Love, RUNWAY: A Full-Circle Journey in Reparative Capital with Ivi Morales
LOVE, RUNWAY is an ongoing series of original written works by members of the RUNWAY team to remind ourselves and each other of the love we share for our work, our communities, and our people. To continue developing the muscle of reimagining what the world would look like if the economy loved Black people we write love letters to different points in humanity's timeline. We hope these stories will help others connect with our purpose and showcase the richly textured humans behind our work.
Hi. Hey. Hola. It’s me—you—ivi! I am future you dialing in from the year 2025.
You’ve just joined an award-winning financial innovation firm called RUNWAY as their Communications Associate. This is the next step in your career, after seven years of full-time entrepreneurship. RUNWAY is unlike any other mission-driven organization you’ve ever worked for! It’s the home of reparative capital—an entire organization dedicated to uplifting Black business, liberation, and community wealth building. Reparative capital is the practice and deployment of capital to heal, repair and restore historical harm, specifically for Black communities in the United States. At RUNWAY, the entrepreneur is centered in every decision, from the organization’s intentional internal governance to our trust-based capital deployment and service delivery. Everything is rooted in love.
You might be wondering why future ivi has decided to return to being an employee at another organization instead of staying fully self-employed. Well, what better place to work at than at a values-aligned, Black women-led social enterprise tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time? This work is critical as we globally grieve and grapple with the raw realities and centuries of anti-Blackness and racism, patriarchy, imperialism, colonization and late stage capitalism.
You don’t know it yet, but the next seven years are going to be transformative. Don’t let that precious, anxious, brilliant mind run amok. Yes, you’re going to experience heightened racial, socio-political instability, a global pandemic, the rise and fall of the DEI industry, and market disruption by artificial intelligence. But most importantly, you’ll also witness—and be part of— the transformative power of reparative capital.
It's no surprise that your journey has taken you from creative agencies focused on corporate social responsibility, to youth workforce development, and ultimately to movement finance. It’s clear that your life purpose is to use your creative skills to inform, influence, and inspire. You’ve always been fascinated by the power of communications to motivate behavior, change minds, shift culture, and shape policies. You launched your own business, bombilla®, on February 1st, 2018. By September, you were taking intensive business education classes through RUNWAY’s referral partner Uptima Entrepreneur Cooperative. Applied business education, coaching, and community? Sign me up! I had the honor of being directly taught and mentored by Uptima founder, Rani Langer-Croager—the catalyst who introduced me to the RUNWAY community in 2019. Through Uptima, you gained a deeper understanding of cooperative business in a region ripe with legacies from the most important social justice movements in this country’s existence. To qualify for RUNWAY, you had to complete a microfinancing course, which set you up for pre-capital advising. By Fall 2019, you were approved for your first-ever capital infusion of $20,000. With those funds, you secured a working desk at the former Impact Hub/Evolve/now Oakstop in Oakland, where you met and became fast friends with Naima McQueen, RUNWAY’s current Director of Education and Training.
You experienced explosive business growth from 2019-2021 with a 138% boost in revenue thanks to RUNWAY capital–or believe-in-you money. As an Afro-Latina-led creative agency owner, you were on a mission to reimagine the creative agency model while creating economic opportunity for creatives from diverse and historically excluded backgrounds. Can you believe that bombilla® grew to become an award-winning creative agency in high-demand by impact organizations across the country? You also had the honor of leading a dynamic team to re-brand The Runway Project to RUNWAY in 2019-2020 in collaboration with fellow RUNWAY entrepreneur Identafire, Megan Totah Design, and Lauren Rascoe Creative. You've since officially paid off your loan this February 2025. Thank you, RUNWAY, for believing in bombilla.
You have a unique perspective and experience, from being an Uptima Entrepreneur Cooperative student and branding instructor to a RUNWAY loan recipient and alum, a long-time consultant, and now, officially an employee. RUNWAY is truly and intentionally a business community anchored in values of right relationship, reimagination, and repair. How lucky of me to get to call RUNWAY my team! You’re leveraging your skills from the past 15 years to shift harmful narratives, practices, and policies that harm Black communities, contributing to the larger movement of a liberated world where we all flourish.
Your greatest joy in working at RUNWAY is the people. RUNWAY isn’t RUNWAY without the relationships that keep its essence fervently alive. These relationships span from your teammates/staff members to board members, referral partners, and the entrepreneurs themselves. We’re a vibrant ecosystem that cares for one another, leading and living our values and creating a more interdependent, relational world. We reflect the people we work with, internally and externally, regardless of who the funders and investors might be. We are a self-directed, 100% remote, relatively non-hierarchical, and a results-oriented work environment.
As the Communications Associate, I’m a member of the Narrative Strategy Circle, a small and mighty team that operates as an internal creative agency under Creative Director Jamica El’s leadership. We are meaning-makers, savvy storytellers, passionate power builders and intentional creative producers. For a marketing generalist like me, I’m thrilled. We make magic happen!
On any given day, we’re developing and distributing stories and content, offering creative solutions to team members, and working on power-building initiatives that expand our reach and deepen our relationship with key audiences. I see us as translators, disseminators of knowledge, and creative whisperers that can bring an idea or vision to physical (or digital) fruition. Your individual gifts of systems thinking, graphic design, public relations, digital marketing, copywriting, marketing and communications in an ambiguous environment—in addition to your lived experience as a RUNWAY entrepreneur—come in handy in this scrappy, enterprising work environment.
Other challenges we face on the daily: staying safe, healthy, hopeful, optimistic, focused and disciplined despite the negative forces. We’re in the biggest fight of our lifetimes! Dismantling and decolonizing isn’t easy. Transformation isn’t easy. We’re fighting the algorithms, keeping up with new technologies and navigating the unstable sociopolitical climate. Our work is urgent and emergent yet lifelong and ongoing. We’re living ancestors writing history. It’s time to reimagine and redesign. It’s time to lean into the transformation that the next chapter desperately needs.
Change is messy, beautiful, painful, regenerative, violent, inspiring, overwhelming. What a time to be alive! And, what better place to work than RUNWAY at this moment. In the words of RUNWAY founder and CEO Jessica Norwood, “We are our best asset. Now is not the time to retreat.”
Con mucho amor,
ivi
Ivellisse Morales is a proud RUNWAY entrepreneur, agency founder and communications strategist based in Cambridge, MA.
