Longtime Harlem Week board member and Harlem Rocket co-founder, Michael Preston
Michael Preston has been committed to service and support of the Harlem community throughout his professional life. He has served as a board member with Harlem Week for the better part of 30 years, going back to 1992, and is the co-founder of Harlem Rocket, a Black-owned high-speed boat tour of Harlem on the Hudson River that is set to launch this summer.
Preston is also vice president of customer experience & government affairs for Paradise Express, the parent company of Harlem Rocket. He has also been a customer service manager and theater manager with the Atlanta Civic Center.
“There is something about being able to provide people with an experience, and that has resonated throughout my life,” Preston said about his professional career.
One of five children, Preston has many cherished memories of growing up in Harlem and becoming immersed in the culture. His father was in the military, so Preston was born in Sacramento, but he and his family moved back to Harlem, where they were originally from, when he was 3 years old.. He attended St. Thomas the Apostle and Powell Memorial High School.
“Between 115th Street and 125th Street was our playground,” Preston said.
His father held numerous jobs and was heavily involved in the arts as a jazz musician, photographer, sculptor, painter, jewelry-maker, and cartoonist, which inspired Preston’s passion for managing and producing shows. At a young age, he would work with his father as a poet, collecting tickets, or managing the lights.
“My appreciation for the arts, culture, painting, music was something we experienced every day of our life,” Preston recalled.
In 1979, when Preston was 16, his father died from a heart attack. He attributed this tragedy to high blood pressure, which motivated his life decision to switch to a vegan diet.
After graduating from high school, Preston was set to go to Penn State, but chose to attend HBCU Virginia State University thanks to being guided by his grandfather, who was an alum. While at Virginia State, he switched to vegetarianism, which he has followed to this day. He also eventually transferred and earned his bachelor’s degree from City College of New York in 2012. He holds both Virginia State and City College dear to him, since one is an HBCU and the other is in Harlem.
When Preston first came aboard Harlem Week, he had been managing a law firm in addition to working with Greyhound. Tony Rogers, former executive board member of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, asked him to help out government affairs, managing permits, etc., during what was a difficult period for Harlem Week in the early 1990s.
He was asked to join the board, and has renewed every year since with the exception of 2003–2005, when he worked with the Atlanta Civic Center.
“We give away more than 110,000 in scholarships, grants, and awards to nonprofits and students going and returning to college,” Preston said of his work with Harlem Week. “I love the concept of us supporting our own—but it is also about us bringing the art, the culture, and the experience to first, the residents of Harlem and New York, and then, the visitors from throughout nationally and internationally,“ Preston said.
While at City College, Preston connected with his current business partner, Garry Johnson. They created Paradise Express in 2012 and more recently established Harlem Rocket, which is expected to launch at the end of July.
The boat tour will take passengers on a tour of Harlem on the Hudson River, going north from 125th Street to the northern top of Manhattan at Spuyten Duyvil Creek and then coming down as a thrill ride. Tour elements include history lessons about Harlem sites and Black people in the maritime industry, such as Crispus Attucks and Matthew Henson.
Harlem Rocket is partnering with sponsors such as the electronics company Ray Marine and Universoul Circus.
More information can be found at the website Harlem Rocket.com, where tickets will become available, and on Instagram @HarlemRocket.
The Harlem Rocket is part of the larger Harlem Waterfront Initiative, which aims to spur economic development in Harlem. Other elements of the initiative will be a ferris wheel called the Harlem Wheel and the Harlem Maritime Museum.
Preston cherishes his family, including five adult children—four daughters and one son—and four grandchildren.
“I’m proud to be of Harlem—living in Harlem; my children born and raised in Harlem; and connected to institutions like the Apollo, the Studio Museum, the Schomburg,” Preston said. “Being a part of Harlem Week is all-encompassing.”
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MoCaFi wants to bring financial services to underbanked communities
The creators of the New York City-based financial technology platform MoCaFi (https://mocafi.com/) joined with representatives of the Bank of New York Mellon to ring the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) closing bell on June 9.
Ringing the NYSE bell on the trading floor heralded MoCaFi’s new call for people of color looking to get their finances in order.
Wole Coaxum, founder of MoCaFi, told the Amsterdam News in an exclusive interview that his company’s goal is to help broaden access to the financial services industry for the underbanked, and to create better, more attentive banking services for those who feel underappreciated by the financial service companies they currently bank with.
Coaxum created MoCaFi in 2016 after spending more than 20 years in the financial services industry. He had worked with Citigroup, Willis Financial, and JPMorgan Chase, but after the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, Coaxum said he had a rethink about the direction his working life was taking.
“The financial services industry is a terrific industry to create change and economic prosperity for people, but it’s not doing it for all communities,” Coaxum said, declaring that he has real concerns about how economic and social justice issues are being handled by most financial institutions. “I wanted to use my time and my talents to create an economic justice agenda that can help the Black community move forward and address issues such as wealth inequality…I wanted to create a business that’s a sustainable business model for closing the wealth gap.”
In 2016, Coaxum created MoCaFi—Mobility Capital Finance, Inc.—as a digital banking
platform. There are no brick-and-mortar branches for the bank. Customers can open a MoCaFi Mobility Bank Account and obtain a MoCaFi Mobility Debit Mastercard via the company website or by downloading the MoCaFi app on their smartphones.
No credit score or Social Security Number is required to open an account. Accounts are available for undocumented people and even for people who have to use a foreign passport or ID.
MoCaFi’s central goal is to offer access to banking services to people of color, many of whom are unbanked or underbanked. The market research company Statista found that 13.8 percent of Black households were unbanked in 2019, and a 2021 survey by the FDIC found that people without bank accounts either “Don’t have enough money to meet minimum balance requirements” or simply “Don’t trust banks” to protect their privacy.
Not having access to a bank account puts people at a disadvantage. During events like the recent COVID-19 pandemic, when the government was trying to help stabilize communities, those unable to access funds were in desperate straits.
“In Los Angeles, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti in the summer 2020 said, ‘I want to create contactless government. I want a way for residents to have single sign-ons for city services. I want a way for the residents of Los Angeles to receive money from city government and I want a way for people to pay for city services all electronically,’” Coaxum recalled.
“If you want to create a mechanism to pay people electronically and they don’t have bank accounts, how are you going to be able to do that? MoCaFi has created a solution called the Angeleno Connect Account. And now Los Angeles has the plumbing in place to be able to fulfill that vision that Mayor Garcetti had.”
As part of its latest efforts, MoCaFi will play a part in the NYC Civic Engagement Commission’s payout of $1 million in planning grants to groups that took part in the city’s Participatory Budgeting program. The company is also set to launch a new program called On Our Block that will bring banking services, financial programming, and resources to local communities of color.
“We see great opportunity in terms of finding ways of bringing people into the financial mainstream by working with partners like the Bank of New York Valley,” Coaxum said. “That’s why ringing the bell and the New York Stock Exchange for us is so impactful—because we want to re-imagine how you can engage people into the financial mainstream to create wealth. If the Black community, for example, was as fully banked as their white counterparts, that would create trillions of dollars of GDP in this country.
“There’s $5 billion just in New York City alone that’s been allocated to residents to help them move forward—but that’s not getting to the people because you don’t have the infrastructure to address that. At MoCaFi, we’re trying to address that problem.”
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