BlackFem, Inc.

Our goals are to maximize the wealth-building capabilities of the most purposely ignored groups (i.e Black women and girls), increase their material wealth, influence policy, and transform other local entities that transmit and perpetrate financial trauma.

WealthRise® is a proprietary model developed by our founder to ensure the success of our program by eliminating the roadblocks to learning found in most out-dated ineffective traditional financial literacy programs.

Intervention Design
We work with school districts to adopt policies that mandate financial literacy five days a week during the school day. We collaborate with the District to finance and manage the program infrastructure and our overall WealthRise® program.

Teacher Academy
We empower teachers to implement our model in the classroom. They receive paid training at our immersive summer experience

Behavioral Reinforcement
We believe programs should build financial capacity, not just teach financial literacy. Our tools have built in reinforcement systems that help sustain wealth.

Monitoring & Evaluation
We measure and maximize our impact as a critical part of our program DNA via classroom audits, online learning checks and supplementary learning sessions for teachers.

We have clearly defined goals and clearly defined strategies for meeting our goals.

Before BlackFem implements the WealthRise model, we partner with cities and states to set up the infrastructure to manage and finance the WealthRise program. Based on our proven best practices, we co-create a multi-year intervention plan for integrating BlackFem into the full community ecosystem. Each step of the way, our interventions are designed to treat the ripest contexts where financial trauma is perpetrated or transmitted: education, policy, culture, and family.

We recognize K-12 and Higher education institutions are a site for transmitting financial trauma through their policies and messages. We conduct capacity-building trainings and infrastructure-building for education institutions to successfully reduce or eliminate the impact of this common phenomena with students. Our K-12 partners commit to deliver our programming to their students up to daily through our Equiddieᵀᴹ platform. Additionally, we develop both economic and extraeconomic teachings to help young adults in the higher education space build material safety and then sustained material wealth.

Similarly, institutions that enact policies are often the ripest context for financial trauma to be perpetrated and/or transmitted. Our partner cities commit to capacity-building programming, trainings, and events that teach legislative aides to incorporate understandings of wealth justice and financial trauma in their work. Equally, we host community activations for policymakers and constituents to codify the ways local political institutions can help the broader community heal from the financial trauma perpetuated. It is common we see significant shifts in policy framing, political debate around economic policies, and community engagement and pressure regarding economic change.

Our cultural institutions are how community ecosystems retain and reenact historical financial trauma. We offer capacity-building and community infrastructure-building to teach how to transform these institutions into healing centers instead of (unintentional) trauma centers. We can measure the effect of this using our founder’s measurement tool and research that she's published on.

Families are the second-leading institutions that are a ripe context for transmission or perpetration of financial trauma. BlackFem hosts regular programming and supports parents in transforming their homes into centers for learning and healing. Participants demonstrate both an increase in material wealth, material safety, and wealth-building capability through greater access to assets, resources to fund those assets, and the strategies to heal financial trauma.

Impact and success are based on our founder’s research and wealth justice framework which discusses material safety, material wealth, healed financial trauma, and institutions transformed: four pillars to demonstrate that the commitment to wealth justice is being achieved.

Over the past seven years, BlackFem has developed a systematic model for maximizing the wealth-building capabilities of Black women and women of color and making financial trauma and healing a centerpiece of advancing wealth justice.

Prior to the launch of our WealthRise program, our organization reached 20,000 students, and specifically 10,000 girls of color. We also had 5,000 participants who successfully completed a BlackFem program over multiple years.

Through the launch of our WealthRise model, we’ve served over 150,000 students, families, teachers, and community members. We’re currently operating in 22 cities and have 38+ cities on our waitlist. The wealth generated by participants of our Bank on Us program has reached $50,000. As of June 2021, twenty-two policies designed to maximize the wealth-building capability of women of color have been adopted. To date, we’ve helped over 72,000 women and girls of color heal from financial trauma. We’ve also seen students move nearly a standard deviation in Math and ELA test scores. Overall, we've made positive strides towards meeting all of our goals in all of our reported measures.

Led by Chloe B. McKenzie, whose research and expertise has been leveraged by a number of states and cities, and institutions like Georgetown, our work has been recognized by the White House Gender Policy Council and Ashoka.

Here's what's next for us:

1. Delivering the WealthRise model to our waitlist cities
2. Expanding human resource capacity
3. Measuring long-term impact of programming in communities