By WALTER MENDENHALL

In 2016, I walked into a school’s career day on the west side of Chicago and met a great young man. This honor roll student played basketball and was respected by his peers. But despite these wonderful qualities, he sold drugs to pay for the things he desired.

He was one of thousands of young Black men in Chicago who have the ambition, intelligence and leadership acumen to become successful, legitimate entrepreneurs but have no idea how to find that path, let alone follow it. There are tens of thousands more like him in cities across the country. Some put their entrepreneurial drive and leadership skills to destructive, and illegal, use.

You’ve heard the statistics: 22% of Black men aged 18-24 are no longer in school but don’t have jobs. When they look around their own disinvested neighborhoods, they don’t see a lot of great options for the future.

That’s where business comes in. Commerce is the key to vibrant communities, and it can also serve as a path for personal growth, development and success. Initiatives across the country have demonstrated the power of business skills and mentorship in transforming the lives of young people of color.

Just look at Baltimore’s Youth Rising Coalition and Oakland, California’s Youth Business USA, which provide young entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds with mentorship, training and resources to foster economic growth and community development. There’s also Atlanta’s Village Micro Fund, which supports to Black-owned businesses by emphasizing community investment and sustainable growth.

Inspired by these models, and mindful of the honor roll basketball player and other young Black men I’d met who see no legal path to a good life, I founded the Male Mogul Initiative (MMI) in 2017. It offers entrepreneurial training and mentorship that gives young men the tools to become business leaders, and inspires them to become role models in their neighborhoods. I played football in college and the NFL, and that helped with recruiting. We set up a place to gather, and then opened the Male Mogul store to sell products that participants in the program designed.

Then, coming out of the pandemic, supply chain issues and rising costs jeopardized our ability to offer quality products at reasonable prices. It was a teachable moment in overcoming obstacles and finding innovative solutions. This past April we launched Co-LLAB, a small business incubator and workshop for Chicago’s young creatives, located in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood. Co-LLAB allows our young entrepreneurs to bring elements of production in-house, stabilizing costs. It also aligns with our broader goals of fostering entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency.

Co-LLAB reaches beyond the MMI community to bring collaboration, innovation and education together so that young people can develop new businesses in arts, entertainment, and retail. Like other incubators in cities across the country, it is demonstrating how organizations serving youth can go beyond leadership training and soft skills to offer skills training and resources that set our young people up for business success. Our budding entrepreneurs can use the incubator’s machinery to create products such as clothing and art prints, which they can sell at our store. Members can consult with experts in accounting, finance, taxes, branding and marketing. They can attend workshops on careers in construction and trades such as welding, electrical work and aviation; these offer on-ramps to stable, long-term careers.

Our incubator is managed by two young graduates of MMI. They are among the hundreds of young men we’ve worked with, all between the ages of 14 to 24, who have developed leadership skills and learned about business creation and self-sustainability. These young men have grown up in some of the toughest and most under-resourced neighborhoods in the nation, but they are succeeding in school and launching promising careers and successful businesses.

Take Brashen. He entered our program at 16 as an intelligent but troubled teen. Last year, Brashen was able to buy his first multi-unit investment property. He was 21.

Or consider Keith. Kicked out of his home as a senior in high school, he ended up on the streets and then in jail. We covered Keith’s legal costs and offered other support as Keith worked hard to rebuild his life. He got his first apartment, developed personal and business skills, and at 22, closed on his first multi-unit property. Keith is on his way to becoming a successful real estate investor.

Stories like Keith’s and Brashen’s show how Chicago — and cities across America — can make room for all of their residents to live, learn and work.

Given the opportunity to envision successful lives for themselves and the tools and guidance they need to get there, our young people continue setting goals and working hard to achieve them. They can start the kind of community-based businesses that offer hope, possibility, and economic revitalization, with young people of color leading the way.

We can acknowledge our cities’ problems, identify underlying causes and work to fix them. And we can turn the harsh realities of capitalism upside down and use business training and entrepreneurship to help our most at-risk youth build productive, successful lives that strengthen their communities.

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