100 Fund Challenge
In The Black 2050 is mainly about organizing the resources that are currently in existing Black organizations, but not every Black person is in an organization. While I encourage everyone to join at least one because we're stronger as groups than we are as individuals, I've come up with a potential strategy to organize Black capital from individuals.
I repeat, this is just ONE strategy. There are others that we can come up with, and we should try those too. The key to success in many businesses is not to spend forever trying to find the perfect product or strategy. It's being able to test products and strategies rapidly and keep the ones that work while getting rid of those that don't. We don't need to argue endlessly about the path to take forward to achieve Black empowerment. There are literally infinite paths, and we should narrow them down to say 100 or 1,000 and try all of those. Keep going on the ones that work, and leave the ones that don't. If you don't like the strategies I propose, come up with your own and try them. We'll see which ideas work out better. We can't get caught up in analysis paralysis.
Related to that point is the concept of decentralization. This is a key lesson we should have learned from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, but its seems that most of us did not. Centralized leadership is vulnerable. Just like trying to pick one company or one person to get behind on any initiative related to Black people leaves us vulnerable. They can take out individual leaders, but it's much harder to take out a system comprised of thousands of leaders and organizations with a leadership succession plan and a common set of causes. We don't need one large Black organization to represent us all in the African Union, for example, we need a method to delegate various leadership tasks among countless individuals or organizations in a decentralized fashion. More of a coalition than one single organization. The coalition can have a name, just not an irreplaceable leader. Leaders should rotate and should all be quickly replaceable.
That said, here's a concept on how we can organize the pent up Black capital just going to waste in our communities. The 100 fund challenge.
The goal is to set up at least 100 investment funds focused strictly on Black economic development. They can pick any strategy, industry, or geographic focus as long as it serves the goal of Black economic independence and self-determination. Then we get 1,000,000 Black people to contribute $10 each to each of those funds every year. That's $1,000 per person per year, or about $83.33 per month. There are 1,000,000 Black people that can afford it. A Black D-list celebrity has more followers than that on IG, and Black individuals have spent more than $1,000 on Beyonce tickets. So if we can't get 1,000,000 to put up less than $100 a month for Black empowerment, then we might as well give up now and just walk ourselves right back onto the plantations. *end of rant*
Now, 1,000,000 contributing $10 to 100 funds, gives each fund $10,000,000 every year to invest, and $1 billion total. Sound like a lot? It's not. Black people in America spend over $1 trillion every year. $1 billion is 1/10th of 1%. We can afford it folks. What we can't afford is to keep going the way we're going and wasting that $1 trillion on non-Black-owned businesses.
We could even do a 1,000 fund challenge with 1,000 funds each getting $10,000,000 per year to invest. The key is just making sure that it's not just 1 fund or even 10 funds because that's too few and too easy to take them all down. And you know "they" would try. So it's best to have as many funds as possible operating all over the world because some of them will definitely fail and we need to diversity the risk.
So what do you think about the #100FundChallenge? Is this something we should try? The next steps would be to find the fund managers that are extremely talented and have integrity. That might actually be the hardest part, but we are divine beings and can rise to any challenge. Feel free to email me through the contact form on this site with your thoughts and suggestions. If not this, then what other practical strategy do you propose?
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P.S. Since I like numbers, here's an interesting bit of math to get us closer to that $1 billion a year needed for the 100 funds. Nearly 8 out of 10 Black Americans identify as Christian, and there are over 16.5 million Black households in America. 80% of that would make 13.2 million adult Black Christians. The median Black household income is about $36,651/yr. So, if we assume that just 10% of all Black Christian households tithe 10% of their income every year, that's $4.8 billion EVERY YEAR going to churches. If we took just 10% of that money and invested it in the plan I describe above or in my book, that's $480 million every year. That's enough to make a dent and start to turn our situation around. So next time you make that tithe offering, ask yourself is this really the best use of money for The Lord's work, or is it going to a building fund that God doesn't need or a pastor's new Benz that definitely doesn't help any of us? Let's start demanding more from our churches.