On October 6, we traveled to Boston for the 8th Annual Mass Black Expo, hosted by the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts (BECMA) at the Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport.
The theme — Building Black Wealth: Small Business, Big Impact — put us in a room full of entrepreneurs, policymakers, and community builders asking the same questions we ask every day: how does capital actually reach the people building community wealth, and what does it take to make that access sustainable?
BECMA President & CEO Nicole Obi opened the day with a sobering statistic from a new Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study: the median net worth of Black families in Massachusetts is just $7,800, compared with more than $500,000 for white families.
She followed it with a charge that stayed with us: “Data alone doesn’t build wealth. People do. WE do.”
We took the stage for a plenary conversation, Rewriting the Black Wealth Playbook: Cooperative Economics, Real Estate & Financial Healing, joining fellow panelists to explore what it looks like to replace the rules that have governed wealth-building for generations. The conversation moved through reparative capital, cooperative ownership, real estate as movement infrastructure, and the financial trauma that too often goes unnamed in economic spaces.
Beyond the conversations and the panel, we were actively meeting Boston-area entrepreneurs who are ready for the kind of capital the ROOTED Fund was built to provide — reparative, relationship-driven, and designed for founders that traditional finance has overlooked.
In that time, we had the opportunity to connect with leaders shaping the economic future of Black Massachusetts — including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.
Those conversations reinforced what we already believe: that policy, capital, and community have to move together. No one piece closes the gap alone.
That charge lives at the center of our work. We have spent more than a decade building the proof — that capital moves differently when it is rooted in relationship, trust, and genuine accountability to the entrepreneurs it serves.
The Expo reminded us why proximity matters. The data tells us what is broken.
The room tells us who is already fixing it and who is ready for what comes next.
We are grateful to BECMA for the invitation and to every entrepreneur who showed up ready to build.
If you are a Boston-area entrepreneur interested in learning more about the Rooted Fund, we want to hear from you.
