On May 7, 2024, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) voted unanimously to approve amendments to LPC rules. The rules codify the Commission’s current regulatory review procedure for movable aspects of sidewalk cafes and expand the approach to include roadway cafes. LPC currently does not regulate temporary, movable aspects of sidewalk cafes in historic…
Bettina Benson was getting off a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, on her way home to Marietta, Georgia, when she received an email that altered the course of her business. She was a recipient of a 2023 grant from venture capital firm Fearless Fund, established to help Black women small business owners gain access to capital.
Benson, a self-taught designer, started the online clothing brand Chloé Kristyn in 2016. For her, receiving the grant was about alignment between the fund’s goals and her own mission: Fearless Fund understood the challenges Black women entrepreneurs face, she said.
“Running a business is inherently challenging, and as a woman of color, especially being self-funded and with the gaps in funding, challenges can be even more intense,” she said.
Black women entrepreneurs find it harder to access traditional forms of funding from banks and as well as grants and venture capital funding, according to a study conducted by Crunchbase, a company that provides statistics about businesses.
White men receive a disproportionate amount of venture capital funding when compared with women business owners. The funding gap between White men and Black women entrepreneurs is even bigger, with Black women receiving less than 1 percent of venture capital funding, the report found.
Founded by Arian Simone and Ayana Parsons in 2018, Fearless Fund has raised over $25 million to invest in Black women-owned businesses. The small venture capital firm has also awarded more than 350 grants through a number of different programs, one of which is the Strivers program that awards $20,000. Those grants have gone to Black women business owners to help close the racial disparity and give them the same opportunities for economic advancement, according to Simone.
But now, Fearless Fund’s ability to provide grants exclusively to Black women is at risk.
Edward Blum, a conservative activist who led the fight to strike down race-based affirmative action at colleges and universities, has sued Fearless Fund in federal court. Blum and his organization, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, claim that the fund’s Fearless Strivers Grant contest discriminates against other races and violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, a law created during Reconstruction to support Black people, particularly those who had been previously enslaved.
In the months ahead, a group of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Florida will determine whether to stop Fearless Fund from awarding the $20,000 grants to Black women-owned businesses while the case is making its way through the legal system.
The lawsuit is part of a bigger conversation that worries civil rights activists across the country. They fear that if the Fearless Fund’s grant contest is struck down, it could also be a threat to other organizations focused on helping historically disadvantaged groups. The American Alliance for Equal Rights’ suits are just part of the effort by right-leaning groups to block diversity, equity and inclusion programs. America First Legal, an organization founded by Stephen Miller, who advised former President Donald Trump, has sued fintech firm Hello Alice over its grant to Black-owned small trucking companies.
Benson and other women who have benefited from Fearless Fund grants say the program has been life-changing.
Before receiving the grant, Benson had challenges with funding inventory for wholesale orders, marketing and attracting the right talent. She was in the process of filling some “pretty significant wholesale orders” when the funds arrived, providing a much-needed buffer.
“You fill those orders and then you get paid, but you have to have funds to be able to invest in production and your material,” Benson said.
The fund has allowed her business to grow, she said; she has even launched a new clothing line.
Janell Norris, CEO and founder of Selfie Skin Co., a skincare brand aimed at Black women, had tried for a grant from Fearless Fund a few times before she got one in July. She was in the process of recording a video at her friend’s house for another grant application when she learned that she was in the final round of the selection process.
Her friend still had the camera rolling when Norris received the news and cried tears of joy.
Norris received a $10,000 Fearless Fund grant, through a different program than the Strivers one being targeted by Blum. The money did not just impact her business, it also created opportunities for those around her, she said. It allowed her to expand her products from two to six and get help with both project management and marketing.
“I don’t think that people realize that when one brand gets a grant, it’s not just that one brand, you’re really supporting an ecosystem of other women minority-owned businesses,” she said.
Norris credits Fearless Fund for helping her brand gain visibility through the venture capital firm’s website, as well as allowing her to invest in organizations that serve underprivileged people, and her employees.
But not long after she received the grant, she said, uncertainty set in. A friend pointed out Blum’s lawsuit after she posted about the grant on social media. She worries about the entrepreneurs who were planning to apply for grants in the coming years.
“For me, it was OK, I got rejected, but you know what, I’m gonna just try it again next year, and I’m gonna work on it throughout the year until it comes back around,” Norris said. “To the entrepreneur who got that rejection in 2023, there’s nothing to look forward to in 2024 because someone has decided to attack programs that are beneficial to women of color.”
Action gets underway tomorrow in the preliminary rounds of the NCAA Division III Tennis Championships, and the student-athletes of Baruch College have been eagerly awaiting this opportunity. The CUNY Athletic Conference plays its main tennis season in the fall, and Baruch secured its spot in the championships by winning the CUNY title last October. The spring has been filled with training and matches with non-CUNY opponents, but now it’s showtime.
Among the players is junior Brianna Augustin, a political science major. Originally from Haiti, where soccer was the main sport, she discovered tennis after moving to New York City. In middle school, she saw a flier for her school’s tennis team.
“I thought it sounded interesting; I’d never played tennis in my life, but I went and tried out, made the team,” said Augustin, who understood she had a lot to learn about the sport. “I started going to the public courts where the walls are good for practicing. That’s where I met a coach that started giving me lessons. From there, then history.”
She never envisioned playing college tennis, but grasped the opportunity and ran with it. She found a love for tennis, which has continued into college. Being part of a team is exhilarating. “The team we have is amazing,” Augustin said. “I’ve met my core friends from the team. Since freshman year, we’ve been together. Even those who have graduated are still in contact. It pushes you in all ways.”
Being a student-athlete has given her discipline, focus, and time management skills. The competitive edge of tennis readily transfers to the classroom. Augustin strives to see her name on the list of Baruch Bearcats—student-athletes who also excel academically.
Augustin attended the Preparatory Academy for Writers in Queens. Several of her high school mentors spoke highly of Baruch, which helped her with college selection.
During the cold winter months, she and her college teammates have kept each other motivated in anticipation of competing on the national stage. She appreciates the diverse cultures among the student-athletes.This summer, she will do an internship in addition to training. After college, Augustin anticipates going to law school—her dream school is the Howard University School of Law. She’s currently preparing to take the LSAT exam. Another goal is to become a political commentator or journalist, for which her language skills will be most beneficial.
NEW ORLEANS — Last summer, Derrika Richard felt stuck. She didn’t have enough money to afford child care for her three youngest children, ages 1, 2 and 3. Yet the demands of caring for them on a daily basis made it impossible for Richard, a hairstylist, to work. One child care assistance program rejected her because she wasn’t working enough. It felt like an unsolvable quandary: Without care, she couldn’t work. And without work, she couldn’t afford care.
But Richard’s life changed in the fall, when, thanks to a new city-funded program for low-income families called City Seats, she enrolled the three children at Clara’s Little Lambs, a child care center in the Westbank neighborhood of New Orleans. For the first time, she’s earning enough to pay her bills and afford online classes.
“It actually paved the way for me to go to school,” Richard said one morning this spring, after walking the three children to their classrooms. City Seats, she said, “changed my life.”
Last year, New Orleans added more than 1,000 child care seats for low-income families after voters approved a historic property tax increase in 2022. The referendum raised the budget of the program seven-fold—from $3 million to $21 million a year for 20 years. Because Louisiana’s early childhood fund matches money raised locally for child care, the city gets an additional $21 million to help families find care.
New Orleans is part of a growing trend of communities passing ballot measures to expand access to child care. In Whatcom County, Washington, a property tax increase added $10 million for child care and children’s mental health to the county’s annual budget. A marijuana sales tax approved last year by voters in Anchorage, Alaska, will generate more than $5 million for early childhood programs.
The state of Texas has taken a somewhat different tack. In November, voters approved a state constitutional amendment that allows tax relief for qualifying child care providers. Under this provision, cities and counties can choose to exempt a child care center from paying all or some of its property taxes. Dallas was among the first city-and-county combo in Texas to provide the tax break.
The recent local initiatives are focused on younger children—infants and toddlers—more than ever before, said Diane Girouard, a senior state policy analyst with Child Care Aware, a nonprofit research and advocacy group.
“In the past, we saw more of these local or state-driven initiatives focusing on pre-K, but over the last three years, we’ve seen voters approve ballot measures to invest in child care and early learning,” she said.
One reason: People saw the economic impact of a lack of child care during the pandemic, said Olivia Allen, a co-founder of the nonprofit Children’s Funding Project.
“The value of child care and other parts of the care economy became abundantly clear to a lot of business leaders in a painful way,” Allen said.
For some Americans, the child care crisis has continued, keeping them from being able to hold down jobs and advance in their careers. The number of parents who reported missing work because of child care surged in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak; it has yet to recede to pre-pandemic levels. In Louisiana, 27% of households with kids under age 5 reported a child care disruption in February or March, according to Census Household Pulse Survey data analyzed by the Associated Press in partnership with the Education Reporting Collaborative.
In New Orleans, a city with many in the service industry and other low-wage jobs, the City Seats funding has been transformative for parents struggling to hold down demanding, mostly non-unionized jobs. The program has also been a boon for the child care centers themselves.
Richard had struggled off and on to find affordable child care since dropping out of college when she gave birth to her oldest son, now 12. That’s even though she immediately put her name down for a spot at child care centers when she discovered she was pregnant. “Literally, when you see the ‘positive’ line, you fill out an application,” she said of taking a pregnancy test.
Now that she can think about building a career again, Richard has set her sights on finishing her college degree. Her dream is to have a career in forensics.
Another parent, Mike Gavion, who has two children enrolled at Early Partners in the Garden District, said City Seats allowed his wife to finish school and get a nursing job. Before the program was available, Gavion’s wife had to care for the children, now 2 and 4, and could only make slow progress through the coursework she needed to qualify for a job.
“It really gave us an opportunity,” Gavion said. “If we had to pay for two kids, I don’t think she would have been able to do nursing school.”
Families in New Orleans qualify for City Seats if they have children from newborn to age 3 and earn within 200% of the federal poverty level. But many don’t immediately get a spot: As of April, City Seats had 821 students on its waitlist, according to Agenda for Children, the nonprofit that administers the program.
About 70% of the City Seats budget pays for children to attend centers ranked as high quality on the state’s rating system. The rest of the budget goes to improving quality: Child care providers have access to a team that includes a speech pathologist, a pediatrician and social workers.
Participating providers are required to pay their staff at least $15 an hour—on average, Louisiana child care workers made $9.77 an hour in 2020—and abide by strict teacher-to-child ratios and class sizes. They also receive professional development from early learning experts.
Funding from City Seats has allowed Wilcox Academy’s three centers in the city’s North Broad, Central City and Uptown neighborhoods to raise average staff pay to $18 an hour. The Academy’s goal is to raise it even higher—to $25 an hour.
“Teachers deserve it,” said Rochelle Wilcox, the Academy’s founder and director. “They deserve to go on vacation, they deserve to buy a home, they deserve to buy a car. … This is not a luxury.” ___
Valeria Olivares of The Dallas Morning News and Sharon Lurye of The Associated Press contributed reporting.
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content.
