When you meet individuals you can feel the energy, the true kindness and passion that radiate through them. Ashely, Maddy, Jeremy, and Jeff are one hell of a team. They are the owners of Charlotte Black Owned. They have the definition of squad goals. As a school social worker, hospital social worker, one being furloughed, and one studying Anthropology and Africana in school, I opened it up and asked the important question — How are you doing?
“It’s been mentally exhausting. For how everything could be to what it is, we really can’t complain, we’re still living and still in good health” Jeff said. Jeremy added “It could be much worse but doing this has brought a lot of life back into us. The stresses are there but they are manageable. This has been so positive, almost something of a distraction and a passion project to work on.” Ashley says “No matter how positive our movement is, there is always that fear and sadness that we will naturally feel with COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter”
Charlotte Black Owned is an Instagram page that has been a big help for people around Charlotte with doing their part and supporting black-owned local businesses. Seven weeks into it and already at 20,000 followers — here’s how it all started;
“One day we (Ashley and Maddy) we’re talking about how we should create a page and post about black-owned businesses. With all four of us being from Charlotte, we know there are racial divides and we were thinking about ways to blur out those lines.” Ashely added “We are committing full time to this and I can speak for all of us and say — we love it. It is taking up more of our time than expected but I think it’s great because we work well together. We are not even 2 months old yet. We are constantly trying to think of more impactful ways to support the community and grow.”
Their approach has been so genuine. You can see it with each post and interaction they have on their platform. They had a goal in the beginning to reach 1,000 followers and it has grown into much more.
Maddy went on to tell me “We sparked seven or eight other pages from different cities that reached out asking for advice on starting black-owned business support pages. We keep thinking about our goals and how far we already have grown. It just goes to show you that if you want to do something, do it — it can be 10 or 20 times better than what you could have ever imagined.”
“It’s going to spark a lot inside of us to keep going. We wanted to bring something to make a change, protests die down and that drive that you have to make a change does as well and sometimes you don’t know where to start. There’s no better moment than now to make that change and help our community move forward”
