In this episode of From Chains to Links, entrepreneurs Rahama Wright and Danielle Toussaint bring valuable insights on what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur in today’s political climate. An empowering dialogue with best practices and real-life experiences, Rahama and Danielle stress the importance of working across the African diaspora to build Black wealth and economic independence—and why it’s important we get out of our own way. It’s gems on gems on gems.
I am Kelly Burton and I am your co-host. I’m here with Ifeoma Ike. How are you?
I’m so great. I’m already excited about this episode. I love our guests already. Who are our fine guests with us?
We are excited because we’re going to have the conversation with Rahama Wright and Danielle Toussaint who are both amazing entrepreneurs. It’s so important for us to have a deeper understanding of the nuanced experience of Black entrepreneurs at this moment, especially since the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action and all the ripple effects that it has had on the entrepreneur community. Before we get into that, I want you to tell us a little bit about you and your background. Rahama, we’ll start with you.
Thank you for having me on the show. I’m really excited to be here. I am the Founder of Yeleen Beauty. What we are is a manufacturing facility for early-stage beauty businesses in Washington DC. We remove barriers to entry in terms of giving folks the space to make products so that we as a community can capture a much larger market share of the multibillion-dollar beauty industry.
Thank you, Rahama. Danielle?
First of all, I am glad to be here. I’m still the eight-year-old girl that nobody told couldn’t do whatever she wanted. I’m grateful for that. I’m all the things I was. I was bossy. I was always planning events. I planned my teacher’s retirement party in the third grade. When I think about my day job, I run Purple Haus, which is a creative intelligence and strategic communications consultancy. I direct a lot of teams and creative teams. I help executive leaders figure out their voices. I throw a lot of parties and events. It’s a joy. I focus specifically on folks who are trying to create impact.
Both of you have access to not only your personal experience, but you each in your own way support other entrepreneurs in their journey. Let’s talk a little bit about what it has been like to exist as a Black business owner because it was August 2023 when that decision came down. Any reflections?
When I saw that decision come down, my immediate emotion was pure rage. To see how the advances we have made as a community in this country are pulled back and under attack, especially since we still have such a small market share in so many industries, is upsetting and angering. To know that Black women founders capture less than half of a percent of venture funding and to see the Fearless Fund have to fight these attacks to give us a little tiny piece of the pie makes you feel like we are back in the ‘50s and the ‘60s. We collectively need to fight back.
I love it. Hence, Declaration ‘26, which is an innovation counterplan to project 2025. We’ll talk about that later in the season. Danielle?
I had a delayed reaction because, at the time the decision came down, I wasn’t running my consultancy full-time. I was in-house in an executive role where we supported other early-stage innovators. I had this secondhand reaction but I understood the implications. Starting over in January 2024, it gave me, honestly, a different resolve. Owning things is necessary. If we balance things out, we create nine million jobs. To me, that’s what’s at stake. If we all decided, we could shift that power dynamic.
That’s just not about implications for Black people and Black communities, but that’s about creating a stronger economy for everyone.
If you truly embody capitalism, then what you said is what would resonate through a lot of people’s minds. We’re hindering growth. We’re hindering prosperity. Black businesses continue to show that when they hire and when they create products, more people become consumers, which adds to the economy. More people are able to pay their bills, which adds to stability.
It almost begs the question of whether this is about something else because if this was purely about making money or creating a stronger economic reality, even if you don’t necessarily believe that all people should be engaged, to be honest with you, in a fair participation, there’s something about, “If you care about money, then you should have also been like, “This is going to hurt the pocket.” I love that it’s the combination of new resolve and also rage. I don’t want to lose that eloquent rage. Shout-out to Brittney Cooper. There’s an eloquent way to be angry about this and then turn it into action, which I hope is what’s happening.
To piggyback off what you said, it’s about power and control. In this period that we’re living in, as we see more people wanting to have more equity and a bigger share of this pie that we call the American dream, we are going to be under attack. It’s about telling us that we need to stay in our place. What this decision ultimately is communicating to the Black community is, “You’re reaching too far and you need to be pulled back.” For me, as someone who’s been an entrepreneur for two decades and failing forward often and pivoting, we can’t allow individuals, organizations, and special interest groups to tell us who we are and tell us what we deserve in this country, especially when we built this country.
I feel that being an entrepreneur is a very nuanced experience that if you’re not an entrepreneur, you really don’t get it. Can you talk a little bit about what it takes to build a successful company in this climate?
It feels very different doing this now than it felt in 2017 when I was running my prior agency. Collaboration is one of the things that will distinguish those who survive and those who don’t. We’ve been so programmed to compete, and this is not a time for that. Many resources are being constrained. There’s a lot of this shrinkage, it feels like, sometimes in ways in which people want to engage. If we play small, which is what I can do to edge you out, we will lose. This is not a game for small-mindedness. We only get big when we go together. To me, that is the thing. Everything I do is done in partnership. I have collaborators. I am on so many other people’s projects. There are always cross-referrals. That is the only way you play this game successfully.
There’s a misconception that being an entrepreneur, you can take a vacation anytime you want to, it’s the Instagram post of being on a beach somewhere, or having all the time in the world. It’s a lot of work. Being an entrepreneur at this time, to your question, you’re going to shed some tears. There are going to be some amazing highs and some very low lows.
To your point, in order to be successful, you have to have and know who is in your tribe, who has your back, and whose back you also have. It is about collective movement forward. I have this love-hate relationship with the word capitalism because capitalism, the way it has been perpetuated in this world, is about excluding others. It’s about, “How can I take resources from one group and make another group successful?” It’s about domination. Capitalism does not work for our community. We have to be focused on how we can get our community together to move forward.
Instead of what you’re talking about, we see the model of being the only one or being number one and making year-over-year profitability that is so unsustainable that we’re seeing the tech industry letting go of thousands of jobs because of the way capitalism has been perpetuated in this world. We need to move to collective economics. We need to move back to what we used to do as a community here, not only in the US but in the global diaspora.
The intersection of Pan-Africanism and working to build our communities together, supporting each other, and bringing Black dollars back into the Black community is what this moment is calling us to do. The US Black buying power is $1.6 trillion. We have the resources. It’s a matter of how we can get those resources aligned back into our community. How do we take this idea of supporting Black and truly committing to it so that we can transform communities here in the US as well as communities in the diaspora? For me, I believe that the way we address a lot of our systemic issues is through partnership with our African counterparts.
That’s the impetus behind the show. How do we rediscover collective economics? What is the collective play? That’s at the heart of what we’re trying to figure out at Black Innovation Alliance.
In the first season, we started the uncovering of these complicated conversations around what capitalism means. Is Black capitalism a different term? Collective economics, does everyone understand what that means? Collective economics, is it the same as cooperative economics? Let’s even use the term feminism. A lot of Black people would not say that they are feminists because of the White feminist movement and what that means.
I would say the first feminist was probably Harriet Tubman because she was like, “I’m about this life. I’m about freedom. I’m going to keep running towards freedom. I’m going to keep coming back and get some people, even my no-good husband. I’m going to keep getting free.” That is also to say that the definition of a thing, in some ways, changes when we decide that we are going to make it our own.
I love that you are raising that. In a lot of ways, even the things that America claims that it believes in are not what they really believe in. For those that do believe in capitalism, we’re also challenging the question of, “Is that what’s happening? By definition, our participation would be welcomed because when we were participating for free and forced through slavery, you gained a lot. Our participation shows that you are still gaining a lot.” The show is also here to unearth these uncomfortable conversations that even people who claim that they’re allies aren’t necessarily wanting to have that conversation.
We might take that though one step further, which is that we weren’t ever designed into this system as participants. We were designed into this system as a product. People think about Wall Street and even its physical location in New York City. It was there because that’s where slave ships were able to unload. From there, they would do the trading. We were a commodity that was traded for the beginning of the capitalist system that we have. You were only ever even anticipated to be something that was bought and sold. You were never meant to own.
That’s what’s being challenged in all of this. It is a form of power, but it’s a fundamental reimagination of who gets to participate and own anything. We were only ever given one role in this script and we threw the whole play away and were like, “We want to own stuff.” That’s throwing everything off because it’s not how we were ever imagined in this system.
Since we bring this up a lot, my question to your point, Danielle, is how do you go from being owned to being owners? What do we as a people need to unlearn and what do we need to learn?
We need to unlearn the idea of anyone having the power to determine our destiny in this world. White people did not create Black people. White people do not own Black people. We, too often, are waiting for permission to realize the change that we know we need to see in our community. I also think that’s part of the pushback. That’s why I was saying it’s like, “You’re reaching too far.” No one should limit how far we reach or how far we go.
We also need to unlearn the difference between Black elitism and Black excellence. It is not the same thing. That is part of this conversation we don’t talk enough about. That is limiting us really and truly. I see that here in DC where I live and I see it when I travel the continent. We need to divest from the systems that continue to hold us back.
I also believe we need to double down on supporting each other financially. I’m in the beauty industry. McKinsey data shows that of the $60 billion-plus that’s generated annually in the US beauty industry, Black businesses only capture $1.5 billion while Black consumers consume $6.6 billion. We can look at the numbers and see the unfair market share. It’s what you were saying before. It’s the fact that we’re contributing to these industries. We need to come to a point where we decide we’re taking it. We’re not asking permission. We are taking what is rightfully ours. It goes back to ownership.
When we look at the beauty supply chain and value chain starting in Africa with plant-based ingredients all the way here to retailers, one of the things that I’ve seen consistently is that we do not own distribution. We do not own manufacturing. There are so many pieces of it we don’t own. The manufacturing piece is so incredibly important. Building the Yeleen Beauty Makerspace and creating the opportunity for Black and Brown founders to own the market around manufacturing is part of building new systems. We need to say, “This system doesn’t work for us. We’re creating our own systems. You can come with us or you can stay behind.”
That’s a needle we could move in eighteen months. In another annual date round, we can move from that 1.5% to 6%. It’s deciding that we as a community are going to exclusively purchase our products from Black folks. Danielle, what do we need to unlearn?
It’s most of what we learn in school. When I think about my K-12 education and how much of it on a day-to-day basis was setting me up for everything that I do in my life now, it’s a fraction. It was almost everything I was doing outside of my regular classroom day. It was everything I did through leadership in the community and through having parents in a wonderful faith community who consistently poured into me and helped me develop character. There are lots of these other skills that then allow me to do the work that I do. It wasn’t the classroom curriculum.
The real question we need to ask ourselves is, are we okay with continuing to teach our young people things that they don’t need and not teach them everything that they do need? Are we content with a structure where by the time they even discover owning entrepreneurship as a real pathway for wealth-building and life-building, the freedom that you have to make decisions about where you are, who you are, and what that affords you, that they only get there once they’re maybe going to post-secondary and then, if not, failing?
I find that many other communities invest all of that in their young people. They almost make it a predetermined thing that they will be owners, so they train them from the very beginning to occupy a certain space. The whole curriculum needs to be thrown out. There are really wonderful, innovative models, but how do we make this the standard in our K-12 education experiences? How do we stop assuming everybody needs it to be K-12 when some of our young people are brilliant entrepreneurs in demonstrating promise even when they’re 13 or 14? How do we start to create shorter cycles, high school leading to post-secondary pathways, before they get to twelve so young people can start their lives and begin to contribute to their communities, for their own families, and for their own well-being?
I want to note that in an age where we have AI innovations that are accelerating and we have a creator economy that’s booming where many of our kids are entering as consumers more than they are as creators, producers, and owners, how do we ask different questions about the ways that technology could accelerate this learning for us as a community and also recognize that they have native fluency in technology that we may not have if we’re Millennials or older? We need to flip this, give them space, and let them teach us what is possible for them. There’s not a lot we’re learning that I’m ready to hold onto. This needs to be a space where we start Whiteboard White paper like, “What could it look like?”
As you were talking, there were a couple of things. One, I always get frustrated in a beautiful way when somebody talks about education because A) It’s true, and B) When I think of where the most elite send their kids to school, it’s to Montessori schools, which were schools that were modeled after poor Black women in projects and the ghetto who were teaching their children different ways outside of the school system and ways for them to explore nature and explore the world. They were being studied by a White researcher who then developed the Montessori program and attributed it to mothers in the projects and the hoods that were teaching their children. Yet, it is the most exclusive form of education.
When you think of the top 5 tech companies and Fortune 500, if you want to be honest, 4 of those 5 founders went to Montessori. Steve Jobs was the only one who did not but he sent his kids to Montessori. What does that mean? That means that when you’re talking about this fluency, certain things about digital technology are not only going to advance, but they’re advancing quicker than they ever have before.
It’s not on the teachers though to know everything about the technology. It’s on the teachers to expose those young people as early as they can to evolving technologies. If you have teachers that are not necessarily connected to that fluency and there’s no revamp of our K-12, you’re having young people who are thinking they’re doing exactly what their parents told them they need to do, some of them are subscribing to Black elitism. There still is this divide between, “You may have all these degrees, but you may not necessarily be able to compete in this economy.”
I find that we need to be having a different conversation. I used to be one of those people who was like, “I don’t know about Black excellence,” because Black excellence and Black elitism were often conflated with each other. By reclaiming Black excellence and recognizing that I inherently believe that’s different than Black elitism, then we can also start imagining how excellence in education means evolving at a quicker pace to be connected into these growth models versus these competition models that oftentimes we needed to have a livable wage, if we’re going to be honest. That’s why we have these degrees.
The final thing I’ll add is this is also connected to our policymakers. One of the things that many of us have been frustrated about is that it’s not that our electeds don’t care, but it’s that many of them aren’t fluent in the ever-evolving digital technology space. That’s across races and across regions. How do you hold, you know, some of these tech companies accountable if you don’t understand the science or you don’t understand how it works? This is ultimately a global economic challenge if we’re not fluent enough to compete but also to regulate.
We have a lot of entrepreneurs who tune in to the show. Can you give our entrepreneurs one piece of advice from your journey on how they can have some staying power as an entrepreneurs?
It’s all about your team. You have to really understand how to build teams for anyone to be successful. The way that we talk about entrepreneurs is always about one person. It’s always about, “This founder did this. This founder tackled this problem and became enormously successful.” That’s not the real story. This person had a whole group of folks from investors, advisors, team members, and whatever it may be that helped them get their vision out there and grow that vision to be successful.
It goes back to the way we model and communicate this whole idea that one person can take on a mountain and be so successful on their own. We miss this huge other part of the story where it’s that first, second, or third hire. It’s the team members. The people around you are so important. The first thing I would say is who’s around you? Who do you need to be around you or who do you need to be around? How do you build that support system to be able to grow your business?
Something that I learned as an entrepreneur is you have to have some level of self-awareness as to the extent to which you are a good manager. A lot of entrepreneurs are not good managers. You have to learn, be self-aware, and have people hold the mirror up to you. That’s a big piece. Build the team. Then, work on yourself because if you’re going to be a manager of people, you’re going to have to be in a good place.
To that point, part of who you hire on your team should not be carbon copies of you. It should be like building a well-rounded team that can flow with you and cover for those places where maybe you aren’t the one. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing the COO role. Maybe you should go get a COO and let that person be great.
You asked about what I would say. I say one of them is to divorce yourself from the identity of the person who is every day making decisions and actively working towards your goal. Sometimes, entrepreneurship is a lifestyle thing. It’s been marketed. I don’t know who is doing the copy. It’s all lies. It is hard and it’s not linear. You are still an entrepreneur even if you take a step back and work in someone else’s company towards their vision, to build capital, to build skills, or to make sure that your mental health is well and all, and then come back to it. Your identity is still an entrepreneur, but you are building what you need for the bigger vision.
The next part of that is to set your own success metrics. I hear everybody trying to be a unicorn. I’m like, “Do you know how much money is between $0 and $1 billion? Do you know how many other goals you could have had in between that? Your life would’ve been fine. You would’ve been retiring. You could have been on a beach somewhere but you’re out here hustling for VCs so that you can be a unicorn, and then what?”
I don’t think people are setting their own success measures. Mine are around my well-being and health. I don’t set metrics around what I want my company to do. I set metrics around what I want to be able to contribute back to the broader ecosystem. Whether I’m leading as a founder of anything or I’m working in another role, I have tracked over the past couple of years and have personally either done deals, contracted with, or helped raise $5 million for other women and Black women-owned companies. To me, that’s how I am measuring my success because it’s not just about me and mine. It’s about us. We have to set those ourselves or we will get sucked into a culture that was not designed for our well-being or for our wealth, quite frankly, and that’s depleting.
Can I say something quickly about that? We all hear the statistic about Black women being the fastest segment of entrepreneurs opening doors and opening businesses. We are also the fastest to close them. Based on JP Morgan’s stats, the average Black woman-owned business in America generates less than $25,000 a year and we are not employers.
When you’re talking about the metrics, I could not agree more with this super huge obsession we have with being unicorns and being so big when what we need in our community is healthy, profitable businesses. You can be a unicorn and not be profitable. We need to understand the difference between top-line revenue and profitability and understand how to manage cashflow and all of these things that we need in our businesses and our community, but we are focused on this idea that the only way to be successful is to be huge and have hundreds of millions of dollars.
What we need in our community is for our companies to go from making less than $25,000 a year to a healthy, profitable 6-figure or 7-figure business. That’s a good business. We need to reteach people that to be a successful business does not only mean bringing in eight, nine, or ten figures when so many of the small businesses in our community can’t even make it. They can’t even get to a place where they’re making it. I agree with you. Part of that is redefining what it is to be successful in business.
Another thing to the unlearned question, and I believe this so much, is we have to not see other Black people as the enemy. How do we unlearn that and really see each other as, “If you are in the room, I’m in the room. If I’m in the room, you’re in the room.” How do we get to a place where we can be radically supportive of each other? When Issa Rae was at that award show and they asked her who she was supporting, she was like, “Everyone Black. Why would you even ask me this question?” There is still a mental leap that we have in our community where being radically supportive of each other is not seen as an asset.
It is seen as a risk.
I want to share though that I don’t think that we made that up. To this point around who is our audience and how we can change those behaviors, we have to create that safety for one another and model that. When you have an opportunity and a business presents and it’s not for you, and you know it’s not for you, it is saying out loud at the moment, “I’m not sure this is for me, but here are three other amazing founders I know that you should talk to.”
I’ve done that a few times and it has come back and has been like, “This was so great. It was the right connection.” We are so sometimes starved for the next dollar. The scarcity and the insecurity lead us to hoard every opportunity versus taking an approach of this radically abundant mindset of saying, “There will always be more. What’s for me won’t miss me. Therefore, this must be for you,” and you are a facilitator.
The other thing is the way in which the ecosystem that supports and nurtures early-stage founders is part of the problem because it teaches us that whatever we thought was successful was not big enough. I can’t tell you how many accelerators I’ve been to that were for Black and Brown or spaces that were meant to incubate but the first thing you get in the door and because of who is sponsoring or funding them, there is this pressure for them to try to push everyone to figure out these business models that work really well for returns for people you don’t know that you don’t think even want to invest in you yet. You haven’t even been able to execute your initial idea and someone’s already talking you out of it to tell you, “It’s not right,” or, “It’s not big enough,” or, “It’s not scalable.”
We’ve got to also interrogate every step in the process where we are trying to do good and make sure that we’re not doing harm inadvertently by making people feel super self-conscious about their goals that might be achievable and might get you to profitability in the name of building this bigger tech ecosystem or business ecosystem that’s working against us.
Ife, do you want to close this out?
We are moving beyond the mire of the Supreme Court decision by doing exactly what you all are talking about, which is modeling what is even when it feels like it isn’t right. One of those things is we have the right to innovate. It’s not something that we need to negotiate. It’s not something that we need to ask permission for.
I want to hear from each of you. When you hear the right to innovate, what sparks for you? What does that look like? What do the conditions look like when we say we have the right to innovate? I want to hear some of your thoughts on that phrase. To put it in another way, if you were to say, “These things being here prove that we have the right to innovate,” what does that look like? Either one of those is a combination of those thoughts or feelings.
It has looked like, for me, believing and being very clear that I can be more than one thing. I can do more than one thing even at the same time. It doesn’t mean that I’m doing everything, but it does mean that there’s a belief in our multifacetedness and an embracing of all the dimensions of our intellect, ingenuity, and creativity.
I have a for-profit, Purple Haus. I incorporated a nonprofit arm into it, Dream Purple Foundation, which is focused on helping solve the downstream problem, which is AI is already displacing so many people in the creative economy. How we do work, how we do marketing, how we do websites, and how we do film production, all of it is shifting. I am in a creative company helping organizations leverage all this while simultaneously seeing that there is this approaching shift in how we will all be doing our jobs.
My path won’t be the next person graduating from college’s path. They won’t get here. They will have to do something different. They will have to use technology differently. Being a part of that solution even as I help people figure out these problems is how I say, “I have a right to innovate. I don’t have to wait for something to happen to me, for jobs to go away, and for my entire industry to shift. I can decide right now to be the person who solves it.” We all need to be asking ourselves what jobs will exist. If it’s 2024, please don’t be building this company in a way that is super analog. You have to ask yourself, “What will every industry look like?” It will look different, so start building it differently.
The way that I understand the question is we have a right to show up as Black founders and Black entrepreneurs. At this moment, people are making us question whether or not we should be leaning into our Blackness because our Blackness is under attack. It’s risky to be Black. It’s risky to support other Black entrepreneurs. There are all of these risks around who we are and how we show up in the world.
Part of this idea of the right to innovate is I have a right to show up the way I want to show up in this world. As an entrepreneur and as a business leader, this is how I’m showing up. You can attack it, but I have a right to defend myself and continue to plant my feet down and say, “I’m not going to move.” That scares people that Black people are saying, “We’re going to fight for what is not only ours, what we’ve worked for, and what we deserve, but you can’t come and take it away from us,” even though they are trying to.
Part of this right is also about being able to have choices and being able to make our own choices. For me, and very similar to what you’re talking about, we build a business in the community and build it collectively. The Makerspace that we’re building here in DC is not just for my company and my brand. It’s for all brands that want to grow in this industry.
I agree so much. We’re trying to think through, “How do we incorporate biotechnology? How do we incorporate AI in our formulation? How do we figure out from the beginning how to create a facility and a space that addresses sustainability and energy and create something that is for the future but is also for the future of our community?” That is that process of really thinking through what innovation means.
We can’t shy away from the fact that how we look in this world, the fact that we have Black skin, the fact that we have Afro hair, and the fact that we have culture from all these different places in the diaspora is under attack. We cannot back away from our Blackness. Part of our innovation is our Blackness, our stories, and the history that we have not only on these shores but on the shores of the world. I really want us to feel a sense of not only pride because I do believe we have that pride, but a sense of resolve that we will never back away from who we are as a community.
This conversation has been so powerful. Thank you so much.Thank you for coming and sharing, but also, thank you for what you model. It’s so important. Thank you for all the good work that you do. We are so grateful.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining us for another episode of the show. We need to radically support one another. It’s not just about me and mine. It’s about us. These are ideas and thoughts that are going to continue to cycle in my mind and my spirit. I hope it has the same effect on you. Join us again for the next episode of the show where we are going to continue to go there. We appreciate all of you. We’ll see you next time.
Danielle Kristine Toussaint is the founder of Purple Haus, a creative intelligence and communications strategy consultancy that partners with visionary leaders advancing new frontiers in economic mobility, health, environment, education, workforce, technology and philanthropy to achieve breakthroughs in business and society.
Over her twenty-year career, she has unlocked over $250 million in corporate and philanthropic investments to organizations where she managed external affairs, communications, development, and partnership efforts. A seasoned nonprofit executive and entrepreneurial leader, she has been Chief External Affairs Officer for NewSchools Venture Fund, Communicator in Residence for Ascend at The Aspen Institute, and Managing Director of Marketing and Communications for both iMentor and KID Museum. She has also been a fractional executive at The Knowledge House and TRAILS.
Her book, Dare to Think Purple, shares leadership insights and inspiring stories from social entrepreneurs and impact-driven executives and her ghostwriting and self-authored articles and speeches have been featured in outlets such as Huffington Post, Forbes.com, Business Insider, and TEDx. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University and an M.S.Ed from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She is on the national board of directors for Reading Partners and an active member of the Jackie Robinson Foundation Alumni Association.
Former Peace Corps volunteer Rahama Wright is a social entrepreneur who works at the intersection of beauty, business development, and policy. Her entrepreneurial journey has spanned bootstrapping, securing venture funding, landing retail deals, and navigating manufacturing, supply chain development, marketing, and sales. She is the Founder and CEO of Yeleen (Shea Yeleen and the Yeleen Beauty Makerspace). Shea Yeleen, a social impact beauty brand, manufactures pure plant-based shea butter body care products that nourish the skin and empower its producers by creating living wage jobs for women in Ghana. Shea Yeleen products can be found at Macy’s, MGM Resorts, and select Whole Food Markets. The brand has been featured in a variety of media outlets including O, The Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Washington Business Journal, and MSNBC. The Yeleen Beauty Makerspace will provide manufacturing, business, and educational support for early-stage companies that manufacture and/or sell hair, skin, and body products.
An in-demand speaker, panelist, and leading voice on African women’s economic and business development, Wright is serving her fourth term as a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Doing Business in Africa and delivered talks at The United Nations, the World Bank, and the Sustainable Brands Conference. Rahama is also the Founder of the DC Pop-Up, a collective of women and minority owned businesses in the DC metro area that are a part of the Made in DC Program. The DC Pop-Up is a curated retail experience that markets and sells products on behalf of makers ranging from art, jewelry, apparel, house wares, and specialty foods. The goal of the collective is to provide inclusive business opportunities that address gender and racial inequality. Rahama resides in Washington, D.C., and is an avid traveler who has visited and worked in 36 countries.
