Category: Story

Nikki’s dream to keep growing her business brought her to Detroit where she fell in love with Mexicantown after hosting a pop-up at Clark Park for a Cinco De Mayo celebration. Opening a business this time around proved more challenging than her previous experience at opening a business. This was a century-old building in the need of many improvements. She enrolled in business management courses and gave it her all. It only took her eight months to fully renovate the building into the beautiful boutique you will find today.

Mayra feels grateful for her family and her community for believing in her and supporting her every step of the way. Today, she hopes to inspire other women in her community into business ownership, or in her case, multiple businesses.

Although Nadia did not imagine herself to be a business owner when she was young, she is very proud to find herself an activist, immigrant, and businesswoman today. She encourages other women to tap into their inner power and passion because we can do so much more than we expect. She says it may not always be easy, but it sure is possible.

We admire Achsha’s fresh inventiveness as she continues to move forward. One can truly say the entrepreneurial spirit of Detroit thrives in her.

As a Black woman in a white- and male-dominated field, she often felt limited and undermined. She worked for five different companies looking for a more nurturing environment for her, but she was disappointed every time. These frustrations are what inspired her to do her own thing, so she built her website and began putting together Eumelanin. She wanted to create a work culture like she never had before.

Valerie’s choice to carry on her family’s legacy in learning and education made her realize just how much our society undervalues early childhood education. She believes our culture has devalued our children’s capacity to learn at a young age, as evidenced by her struggles to secure funding. Appealing to funders with a model like this when education “is so often wealth-driven instead of human-driven” has made it difficult to gather capital for the construction of the school building and space.

Celebrating Women’s History Month is an acknowledgement of the amazing accomplishments of women despite the unique barriers we face, often in intersectional ways depending on the culture and body we are born into.