The Blueprint We Build Together

 A Black Women’s Call to Our Own Future

 

The Founding Mothers who came before us—Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Octavia Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, among others whose names shaped our lineage—did more than resist. They built. They carried truth like a torch, lit the rooms that power tried to keep dark, and left us blueprints for survival. They gave us the studs and the frame, poured the foundation, and told us plainly that our inheritance was not simply memory but instruction. They proved that to be Black and woman in America is to be both the backbone and the vision. That is not nostalgia. That is the scaffolding on which we now stand.

And yet here we are again, facing a question that sounds like a prayer and a dare all at once: how do we get through this?

The Reality We Cannot Ignore 

The layoffs that gutted Black women after Trump’s second inauguration were not the unfortunate result of a slowing economy. They were a clear message. The dismantling of DEI initiatives across federal agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and universities was less about budgets and more about targeting. By removing even the most basic programs designed to create access, this administration signaled what many already knew: Black women were never meant to belong inside their institutions unless our labor was being extracted without recognition.

We saw the statistics. Black women lost jobs at a rate that dwarfed every other demographic. For many, the cuts were not just about paychecks. They represented healthcare, rent, childcare, and survival. They represented years of education and ambition that suddenly became disposable. The ground shifted under us. But if history has taught us anything, it is that Black women do not remain flat on the ground. We build new ground to stand on.

The Currency of Us

The economy already runs through Black women, whether or not Wall Street admits it. We set culture, we drive consumption, and our labor fuels billion-dollar industries from beauty to publishing to politics. Our music, our language, our aesthetic, our intellect—corporations have no shame in mining us for profit. But the most radical step forward now is to decide that our currency is no longer up for rent.

Black Americans now command about $2.1 trillion in buying power, more than doubling since 2000; that figure comes from the Selig Center and is cited in Nielsen’s 2025 analysis of Black audiences. Women drive the majority of household purchasing decisions overall—industry studies consistently place women’s influence at 70 to 85 percent of consumer spend—while Black women are also one of the fastest-growing entrepreneur cohorts. Read together, the signal is clear: our community already moves markets; formalizing how we find and fund one another is the bridge from survival to scale. Brookings+3Nielsen+3NIQ+3

How to use the data to build the bridge: Treat $2.1T as a targeting map, not a headline. Pick three essential spend categories where Black women already lead or are rapidly growing—beauty and personal care, food and wellness, digital services/education—and stand up a Digital Exchange that directs a fixed share of monthly purchases to Black-women-owned sellers, then measure recirculation and job creation the way cities track multipliers. Start with simple KPIs: percent of spend redirected, average order value, repeat purchase rate, and number of businesses onboarded per month. Publish the dashboard in your newsletter so the community can see the needle move in public. NIQ

That decision is not only for the well-off among us. It is not just about women who can afford to invest in startups or sit on boards. It is also about the sister who can spend five dollars on a locally baked loaf of bread instead of handing it over to a chain that will never respect her. It is about choosing the hair oil made by a woman in your neighborhood rather than the multinational brand that copies her formula. It is about shifting habits, one grocery run and one order at a time, so that our dollars multiply inside our own ecosystem instead of being siphoned out of it.

It is about shifting habits, one grocery run and one order at a time, so that our dollars multiply inside our own ecosystem instead of being siphoned out of it.

Circulating our currency within our communities is survival economics. It means the poorest among us are not left behind, because every dollar they spend becomes part of a loop that can return to them.

Imagine a woman barely making rent who chooses a meal prep service run by another Black woman. That purchase not only feeds her but keeps the chef employed, which allows the chef to hire another worker. That worker then spends her income at a Black-owned daycare. This is how survival becomes sustainability. This is how the poorest among us are folded into the larger weave of progress.

Why We Speak to Us

There is a reason this vision speaks directly to Black women. In the current climate, naming ourselves with such clarity will be misinterpreted by some. In a society where whiteness has long been positioned as the neutral center, any effort to build intentionally for ourselves is too often cast as divisive, even as racist. But to confuse survival with separatism is itself a failure of imagination. This is not an agenda of exclusion. It is a practice of precision.

The truth is plain. Black women are absorbing the sharpest edge of this moment. We are disproportionately losing jobs in the dismantling of DEI. We are carrying households without the insulation of generational wealth. We are navigating medical systems where our pain is routinely dismissed. In every sector, the ground beneath us has been intentionally weakened. To build spaces, economies, and structures for Black women is not to wall ourselves off. It is to pour new foundation where none has been allowed to set.

And history shows us what follows when we build for ourselves. The kitchens where Black women strategized fed movements that reshaped democracy. The presses where our stories were printed became archives for the world. The networks we created for survival became models of sustainability later praised by universities and industries. To center Black women now is not to retreat from the world but to create the conditions under which the world might find its balance again.

This is why the language is deliberate. To broaden it prematurely, to soften it for palatability, would dilute the urgency of what we face. The house is burning most fiercely in the rooms where Black women live. To direct resources, creativity, and commitment to those rooms first is not selfish. It is strategic. For when Black women stand, the structures we build invariably extend outward. They become shelter and blueprint far beyond our own.

What we are doing here is not separation. It is clarity. It is the articulation of a survival strategy in an environment designed to erase us. It is the insistence that love, vision, and structure must begin with those who are carrying the greatest weight. 

Having named why this work must begin with us, the next question is where it begins. If Black Wall Street was our first draft, our second must live not only in our neighborhoods but in the digital commons. That is where we map, where we connect, where we circulate.

The Digital Blueprint

If Black Wall Street was our first draft, our second must live online as much as it lives in the streets. The digital age gives us tools our foremothers could not have imagined. We can map our businesses, organize them by industry, create searchable databases, and build marketplaces where discovery is simple rather than accidental.

Picture a Black woman who has just been laid off from her corporate job. She logs into a digital Exchange, finds a freelance project posted by another Black woman entrepreneur, takes it on, and gets paid directly. That payment allows her to cover her rent for the month. She then uses that income to buy clothes for her child from a Black-owned boutique listed on the same platform. Her purchase allows that boutique to expand and hire another seamstress. That seamstress uses her paycheck to buy groceries from a Black woman farmer who sells directly through the Exchange. This is a cycle not of charity but of intentional circulation.

This digital infrastructure must be designed to include everyone. It cannot only showcase elite brands that already have funding. It must hold space for the home baker, the side-hustling mom, the artist selling prints, the babysitter, the hair braider, and the organizer running a tutoring service out of her living room. Each of these women deserves to be visible and supported. 

But digital tools are only one piece. We are not starting from scratch—we inherit a design already tested in freedom schools, food co-ops, and underground networks. Those blueprints are not relics; they are instructions.

The Design We Already Know

(From left to right: Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison.)

We do not need to copy Silicon Valley or Wall Street. We already know how to build. Our history is one long record of constructing what we needed when no one else would. The underground networks that moved families to safety. The food co-ops that kept neighborhoods fed. The freedom schools that taught children to read when public schools refused. The clinics that became hospitals. The newspapers and chapbooks that became literature courses in universities.

Each of these efforts began not with permission but with refusal. Refusal to wait. Refusal to accept scarcity. Refusal to stay silent. Today our refusal must become infrastructure. The structures we create should not be temporary stopgaps. They should be durable, expandable, and flexible enough to hold the weight of generations.

Every design we borrow and every tool we build points to the same question: what remains after us? The measure of this work is not only whether we survive the present but whether we leave behind structures that endure for those who come after. 

What We Pass On

The most important question is not what we build for ourselves, but what we leave for those who come after. Sustainability is not only about resources but about culture, economics, and memory. A sustainable Black women’s economy means that the single mother with two jobs knows she has a place to land if one collapses. It means that a college student with an idea for an app knows her first investors and users are already in her corner. It means that the grandmother running a small catering business from her kitchen knows she will not be invisible. 

What we build today must be timeless. Not a pop-up experiment, not a trend for social media, but a market, a commons, an Exchange that scholars will study in the future. They will write about how Black women created an economy that was not reliant on a system designed to erase them. They will note that what began as survival became prosperity.

Legacy, however, is only secured by action. To honor what we’ve inherited and to ensure what we pass on, we must choose the work in front of us. We must decide what we will do—together—now.

What We Do Next

So what do we do next? We commit. We create the databases, the directories, the maps. We make sure that when one sister asks, “Where do I find a Black woman who does this?” there is always an answer. We commit to buying from each other not when it is convenient, but as a rule. We pledge to circulate our dollars with the same seriousness we bring to voting or organizing. Because this, too, is power.

And I need to be clear. I do not have all the answers. None of us do alone. What I do know is that we hold the answers together. That is why I am open to hosting or recommending a town hall—something Zoom-style and accessible—where we can gather in real time. We can pitch ideas. We can find out who has already started basic databases for Black women-owned businesses, schools, brick-and-mortar shops, and online classes. We can spotlight the sisters building apps or platforms. We can connect with the graphic designers and web builders who are ready to help someone else launch. We can crowdsource our knowledge and our skills so that the burden does not rest on a single back.

I know we can do this because we already have. When Kamala Harris launched her 107-day campaign, Black women across the country set the first meeting to crowdsource funds and ideas. In record time, we built one of the shortest and largest fundraising movements in political history. That showed us what happens when we move together, when we refuse to wait for permission. Now we take that same energy and turn it toward us.

Maybe this moment, as painful and disorienting as it feels, is the exact catalyst we needed to dream bigger for each other. To stop waiting for institutions to protect us and instead build our own infrastructure. To imagine an Exchange not just as survival but as a launchpad. To see the possibility of what we become when we decide that building for ourselves is the only path forward.

And the truth is, what benefits us has always rippled outward to benefit the world at large. When Black women create, the world shifts. When we organize, the world learns. When we prosper, the world borrows our blueprint. That is why this work is urgent. Because in saving ourselves, we will once again show the world how to save itself.

 

Tasha Monroe

Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.

Writer & Editor, The Commons Dispatch

 

 

ADDENDUM FOR THOUGHT! 

For those asking where to begin, here are the channels already within our reach—the voices, the platforms, and the cultural engines that can carry this blueprint forward.

Voices and Channels to Mobilize

The blueprint is not just about businesses, it is about the platforms that carry them. Podcasts are one place to start. A curated “Sister Signal” playlist of Black-women-hosted shows on money, wellness, culture, and entrepreneurship could become both discovery tool and sponsorship lane. Rotate ten shows each month and pair each with a featured business so that the conversation translates directly into commerce.

YouTube and livestreams can serve as another frontier. A weekly series where founders demo products, app builders show prototypes, and designers give quick brand audits would convert audiences into customers in real time. Attendance becomes visibility. Conversions become proof. The chat box becomes a hiring pipeline.

Publications and newsletters are another bridge. Imagine a syndication ring where Black-women-led newsletters swap excerpts, share resource lists, and co-publish investigations into access to capital. The result is compounded reach without surrendering traffic or authority.

Culture will also carry the case. Commissioning micro-campaigns from writers, journalists, filmmakers, and publicists to tell receipt-level stories makes buying Black-woman-made feel like the default, not the exception. These stories can travel across platforms faster than ad buys, normalizing an economy that already exists.

Learning and earning go hand in hand. Micro-courses and co-ops on bookkeeping, Shopify set-ups, grant-writing, and procurement readiness could transform fragile income streams into durable businesses. Every course completed is another door opened into the marketplace.