She opened her own boutique, Lisa Lou Boutique in a storefront at 614 Mulberry St., a convenient location about half a block from downtown Lincoln Park, in November just after Thanksgiving.

She had a vision. She needed the means to get there.

A new leadership initiative by a group of black professionals in Waterloo has given him that means. It’s called 24/7 BLAC, or Black Leadership Advancement Consortium.

“I heard about their (business) accelerator class. And so, I decided to sign up for it. I learned all about taxes, how to classify my business as a ‘business.’ It’s just a wealth of information, a stepping stone to running your own business.

She started the business from her home in 2018 and continued to dabble in it while working from home for her job at CUNA Mutual in Waverly. When she finished with the course, led by local entrepreneur ReShonda Young, Bradford not only had a vision and a desire, she had confidence.

“Coming in, I felt a little uncertain about my business, because I didn’t know where to go with it, what to do,” Bradford told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. “But after I finished with this course, not only did I have the knowledge, the connections and all that, but it gave you the confidence to launch your business into the community. They bring everything out of you. They do.”

While she initially hoped to just generate enough business to keep the store running, “it was better than that for me, so I’m really happy about it.” She does coast-to-coast online sales in addition to in-store commerce.

“This is amazing!” BLAC 24/7 board member Gwenne Berry told Bradford. “I’m so proud of you! I’m just excited for you!”

“We were so excited that Lisa entered” the program, said Joy Briscoe, executive director of 24/7 BLAC. “Her being in downtown Waterloo, it’s just amazing.”

“Just seeing her grow and her dream come true is really good,” said Sharina Sallis, BLAC 24/7 Board Chair and Community Relations Manager at CUNA Mutual. “She always had it in her. Being able to implement these retail assets in her own space is nice to see.”

Bradford is one of the newest members of a small slice of Waterloo – young black entrepreneurs. It is the objective of 24/7 BLAC to enlarge this slice. Much bigger.

The name of the group, “24/7 BLAC”, was taken from the “24/7 Wall Street” study a few years ago which concluded that Cedar Valley is the worst community in the country for black people. The group’s organizers took part of the name to remind themselves to make things better – much like a sports coach who takes an opposing player’s nonsense and posts himself on the bulletin board in the locker room to motivate the team.

And make no mistake, 24/7 BLAC is here to earn it.

Founded 18 months ago, 24/7 BLAC promotes career readiness and advancement and economic empowerment with a multi-pronged approach: an educational “economic empowerment” series; the Wakanda Investment Group, a private equity investment club; “SkillUp” employment opportunities and advancement program; and the Cedar Valley Black Business & Entrepreneurship Accelerator, or CV BBEA, the state’s only all-black accelerator program. Around 30 people, including Bradford, have completed the training over the past 18 months and several are now working for themselves.

“That, we know, makes a difference,” said Berry, the band’s recording secretary.

The group, a registered nonprofit, is already seeing progress, as evidenced by the Bradford store, and is beginning to receive inquiries from other Iowa communities about how to proceed with similar groups.

The group has an economic empowerment series that begins the first Tuesday of every month, featuring Mike Finley, also known as “The Crazy Man in the Pink Wig”. The 26-year-old US Army veteran has been teaching financial literacy for 32 years, including a stint at Waterloo radio station KBBG, and is the author of four books. A former recipient of the local “Heroes Among Us” award, he gets his nickname from the attention-grabbing hot pink wig he’s been known to wear during talks.

While many people have gone to Finley individually for advice, Berry said, “This information is very rarely presented to black people as a whole. When we talk about racism and overcoming racism, we are talking about education. We never talk about economic empowerment. But really, you can make all the money in the world, but you can’t buy the house you want in the “XYZ” neighborhood if you haven’t focused on your credit score, focused on your credit. that we just don’t talk about.

“When we talk to people 24/7, we’re telling people it’s okay to have money in the bank. But the best place to get your money is to invest it. We’re finding ways to help, very specifically, black people, to address those gaps,” Berry said. “Not as a victim, but as someone who just doesn’t have the same opportunity to get this information.”

The investment club, named ‘Wakanda’ after the African kingdom in the movie ‘Black Panther’, examines ‘how are we going to invest this money as a group’ in the stock market, researching various industry sectors and companies to invest prospectively in, such as healthcare and technology.

Berry said the investment group was an eye-opening experience for her.

“We’re also afraid of words like ‘investment portfolio,'” Berry said. “I’ve often said, ‘Investment portfolio?’ It’s something the rich have. We all have an investment portfolio – you have a 401(k) retirement plan. But are you maximizing the potential? Most of us are not. Especially if you are black. Because this is not information that our families have had.

Another offering from 24/7 BLAC is a home ownership education program, “helping people understand all the ins and outs of buying a home, and how our homes are sometimes the first step towards generational wealth creation,” Berry said.

The group’s “SkillUp” program helps people with basic job skills. “Not just to prepare for (job) interviews,” Berry said. “but also be prepared to do things like negotiate salaries; get ready to level up.

Last June, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, BLAC hosted a first-ever virtual forum on executive leadership for black professionals. It drew around 400 attendees on a Zoom call, featuring Kevin Warren, the Big Ten intercollegiate athletic conference’s first black commissioner.

“What really makes me happy is how the community said, ‘We’ve got your back,'” Berry said. She said major employers look to SkillUp program participants for potential employees.

Disparities are significant in Waterloo and across the country. Robert Smith, a BLAC 24/7 board member and director of the University of Northern Iowa Center for Urban Education, cited a Business Insider article from February that showed black Americans lag far behind whites and to other ethnic groups in a number of economic areas, including employment. , business ownership and household wealth, among others.

Indeed, many members of the 24/7 BLAC Board of Directors are personal examples of the disparities – many have postgraduate degrees, others many years of military service, but have pretty much started at the bottom of the local job ladder.

“As a black woman in this community with a Ph.D. – this tool did not work for me. It shouldn’t be,” said BLAC 24/7 Board Member Denita Gadson. For several years, she served as Academic Advisor for Diversity and Inclusion initiatives at the University of Northern Iowa School of Business and was recently appointed Director of UNI’s Educational Talent Search Program at Cedar Rapids. She held several jobs in the public and private sectors before that.

The 24/Wall Street report not only targeted Waterloo, but quantified what many in the community were seeing, Briscoe said.

“Originally, we focused more on workforce development, but when we learned that black-owned businesses needed so much support, that was our first fight,” Briscoe said. in the Bradford shop.

Smith said the 24/7 BLAC offerings “offer a prospect of helping the whole community from an economic standpoint.”

For decades, Smith has taken the message of economic empowerment to the black community in a number of places; specifically, “about financial literacy in the community and trying to generate long-term wealth.

“I’ve always believed passionately that the piece that’s always been missing is trying to help citizens and people in the black community understand that there’s this level of funding that we need to be part of,” said Smith. “We are going to have to be part of it. The better we understand it and learn to better understand how the infrastructure is put in place, the better we will be able to support the progress and achievements of the black community.

“I’m a bit behind the scenes. I just want to be that consciousness,” Smith said. “Don’t lose sight of financial literacy and try to build wealth.”