $1MM to build gender and racial equity and a diverse free market ecosystem.  One of the core values of BGV is to always be learning, adapting and teaching. Sharing is a powerful catalyst to success. Life lessons are the key to growing a business.  I want every woman who experiences BGV to feel a sense of belonging because belonging supplies a sense of agency and license that no other feeling can provide.

This year, the theme of Women’s History Month is “Women Who Tell our Stories.” What does that mean to you? What does it mean for Black Girl Ventures?

Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of sharing our history. It is only fitting that Women’s History Month carries such a powerful theme. For Black Girl Ventures, storytelling is a cornerstone of what we do. Social capital is one of the keys to gaining access to financial capital. Through social capital, our founders can grow their mindset, their revenue and their access to larger opportunities.

Prior to my career as a business and community leader, I spent some time as a performance poet. I used poetry as a vehicle for telling my stories and communing with others. For me, Women Who Tell our Stories is a way to honor the lived experiences of women all over the world. We share similar experiences. When we share them, we let others know that we are not alone. 

Can you talk to us about Black Girl Ventures’ Change Agent Fellowship? What impact has the Nasdaq Foundation’s Quarterly Grant had on the fellowship’s success?

The first thing I want to share is that the program is called a fellowship very deliberately. Each emerging leader is extraordinary, but in communities across the country, these leaders are working together in teams, in fellowship, to achieve things that would be extraordinarily hard to do alone. Although everyone seems to have a “fellows” program these days, that is not BGV’s intent. We want to intentionally support groups of leaders together, working for their own business, each other, their peers and their community. 

The Emerging Leaders Fellowship Program is a unique 12-week leadership development intensive created specifically to extend the capacity of early to mid-stage entrepreneurs. In this program, rising leaders are supported to champion creating access to community, capital and capacity building in their own markets. We need more voices at the table, so this special curriculum for leaders is where we teach them and position them on a fast track to leadership in their local markets, with the support of our incredible corporate partners.

During the program, fueled by Nasdaq Foundation’s investment dollars, we were able to support Fellows by providing Uber Eats vouchers and offering them several resources for free (Canva, Masterclass, Skillshare, a New York Times subscription and more.) All Change Agents also received a $10,000 stipend, which helped provide invaluable resources for their businesses. 

Despite the program ending in December, the Change Agents' access to these resources lasts for a full year. 

In line with the 2023 theme, can you share one or two stories of the impact from the Change Agent Fellowship?

Founder of the language learning company, Diáfano, and BGV New York Fellow, Irma Cedeno, is a linguist, educator and cultural competency strategist passionate about learning languages. 

“As a language learning company that is highly focused on creating change in workforces through language, I find business to be an extremely rewarding path. It is one that allows me to see the results of our efforts every day. However, I always tell my friends, "It's really lonely at the top." Even though Diáfano has amazing staff, I'm a solo founder, I have my heart, my soul and every other part of me invested in this business

That's where having a tribe comes in: people who are going through the same thing and can understand where you're coming from. And when you build your tribe, you want some people to be completely different from you, but in my case, it was important to have women and have women of color just like me. The conversations are just authentic and empathetic, and I don't need to pretend to be anything other than who I am or pretend to feel anything other than what I feel. 

I've also become increasingly proud of being an Afro-Latina, so I wanted to connect more with my Black roots. Black Girl Ventures was just such a good fit for me. Their mission in dissolving the wealth and gender gap through access to capital is aligned with my vision. BGV's focus is wealth equity, which for us is language equity, and cultural equity because language proficiency is both social mobility and financial mobility. 

My business is extremely mission-driven, and the fact that Black Girl Ventures gave us a $10,000 grant helped us with our mission. We were able to hire a Sales and Marketing Trainee for our organization, which helps us with lead generation, an aspect that's key to bringing in new clients. BGV also offered us an added budget to host events to amplify BGV's mission to over 300 founders in New York City. That allowed me to sponsor an event at an organization that I love, DA SPOT NYC, a Brooklyn boutique that features 85+ Black- and BIPOC-owned brands. Through an entrepreneur mixer we were able to host dozens of entrepreneurs, many of them people of color, who came to socialize, learn from other brands and enjoy some amazing home-cooked Caribbean cuisine. 

BGV is the gift that keeps on giving. They set me up with sales mentors at PIMCO, also women of color. One of them met with me monthly and gave me feedback on my sales processes. Next week I start my Capital One Growth Consulting program, in which BGV connected me with Capital One experts who focus on my business growth through categories like technology, branding, HR, finance and more.

What is on the horizon in 2023 for Black Girl Ventures?

More! 

We have three years of data that is showing us two things. First, the needs of and interest from Black and Brown women founders vastly outweighs the opportunities we were offering. We saw that in the sheer volume of applications for programs like our Emerging leaders and Pitch programs. Sometimes the ratios were as high as 30:1. Second, there are founders everywhere. Operating a BGV Community like we do in New York is worth every penny, but it costs a pretty penny to operate. 

So, the challenge faced by BGV is, how do we serve more founders, in more ways, in more places. Answering that loaded question is what is on our horizon: 

1.  We revamped our Emerging Leaders program to have not one but up to two teams trained and deployed annually, doubling our Leaders and doubling the numbers of founders engaged in our outreach. 
2. We eliminated our cost barriers to our online peer community—BGV Connect. All the access to peer support, learning tools, experts, in-kind services, just none of the cost. And it's available to founders no matter where they live. 
3. We are doubling the size of our college aged BGV entrepreneur program, NextGen. We are currently partnering with HBCUs nationwide with Fall and Spring programming. Our next step would be to explore what the program would look like at Community Colleges.
4. Our innovation machine continues to operate at full power. For example, the Pull-up and Pitch program is a fast-paced, lean and mean version of our full Pitch competition. It is allowing us to head into communities like Atlanta, Washington D.C. and Charlotte in 2023, bringing resources, support and a spotlight to founders in new communities. By working with partner organizations on the ground, BGV is also getting a clear picture of potential new markets for us to grow into. 

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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