Community Wealth Building Accelerator
Building businesses that build community wealth
Businesses owned by people of color face a host of systemic challenges in rapidly gentrifying cities such as Atlanta including a lack of access to capital, higher interest rates compared to their business counterparts due to perceived risk, the potential for displacement due to poorly structured leases and lack of capital to purchase buildings, and rapidly gentrifying communities resulting in an ever-changing customer base.
While entrepreneurship can be an effective wealth-building tool to help households increase income, build physical assets, and improve credit, the net benefits of it have not been felt proportionately by Black and other minority-owned businesses due to systemic barriers in terms of access to both capital and technical assistance.
Our program helps small businesses explore long-term ways to increase community wealth and protect their business legacies. We provide trainings and workshops on models like cooperatives, employee share ownership programs, and alternative capital raising strategies. We also provide workshops on leasing and purchasing of commercial real estate. Our vision is thriving local economies where underserved businesses are holistically supported, bolstered by greater community wealth and resilience.
The Guild’s Community Wealth Building Accelerator is a unique business advancement program for existing women and people of color-owned small businesses to build wealth for their communities.
Financial Planning
This series of workshops covers everything from personal finance planning to managerial accounting and building proformas for your business. The goal is to get you investment ready — whether that’s debt or equity.
Commercial Real Estate 101
This series of workshops covers everything from your rights as a tenant, how to negotiate a lease, and how to purchase and build out your first retail store.
Democratizing Ownership
Building generational wealth is great, but what if you could help your employees build wealth too? As your business grows, we’ll help you implement models such as ESOPs or cooperatives that promote economic justice.
Legal Cafe
The legal cafe includes a 2 hr presentation from a general business lawyer to cover everything from legal entity formation to filing for trademarks. It is followed by a 2 hr presentation from a commercial real estate attorney. After the presentations, you’ll have the chance to have your questions answered and documents reviewed by our panel of attorneys.
Triple Bottom Line
We offer a series of workshops to help grow your business’ triple bottom line — i.e., help you increase your social and environmental returns in addition to your financial returns. Workshops include topics on B Corps and benefit corporation formation.
Marketing & E-Commerce
We bring marketing experts with industry-specific knowledge to help you build powerful digital marketing strategies and campaigns. We’ll also help you create an e-commerce strategy.
Our first cohort comprised 21 small businesses. 90% of them were owned by women of color.