Evanston business incubator seeks to open doors for Black entrepreneurs

Evanston business incubator seeks to open doors for Black entrepreneurs

By: Melissa Renee Perry
WBEZChicago

In 2018, cousins Jacqui White and Tosha Wilson had an idea to open a laundromat-meets-cafe business in Evanston’s historically Black fifth ward. They would name it The Laundry Cafe, TLC for short.

White and Wilson envisioned TLC as a gathering place where Evanston residents could socialize and enjoy a cup of coffee, all while doing a load of laundry. Their business would bring a unique twist on an essential chore, set in a space that would encourage community.

Despite both working full-time in law enforcement, White and Wilson were committed to getting their idea off the ground. Unfortunately, the pair hit multiple roadblocks when it came to receiving funding, prompting Wilson to organize a crowdfunding campaign on Facebook for TLC and other Black businesses. While their campaign was warmly received by the community, they still weren’t bringing in enough funds to get The Laundry Cafe off the ground.

“We applied for small business loans, and we weren’t having any luck,” White said. “We were hitting some dead ends with financing.”

Then in 2020, White and Wilson had a meeting with Lori Laser, a woman who was looking into a way to help expand wellness services for underserved residents in the Chicagoland area. She wanted to partner with local leaders and aspiring Black business owners like White and Wilson.

“We all just sat together, bouncing off ideas, figuring out how she could help us and surround us with other Black businesses,” White recalled. “In that, we came up with the Aux.”

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Fix Development’s Solidarity Economy

Fix Development’s Solidarity Economy

BY ELLY FISHMAN
Fast Company

It was the call Juli Kaufmann had dreaded, and it came just one week before the activist-turned-real-estate-developer planned to break ground on her $10 million, 16,500-square-foot project. The building, called The Aux, was pitched as a new anchor for Black and brown businesses in the city of Evanston, Illinois, a place where wealth disparities between Black and white residents stand among the worst in the country. But now, the plan teetered into uncertainty. The project’s final permit, Kaufmann was told, would be delayed. Again.

A sprawling wellness center with 10 committed tenants, The Aux—Kaufmann’s first project outside her hometown of Milwaukee—had already weathered several delays. First, there was the pandemic. Then, the sale of the proposed building fell through. Over time, what began as a $6 million project almost doubled in cost. Kaufmann and the project’s codevelopers—three Black entrepreneurs (Tosha Wilson, Jacqui White, and Tiffini Holmes) and Lori Laser, a philanthropist invested in racial equity, had spent months reassuring more than 60 investors, many of them Evanston residents new to real estate, that the project would soon break ground. The permit problem was a disappointment, but, says Kaufmann, hardly a deterrent. Finding ways to overcome barriers is core to her ethos. “Systems are hard to change,” says Kaufmann, who has spent the past 15 years trying to do just that. “You just keep going.”

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