Determining what drives entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups is the focus of Yolanda Christophe’s research.
Christophe is one of three Lender Center for Social Justice postdoctoral fellows who are involved in the center’s examination of the racial wealth gap in America. That initiative explores the gap’s causes and consequences and aims to create effective solutions to counter it through social collaborations that help dismantle the root causes of racial wealth disparities.
Before coming to Syracuse University, Christophe was a research fellow focused on this area at the Inclusive Innovation Initiative at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Before that, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in finance and business administration from Florida Memorial University and a Ph.D. in management from Morgan State University.
We sat down with Christophe to hear about her interest in understanding the critical stages of entrepreneurial journeys, the psychological factors and resource needs that drive entrepreneurial success and the dynamics between individual entrepreneurs and social institutions.
I started observing that entrepreneurship could be a pathway to wealth building for individuals, and specifically for individuals from underserved communities. Those people don’t always have opportunities to go through the traditional path of labor as an economic mobility vehicle.
Fixing the racial wealth gap is not just about money. You can’t just give people money and expect them to be okay. It’s also about how to develop supportive arrangements that facilitate producing wealth or generating income while allowing residents to feel okay. It is also about education and skill-building. All those elements need to be considered.
My mom, dad, brother and sister are all entrepreneurs. My mom immigrated to the Bahamas from Haiti to build a better life and provide for her family. In a new country, facing language and cultural barriers, she couldn’t access the traditional labor market. There was bias against her because of how she looked and spoke and there were cultural barriers to navigate. Because the labor market wasn’t open to her learning a different language and customs, entrepreneurship became her means to make a living and help maintain our family. She owned a small grocery store in the Bahamas. Entrepreneurship provided economic mobility for my father and brother, too. Together, they own a landscaping company and have also started working on large infrastructure and recreational projects. My parents and siblings are still in the Bahamas, still entrepreneurs and thriving.
I have focused on institutional and systemic barriers that can influence entrepreneurial success. I’ve talked with almost 40 entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship support organizations about their experiences to understand what barriers entrepreneurs face and how they are confronting them.
I’ve found that they are roaming in search of resources and supportive institutions and using their ingenuity to find ways around barriers like those sometimes imposed by financial institutions, landlords, distributors and local government agencies. They are banding together, leveraging connections from informal networks and confronting or working around the barriers they face. They may lobby to be let inside the gates of opportunities, reach out to mentors and helpers, or find alternate ways to approach business survival. They may do community-based crowdfunding, get charitable grants from companies to obtain financial resources or form strategic partnerships with social movements to gain legitimacy. They are not trying to totally transform the ecosystem; their tactics don’t overly challenge the existing system.
It’s very interesting to learn how they are striving for individual survival and preservation. The sad part, though, is that the constant effort to try to find and tap into resources can be exhausting for them. Many are experiencing real pain and difficulty, and most entrepreneurs use up their initial resources in the course of this wayfinding. It doesn’t have to be that way.
My hope is to take this Baltimore lens and apply it to other Rust Belt cities across the United States that are like Baltimore, places that have experienced similar historical segregation.
I see entrepreneurship as a pathway to economic mobility and economic freedom, but the racial wealth gap needs to be approached from a dynamic perspective, not just a money perspective. We can’t just think about just building finances. We also have to think about creating systems that can help, that provide the right skills, that provide mentors and that make sure entrepreneurs have the needed resources to be successful, such as technology resources and mental health and wellness support.
Yolanda Christophe is just starting her two-year social justice fellowship.
My goal is a case analysis examining similarities and differences of various cities and the institutional barriers that exist in each place as well as how entrepreneurs are navigating their situations. I’d like to see networks created across states to help individuals. I want to write a policy brief to influence how systems can be developed to help entrepreneurs. I also want to make sure this work serves not only academic research but is dedicated to seeing change in the system by working with community leaders.
We have to do right by the people who are telling us their stories. Individuals’ entrepreneurial ingenuity is great but keeping that up is exhausting for them; most give up and their businesses fail or die out in the process. As researchers, we need to regard them as the experts in this situation then translate what they’re telling us into actionable ideas to help support them.
