Getting Ahead for Business

The Women and Minorities Project helps two UMKC students launch their businesses

Johnnie Weathersby III has been thinking about starting his own business since middle school. Royce “Mocha” Jackson just launched her business last year. But thanks to the Women and Minorities Project, both UMKC students will have the chance to get their dreams off the ground.

Funded by the Port Authority-Ameristar Isle of Capri Foundation through the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, the Women and Minorities Project is providing these two students with free access to the student incubator at the Bloch School’s Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (IEI) for a year.  That means free office space. That means free access to a fax machine, phone, conference rooms, and Internet. And that puts both budding entrepreneurs in arm’s reach of the myriad of resources—legal services, business coaching, peer mentoring, training, and technical assistance—housed at 4747 Troost.

“It’s an awesome opportunity,” says Jackson, an MPA student in nonprofit management at the Bloch School's Department of Public Affairs. “We’re very grateful.”

The project also pays for 3 credit hours of coursework for both Weathersby and Jackson.

“I definitely love that part of it,” adds Weathersby, an undergraduate who plans to major in business with an emphasis in entrepreneurship.

Weathersby and Jackson were chosen by a six-member selection committee chaired by Senator Yvonne Wilson.

“Having met and visited with these two deserving students and their sponsors, I am convinced that their experiences with the project will build a foundation for successful businesses,” says Senator Wilson. Moreover, she says she is confident these students will use their businesses to pay the opportunity forward.

PUREViews

Johnnie Weathersby hasn’t wasted any time getting down to business.

His company, PUREViews, is a full-service Web firm that helps businesses design, analyze and promote their sites. Weathersby plans to help small businesses not only launch their own Internet presence, but also understand how to use it. He’s already working with several clients and has brought in two fellow students, Paul Washington, a communications major and Matthew Ferguson, an engineering student.

“Web design is something I got into in high school,” says Weathersby. “I took a class and midway through it I did enough studying on the outside that the teacher stopped giving me a grade and asked me to help teach the class.”

Business, and especially PUREViews, helps Weathersby meet two of his personal goals—a desire to create (he toyed with the idea of becoming a professional artist) and leave his mark.

“It comes naturally to me, and it’s something I like doing.”

In addition to his business and his studies, Weathersby interns with Hallmark, is co-president of SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise), and volunteers with Harvesters and Operation Breakthrough.

And Weathersby is taking full advantage of the opportunity. He’s already scouting other incubator inhabitants—including Jackson—to see if he can help them develop their Web sites.

Sable Dame

Mocha Jackson is an accidental entrepreneur. She found her entrepreneurial epiphany on a back-to-school shopping expedition.

“When I go shopping, I just want to find something cute.” But when Jackson entered store after store to buy a simple, trendy t-shirt, she found her choices—detective dogs, angst-ridden donkeys, and insulting slogans—rather limiting.

So Jackson and her friend Quadriyyah Musawwir-Andrews started making their own shirts with slogans like "Black Cherry," "Freedom Fighters," and "Chocolate Bunny." And although they had only planned to make the shirts for themselves, the response they received from other women—and even other men who were looking for t-shirts for their daughters—convinced them to ramp up production.

Sable Dame, their company, produces t-shirts that have self-affirming slogans and that in turn promote “awareness, self-love, and an overall positive body image and self-esteem for women, and particularly for women of color,” says Jackson.

Right now, Jackson and her partner will court customers through an e-commerce site, with later plans to shop the shirts out to boutiques. But Jackson’s aspirations don’t end there.

“We want to this to be our career and we actually want to create a movement where women can challenge mainstreams ideals of beauty,” she says. Their t-shirts, she adds, are their simple resistance.

 “So hopefully this will grow into something bigger. Today, it’s t-shirts—and that’s good enough for us right now.”

Today brings Web sites and t-shirts for Weathersby and Jackson. Tomorrow could bring anything at all.