Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative is a community of investors, advocates, practitioners, and scholars that exists to restructure access to capital to create opportunities for Black people in Atlanta and across the South to build collective wealth. We especially advocate for the one-third of Black households in Atlanta that have zero or negative net worth. We relentlessly prioritize a commitment to build Black wealth that extends well beyond anti-poverty efforts by reimagining economic realities through community wealth-building strategies that leverage the power of people, capital, and ideas.
When large groups of people have few opportunities for economic livelihood it compromises the country’s economic competitive advantage. We advocate for Black people specifically because, as people living in this country who are descendants of enslaved Africans, Black people have endured generations of countless acts of violence, subjugation, destruction, and death both known and forever unknown. We live in the perils of anguish and devastation from both opportunities that have been stripped away and the lack of access to opportunities to grow, be free, and nurture wealth. Black people have experienced unfathomable attacks rooted in over 400 years of systemic racism and oppression, with the much-intended destructive outcomes compounded generation over generation. These attacks were born in slavery, flourished on the heels of Jim Crow, and continue to be cemented in policy and backed by a system that benefits others at the expense of Black people even today. Restrictions on activities such as buying land and property, owning, growing, and scaling a business, and the ability to pursue occupations in our communities that pay a fair wage have stripped, stolen, and thwarted the opportunity for Black people to build wealth. As a result, Black wealth has declined in the past decades and is now comparable with the Jim Crow era. But each of us, individually and collectively, can work to change this situation from a one of despair into a positive wealth building narrative of implementing solutions of repair.
Black Wealth Matters
AWBI boldly and unapologetically works to actively reimagine economic realities to produce an opportunity-rich future for all. We envision an Atlanta where prosperity is shared. We are different because we apply a race-explicit, asset-based, and holistic approach to building Black wealth. Race-explicit does not mean race-exclusive. We firmly believe investing in solutions to address the barriers blocking prosperity for Black people improves outcomes for everyone. To that end, our goal is clear: build Black wealth. We are adopting this approach because we understand the limitations and implications of not centering Black wealth building. In building Black wealth, we work alongside the community to revolutionize, measure, define, and outline structural determinants of Black wealth.
This pivots from a traditional racial wealth gap frame because:
1. Wealth begets wealth, so the gap will widen without a targeted approach.
2. We reject the assumption that White wealth is the standard. This metric of success based on White wealth is based on a benchmark of catching up to a 400-year lead unjustly built on the backs of Black people’s labor.
3. We know how wealth is created matters. We do not indiscriminately support solutions that are extractive and harmful.
4. The unjust burden of responsibility for closing a growing wealth gap disproportionately falls on Black communities. It creates an environment in which it is the Black community's responsibility to fix what has been done to us. We name the policies, practices, and people that are actually responsible for the gap and promote solutions that counter the harms they have caused
5. Wealth as a construct is predominantly defined by economic metrics. We adopt a more holistic and asset-based approach centered on the Black experience.
The South Has Something to Say
While we are striving to improve outcomes for Black people, it is important we pay attention to where they live. With roughly 55 percent of Black people living in the South, and the pronounced racialized economic outcomes that stubbornly persist in the region, it is important to apply a targeted universal approach to facilitate thriving and inclusive economies. If we aspire to thriving communities, we must invest in the South. We believe this requires a dedicated multi-year commitment to race-explicit efforts.
This approach requires:
1. Inclusive design and investment practices that are deeply informed by directly impacted communities. This is a sharp departure from traditional extractive practices led by ivory tower “experts” to tell communities how to navigate their trauma and dreams.
2. Bold initiatives that trust the expertise of credible southern anchors. This approach requires that we interrogate traditional assumptions of “capacity.”
3. Honoring the ideas and commitment of southern organizations that deliver results to move the needle. This will deprioritize strategies that exclusively reflect the perspectives and ideologies of larger institutions that lack proximity to problems.
4. Injecting restorative and patient capital in places and people to undo 400 plus years of systemic racism. The work is to undo the systemic design of racial hierarchy and reimagine new possibilities - this demands aggressive and long-term investment.
5. Incentivizing alignment around results. Seek, create, and support solutions that catalyze real and lasting change.
Individual vs. Collective Black Wealth Building
We believe it is important to distinguish individual wealth building from community wealth building. Community wealth building is a practice that employs a range of forms of community ownership and asset-building strategies to build wealth in low-income communities. We leverage that definition and refine it to include a race explicit lens to define Black community wealth building as a practice and outcome that builds on the collective assets of Black people, spaces, and experiences to facilitate healthy communities and thriving economies.
Individual and community wealth building are not synonymous. This is evidenced by the surge in Black millionaires in recent decades that has not automatically translated into building collective Black wealth. In fact, the inverse has occurred. To be clear, this does not mean that individual Black wealth is inconsequential, it is incredibly important to grow the mass of Black individual wealth. However, we also need to invest in collective Black wealth to bolster aggregate gains and support sustainable solutions that transcend Black exceptionalism, which is often co-opted as a tool of systemic racism. Adopting a race-explicit community wealth-building approach allows for dynamic and innovative models that yield multiple returns.
Facing Our Future
As a catalytic community, AWBI works tirelessly to ensure all Black people are positioned to build wealth by supporting the ecosystem as a research powerhouse, fearless and trusted convener, resource connector, and facilitator of thoughtful solutions. We take a data informed and community-oriented approach to examining research, extrapolating trends, making recommendations to stakeholders, and publishing our recommendations so that we can fuel advocacy that will lead to just outcomes for Black people. We do this to make data informed recommendations on transformative policies and demolish systemic racism. We seek to revamp how capital is acquired, managed, and distributed while striving to dismantle systems of predatory inclusion.
As we work to remove barriers to Black wealth and advance generational wealth in the Black community, it is important to note: Black people are not monolithic. Black people all sit in some form of an intersection. We are an awe-inspiring tapestry of Black Americans and immigrants of diasporic beauty, multi-ethnic, multi-hued people of various genders and sexual orientations, occupations, incarcerated and non-incarcerated, and of all income brackets. We live in various communities in the north, south, east, and west of this country we call home.
We commit to creating the ideas, serving as a conduit for capital, and connecting with people critical to building a society where all Black people have full agency over their choices in ownership, entrepreneurship, investments, contributions to community and culture, and transfer of intergenerational wealth.
We urge you to join our Build Black Wealth movement! We need investors, partners, advocates, and scholars to inspire beloved economies and communities.