Telecommunications company, Comcast RISE, has announced that it will award 100 businesses in the area with $1 million in grants. The grants will be available to small businesses that are owned and operated by women and people of color including Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian American owners. Atlanta makes up one of the five cities included in the Comcast RISE Investment Fund, which has allotted a total of $5 million to be distributed across 500 businesses. To date, the company has been able to provide $16 million to businesses owned by people of
Adeola Ogunmola Sowemimo is the first Nigerian female to fly the Boeing 787 Dreamliner for Qatar Airways, and she flew the Boeing 767 Aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean. Sowemimo hails from Ogbomoso, in Oyo State Nigeria, and graduated from the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology. After her pilot training, she flew off to Florida in the United States for her standard pilot course. On finishing her training at the age of 21, Sowemimo returned to university in Nigeria to complete her education. Sowemimo joined Medview operations Abuja in 2013 till
In times of crisis, it’s especially crucial that governments share accurate, up-to-date information with their citizens and journalists – as social media can play an important role in disseminating urgent information. But we’ve seen time and time again that some leaders have taken liberties to silence their people. Nigeria and Zimbabwe are just examples of countries with governments that have done so in recent years. Back in 2019, Zimbabwe blocked access to social media for seven days as deadly protests swept the country which killed at least 12 people. The government
UK Minister for Women and Equalities Liz Truss has launched a task force chaired by Anne Boden, CEO and founder of Starling Bank, focused on supporting women-owned businesses. Black entrepreneur and investment manager June Angelides MBE is part of the force. She is best known for starting the UK’s first child-friendly coding school for mums, Mums in Tech, while on her second maternity leave from Silicon Valley Bank. Angelides is also one of a handful of Black women in venture capital. Launching today, the task force will use its convening
Major beauty retailers are boosting small, minority-owned businesses in a bid to support Black women entrepreneurs. As of last year, 17% of Black women in the U.S. were in the process of starting or running new businesses, according to the Harvard Business Review. That outpaces the 15% of white men and the 10% of white women who reported the same. But only 3% of Black women reported running ‘mature’ businesses. And when it comes to the traditional workforce unemployment rate, it remains high among Black women, at 5.5% in March, compared with
Deborah Gladney and Angela Muhwezi-Hall are the sister duo and creators behind QuickHire, a hiring platform that connects workers to service and skilled-trade jobs. In November, QuickHire raised $1.41 million in an oversubscribed round of funding, making Gladney and Muhwezi-Hall the first Black women in Kansas to raise over $1 million for a startup, according to AfroTech. The round is a pretty big deal because Black female startup founders received just 0.34% of the total $147 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. startups through the first half of 2021, according to Crunchbase. QuickHire,
Tiffany James, 27, started Modern BLK Girl after turning an initial $10,000 investment into $2 million. But her success is partly down to one colleague who decided to pass on the baton of knowledge. James had left school with a degree and student loan debt which had her struggling, and for a while, she wasn’t sure how she was going to get out of it. The turning point came in 2019 when a co-worker suggested that she buy stock in a company named Tesla when shares were between $60 and $70.
Honeycomb is hiring on pocitjobs.com Alayshia Knighten is a seasoned DevOps Engineer with a love of infrastructure and a focus on breaking down technical learning barriers for customers. She recently spoke to POCIT about navigating life in the tech sector as a woman of color and her role at Honeycomb, an observability tool that lets developers quickly make sense of the billions of rows of data needed to fully represent the user experience in your complex and unpredictable systems. Since joining Honeycomb as a Senior Implementation Engineer in October 2020,
Failing to credit Black creators will cost platforms and TikTok is one firm that’s not trying to be a part of that mess – again. The Bytedance-owned app is introducing the first iteration of creator-crediting tools that will enable — and encourage — users to link back to the videos of TikTok creators and trend originators. The new TikTok tools, rolling out over the next few weeks, will let creators directly tag and credit others through a new button in the app. Kudzi Chikumbu, TikTok’s U.S. director of the creator
In February, Prestige magazine published a list of the top-selling pieces of crypto-art to date, with all entries sharing some common traits – they were all men and all white. And when you look into the news reports of those who’re supposedly ‘killing it’ in the NFT or crypto space most of them look the same. But here at POCIT – we’re all about shining a light on the communities that are sometimes cast to the side and forgotten even when they’re making a considerable impact. Before we begin – for
