Q & A

We recently sat down with Elizabeth Carter to find out more about her passions, her calling and generally dive in deeper to get to know her.

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What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your work over the last few years?

Well, 2020 hit me, like everyone else. I was able to pivot my community development law firm, and that's really where the business capital side came into my work.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the landlord-tenant business wasn't doing hot for landlords right at that time. But there was money coming in on the other side. The initiatives to stimulate the economy actually really stimulated the investment side of things. You had businesses getting more cash flow, though it wasn't all distributed equitably–but it was more money than a lot of people saw. It helped those who were thinking, “How do I leverage this money to grow more and to be sustainable?”

I started to engage people more on LinkedIn, and I've had that for a while, but I've never used it in a way that got meaningful results. Now, I'm reaching out to people virtually and they’re responding. They became clients, potential partners, collaborators or law clerks. This helped with my own cash flow during the pandemics but I still struggled to find the funding I needed to adequately resource my firm. So, like what I do with my work of creatively helping underfunded entrepreneurs and businesses accumulate capital, I got creative by turning to programming as an innovation to support and sustain my business.

I launched the firm’s #BlackWomen Lawyers Matter program to disrupt the racism and sexism of the corporate securities law industry, and create a pipeline of well-supported Black women law students and lawyers of different legal disciplines to learn solidarity economy lawyering. Our #BlackWomenLawyersMatter program eventually led to the Firm receiving more staff support, which helped the Firm become specialized in providing personalized, subsidized legal support, and build ecosystems.

As we were building relationships and ecosystems of support through the #BlackWomenLawyersMatter program, we increased our commitment to dismantling the business development and funding challenges of our own clients such as the White supremacy that Black cooperatives face in cooperative leadership and funding ecosystems. These challenges inspired our #BlackCapitalMatters and #BlackCoopsMatter programs, programs designed to create alternative funding and operational support to Black-owned businesses and cooperatives. We now use this infrastructure to continuously and uniquely respond to the inequitable business practices Black and Afro-Latinx(o)(a) communities still deal with years after the (ongoing) pandemic(s).

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Developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time. These alternatives want to balance profit and purpose and put a premium on sharing power and resources.

Why is getting investments in this alternative model crucial for those who seek it?

I think it’s interesting that we call it an alternative model. Consider venture capitalism versus crowdfunding, for instance. The idea around crowdfunding  for a company is considered less traditional,and less elitist. It's about this idea that we–regular, everyday people–can be our own resources. And these alternative models, the cooperatives and the crowdfunding investment tools  actually work better during times of financial crisis, while the main systems are failing. People tend to think of banks and venture capitalism as traditional, but really, what’s traditional is community, which is how humans have done things for so long. We're really going back to what has always worked for the majority and for the masses.

Apply that basic principle in other ways and you can see similar success. When I saw businesses shutting down because of the pandemic, I was saying, “Why aren't we coming together and merging the similarly situated businesses? Why aren’t we creating co-ops or joint ventures?” If two businesses can come together and share a rental space, that’s two businesses spending money on one location instead of two. But it’s more than telling someone or even having a legal structure for them to do that. If people aren't used to collaborating or trusting one another, it's not going to work. I think that's where a lot of it fails. That's the greatest challenge of promoting coops or collectives.

In the business capital world, you hear the word “founder” a lot. That’s singular, one person, but it takes a team to make a business successful, right? We’ve seen that in times of mainstream financial crisis, people start to rely on their friends, family and each other more to come together and share resources. I think the challenging part is figuring out how to sustain that when you're looking at it as a business strategy versus as a way of life.

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How do we shift the narrative about the role of capital in BIPOC communities and reframe the perceptions of the risk involved?

We shift the narrative about capital and risk in BIPOC communities by continuing to push for the capital infusion that we saw in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. George Floyd’s death represents so much, and there are a lot of shifting minds and thoughts and hearts across the world. For a short period of time, I did see some wealthy white investors want to inject capital into Black businesses, just by virtue of them being Black. I've seen it even with my own clients, where grant funding just started pouring in for nonprofits and for-profit businesses started getting all these investment dollars, no questions asked, even if they knew it was “risky.”

But all investments are risky. That's the key. The question is, what makes one business more risky than others?

My point is not that investing in startups is risky, but that there's a disparity when it comes to a person of color raising capital versus the white guy raising capital. Even though both ventures are risky, someone will say of the white guy, “Well, he has networks, he went to school with so-and-so.” And if the person of color doesn’t have the same network or connections, you say, “Well, you just need to be in the right room at the right point in time.” No, institutions and individuals just need to intentionally stop making investing risky for BIPOC startups by exploiting, disregarding, and disrespecting them.

And the way we can shift and reframe risk in our own communities is by promoting collaboration. I have seen Black women just take the risk on themselves, despite the little support they receive, and I love to see that. What I want to see more of is the sharing of risk in monetary and non-monetary ways especially among Black women who are increasingly and rightfully betting on themselves.

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What are the top three pieces of  advice you would give to BIPOC entrepreneurs, who are dedicated to both purpose and profit, as they are starting or scaling their business?

My first piece of advice is: Please, be intentional about who you hire and who you support and who you collaborate with, so that opportunities are spread across the board. Hire from within the community so that wealth and resources distribute back into the community. Hire women and people of color. Representation matters. Hire from within the community you serve.

Second: Collaborate! That's when those short-term ventures transition to longer term, when you start looking toward one another to be a resource. Part of my work is around the legal strategy for raising capital and understanding how we can be creative about getting the money that you need. If we can really be creative, you might have some money in your community that you didn’t even know about, because you've been told that that's not where money lives.

Third: Be very intentional about why you're pursuing this venture and always add a mission beyond just making money. The money will come, but you have to be conscious about why you're doing the work that you do if you’re going to create a significant, positive impact for people.

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What is the call to action for investors who seek to promote social justice through investment solutions?

Be intentional about supporting a particular group or particular issue. If you’re trying to change the world without critical thought, you’ll fail. But if you can find others who share your mission and you pool your capital together, you can make meaningful changes.