I NEED TO KNOW YOU ARE WITH US.
the author, Elizabeth Bates. photo by Harlin Miller
For years, I had the honor of leading Camelback’s Education Fellowship. I was aware of the enormous gap in funding for founders of color and women, and increasingly became aware of what that gap looked like, sounded like, and felt like in practice - ranging from overt racism and sexism to microaggressions to “I don’t know why, but every time I talk to this funder I just feel...really bad...afterwards”. I became increasingly aware of the enormous gap in understanding, empathy, and awareness of implicit bias that was coming from ‘the other side of the table’. I often wished that funders and investors could hear what we were hearing from our Fellows. Because maybe it would change things.
But funding disparities rooted in structural racism don’t go away that easily - and I knew it was not the founders’ responsibility to solve for this, even if it could be solved with unilateral effort. There was no amount of pitch practice or warm introductions or coaching that can solve for the underlying systems at play. Making the entrepreneurial landscape more equitable will require a consistent, persistent, and collaborative effort. It will require a systemic lens, and work from both sides of the table: founder and funder.
Not only this, I also believe it is first and foremost the work of white people - in this case, those in grant-making and investing - to have the courage to take the risks required, the kind of courage and risks that our friends and colleagues of color exhibit daily in the battle against systemic racism that they cannot opt out of. We shouldn’t either. These systems have disconnected us from the most intimate parts of our humanity - and in exchange for this, have given us unasked for and unearned privileges as a bribe to keep quiet and obedient to its ways. The past 9 months, ten individuals had the courage to take risks with us - to be, as Martin Luther King Jr. described, “disciplined nonconformists,” and we learned a lot from their journey.
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