Our team aims to stand true to our mission and are currently gathering capital to launch our own micro-grant named “The Butterfly Grant”. This grant of $500 or more will be awarded to selected young black creative women spanning all arts disciplines. We intend to pair these awardees with a dependable mentor in their field. We plan to launch this grant initiative September 2022. We would be using your donations to jumpstart and fund this grant program.
The Creative Black Woman’s Network was created by V.C.R as an physical extension to her best selling book “The Creative Black Woman’s Playbook”. The purpose of this network is to celebrate black sisterhood, honor our rich heritage and history, and to empower creative black women internationally. It is our goal to inspire the monatization of every gift and inherent talent we possess.
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Our founder V.C.R., a black creative woman, had personally faced significant challenges working in the arts sector. What she found was her obstacles, such as pay discrimination, overt sexism, and colorism, weren’t just happening to her, but to the majority of her community. So on October 27, 2019, V.C.R released her book “The Creative Black Women's Playbook”. This book is a comprehensive guide to help black women first see themselves as worthy of creative work and then, step-by-step, help them start their own business. With the help of the Women's Center of Creative work and Coconspirators Press, sold all 300 copies that were printed in 9 months. With such an unbelievable response to this book, we knew we needed to continue printing and expand this vision. In March of 2020, when Covid-19 ravished the arts industries, it left so many artist, out of work, and scrambling for financial resources to keep their businesses afloat. We knew that there were other black women who needed financial resources and encouragement too. V.C.R then launched “The Creative Black Women's Network” to help spread grant information to my peers. I began rigorously researching grant opportunities and posting them weekly to an instagram page and every week the posts would spread like wildfire. She then started a mailing list where she sent resources via email to her community. Soon she noticed that her budding community didn’t just need financial resources and literacy, they were in need of encouragement and inspiration during this dark time. So just like in her book, she began spreading historical facts about pioneering creative black women who paved the way for us and inspiring messages. Her CBWN team began organizing virtual encouragement calls for my community as well so my colleagues could vent about what they were facing as creative entrepreneurs. During a horrifying pandemic, and while performing her music at protest in solidarity with black lives, she decided to take her activism a step further and created this organization in hopes to keep spreading financial resources, entrepreneurial tools, notable historic facts, and inspiration to our community because it is vitally important that we do so.
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