Top image: Left to right: Council Member Christina Henderson, Council of the District of Columbia; Emily Morris, Founder and CEO, Emrgy; Shirley Boubert-Rumble, Owner and CEO, Usource Construction; Olivia Igbokwe-Curry, Lead, US Federal Political Affairs, Amazon Web Services; and De’Ara Balenger, Managing Director, Special Projects and Partnerships, The Rockefeller Foundation, who moderated
De’Ara Balenger closed out the Summit alongside four women who build companies, communities, and policy, Shirley Boubert-Rumble of Usource Construction, Emily Morris of Emrgy, DC Council Member Christina Henderson, and Olivia Igbokwe-Curry of AWS, and asked them to talk about capital the way women are rarely taught to: directly. “There is a discomfort in women talking about money and talking about capital,” Balenger said, “and I think it’s because we’re socialized not to.”
Each of the panelists had her own experience with capital and financing, but each came to the same conclusion: closing the capital and wage gap starts with women raising their hand.
Morris raised $35 million for Emrgy and still found out she’d made the single largest venture round by a woman in Atlanta that year, 1% of the city’s total VC. Boubert-Rumble built Usource on her own cashed-out pension and a CDFI credit line because venture capital was never built for a construction company. Henderson argued the fastest way to fund women is to stop calling it a women’s issue. And Igbokwe-Curry put the quiet part out loud: closed mouths don’t get fed, and the wage gap starts with women asking less.
Four voices with one argument: women are already building the companies and holding up the communities. What keeps going missing is capital, the nerve to ask for it, the side doors when the front door won’t open, and the basic access that is necessary for any of it.
“Emrgy is a venture-backed startup company... all of these are very capital intensive, highly regulated, and require a lot of capital to get off the ground, and you know every single dollar has been difficult to raise. I can say that wholeheartedly... they mentioned to me at the time that I had raised the largest round venture round of any woman in the city of Atlanta that year, and that shocked me. It shocked me. I went and looked how much venture capital was raised in Atlanta in this year, and it was, you know, around $1.8 billion, and so the fact that the single largest woman-led raise was 1% of the total venture capital just in the city was staggering to me, and there’s something very wrong with that.”
“My father-in-law is a venture investor in Atlanta, and... he said, you know, did you know women only get less than 3% of all venture capital, and I, you know, stared blankly, yes, I’m aware of that statistic... and so I asked him, you know, how many pitches have you heard from women-led companies this year, and his pause was long enough for me to know that the answer was very, very small... I think truly the the impetus on all of us at this room at getting a seat at the table, either for us or for someone that we can advocate for, where money specifically is discussed, is a key challenge that I think we all are faced with.”
Emily Morris, Emrgy (left), and Shirley Boubert-Rumble, Usource Construction
“My first inspiration was my father... he was a bricklayer, and so I remember growing up and seeing in the backyard mortar and CMU concrete masonry units... So I fell in love with the built environment... and out of college... my first project was to not only I redeveloped an old nursing home into a women’s shelter, a 10 bed women’s shelter. I did the design work, I did the budget, I hired the subs, and we had the grand opening... that was the moment when I knew, hey, there was something special there.”
“We spent the first eight years, you know, as far as capital is concerned, you know, that was my pension. I cashed out and said, let me put it into the business, and let’s see how we can scale. We were able to get a lot of credit through a CDFI, another important source out there for those that are not venture capital ready, if you will... community development financial institutions that are really focused on supporting small businesses that usually have that capital gap, and they’ve extended a line of credit to us. We’ve been able to sort of scale our bootstraps by really creating opportunities, performing, and building trust.”
“People think of childcare from a care perspective, but actually childcare is a workforce issue that’s critical to the economy, and so if we change that perspective, that when I go into a room and I’m having a conversation with the Chamber of Commerce... then we’re not talking about it from just a care issue or a women’s issue. No, it’s talking about from the perspective of how can it benefit the entire community... It’s the same on healthcare. I chair the committee on health. If I’m thinking about women’s health, I’m probably addressing some issues in men’s health too, because women are usually the ones who are encouraging our spouses and uncles and dads.”
“My career was sort of guided by this phrase I learned from my mom: your zip code is not determining your opportunity for success... One of the key challenges that we’ve had in the district has been around regulation... You can’t do that if I’m having a new business owner coming in and I’m telling you, you have to go talk to six different agencies just to get a license to open your property... We have to get back into the perspective of, or think about it from the perspective of busy people. Women are busy people. How can we make it easier for folks to progress and move forward, but also remove some of the barriers that we put in place, which at a time might have been well-intentioned.”
Olivia Igbokwe-Curry, Amazon Web Services
“We hear a lot about the democratization of AI, and I think that’s 100% true. But we also have to make sure that there’s broadband, right?... if you’re in a community that doesn’t have broadband, then you don’t have that access, so while I’m always the person who looks at like the glass half full, I do think AI can be a great equalizer, but we have to be very realistic when we’re saying that to also assure that we have access to broadband at the very basic level, and then people have the access to the knowledge... The onus can’t just be on where industry is investing, it needs to be a collective partnership between local government, state, local and state governments, the federal government, and industry in order to work together.”
Council Member Christina Henderson
“My mom always says closed mouths don’t get fed. I think a lot of the times... women are so afraid to fail, whereas men sometimes aren’t... you can just tell that at times women can be a little bit more tepid or afraid to ask... So I think, like, my biggest takeaway, and what I’ve learned throughout the trajectory of my career, is you know, not everyone knows everything, and if you ask a question, you only need to ask it once, because you now learn that. So, like, not to be afraid to lean into what you don’t know, and kind of see that as you empowering yourself more so than that being a way of exposing your vulnerability.”
Her reason for being in the room ran underneath all of it. “I wanted to make sure that I had a voice and a seat at the table to assure that everyone’s point of views, as many as possible, even those who traditionally aren’t in those spaces, are heard and valued,” she said. “The disparity of female voices, especially black female voices, was evident in all of those rooms.”
Kelsey Beymer is an Engage Reader Contributor, who leads Engage’s communications and social media.
