2023 Ventures Showcase Recap

On May 24, our CityBridge community came together for our 2023 Ventures Showcase, the culminating event for our 2022-2023 Design Residency: Ventures cohort. Over the past nine months, our Residents received customized curriculum, coaching, connections, and capital that supported accelerated the design and implementation of their education ventures. 

Throughout the program, these passionate individuals worked tirelessly to reimagine the future of education and to push their vision forward. This work was on display during the Showcase as our entrepreneurs pitched their ventures to a panel of expert judges. 

Our 2022-2023 Residents:

• Tia Bell, The T.R.I.G.G.E.R Project. The T.R.I.G.G.E.R. Project is a non-profit focused on addressing root causes that create a culture of violence among our city’s youth.
• Laurel Djoukeng, Sparc. Sparc is a social network that connects college students/professionals with job opportunities, employer recruiting events, and networking opportunities.
• Noah Dougherty and Dan Englender, Relevant Learner. Relevant Learner connects students with locally and culturally relevant content by sourcing diverse and empowering content from expert community institutions and making it simple for educators to find, personalize, and share that content with students.
• Vanessa Douyon, The Polyglot Tot. The Polyglot Tot provides at-home tools to help caregivers pass their heritage language on to their kids, focusing on ages birth to three, when most language development happens, and where resources are at their slimmest.

Please join us in congratulating our entrepreneurs for all they have accomplished this year. We are grateful for the unwavering commitment of Tia, Laurel, Noah, Dan, and Vanessa and the collective impact they will make on DC’s education system.

We are also grateful to Riley Jones, IV, for his leadership and to our esteemed judges: Troy Duffie, Dr. Omolara Fatiregun, and Isaiah Walker.

Entrepreneur Journeys, a reflection on the celebration

CityBridge held its first in-person event in over two years, Entrepreneur Journeys, in June. The event was a remix of a traditional panel and spotlighted three BIPOC Entrepreneurs in our DC community. We asked these entrepreneurs to share their stories of learning, vulnerability, and self-discovery. 

At CityBridge, we recognize, support, and celebrate the journey of entrepreneurs—especially those entrepreneurs who choose disruption, liberation, and to design a future we’ve only dreamed of. To be an entrepreneur is to continually put yourself and your ideas out into the world, with the hopes they will find ears, hearts, and minds that embrace, believe, and invest in them. This takes a deep level of self-awareness, vulnerability, continued reflection and self-discovery, and to be able to speak to the future. 

Below, we are sharing the questions that were asked of panelists during the Entrepreneur Journeys event. We hope that you will take a look at them and use them as reflection tools to uncover your own entrepreneurial journey. Bonus if you share one of your stories with a friend or colleague!

Reflection Questions:

• Which of your intersectional identities do you most strongly identify? Why? What’s your UNIQUE story that has allowed you to be here?    
• What is something you’re insecure about as an entrepreneur that you’ve hidden from the world?  
• What is the one thing you are learning about yourself? Is it in tension with what you’ve always been told?
• What is an image that captures “a more equitable future” for the young people of DC. What are you creating that will make this true?

Entrepreneur Journeys Panelists 

Andre Zarate is an educational leader in the Washington, DC, area, most recently at Sojourner Truth Montessori PCS. He has been an educator for the past nine years in Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia. He’s currently working on his doctorate degree to support his mission and commitment to creating a counter-space school model that centers the needs of LGBTQIA+ students of color through the Z Factor Project and House of Legends.

Lauren Bryant is a catalytic connector, radical collaborator, and womanist operationalizing spaces of belonging that ignite and sustain change. A decade-long cultivator of community within public education, Lauren centers her values of community, collaboration, and compassion to support school-based operations teams and leaders through her work at StartOps, focusing most deeply on the experiences of executive leaders of color and leaders of color within operations.

Naomi Shelton currently serves as Chief Executive Officer of the National Charter Collaborative. A self-described dynamic leader with cross-functional expertise, Naomi is a 4th generation graduate of Tougaloo College and a staunch advocate for educational justice who lives for a good independent film and live music. While Mississippi is her birthplace, DC is—and will forever be—home. #DCorNothing

Welcome to the Rewind

The last two program years have laid bare the acute impact of the deeply embedded inequities in our systems. However, in the midst of the increasing levels of frustration and disillusionment, we have found local inspiration. Since 2020, over 300 DC leaders have been compelled to address these inequities with the support of our programs. The CityBridge Incubator provides critical early-stage support for school leaders, educators, and entrepreneurs to design innovative and equity-centered solutions to our most entrenched educational challenges. In one of the most troubled and unique moments in our history, leaders—from all wards of the city—in student-serving organizations and schools within both sectors designed, piloted, and launched solutions tethered to one unifying goal: to create a more equitable future for DC’s young people.

Through the activation of equity design principles, our tools, and coaching from our experts, participants designed solutions from strengthening trauma-informed practices within the individual classroom to the launch of a multi-generational model prioritizing family wellness and parent technical skill development. Regardless of whether or not each participant’s ideas or pilots were ready for scaling, all participants embarked on a journey that centered learning from and with the communities most impacted by the problem.

Just as we encourage learning as a part of the solution building process, we demand that of ourselves. In fact, we’ve spent the last two years refining the strategies that will help us deliver programming that catalyzes our unifying goal. We have executed strategies to activate leadership and prioritize the recruitment of Black and Brown leaders, deployed curricula and coaching to improve the effectiveness of early stage ventures, and shared our ideas broadly in order to invite critique and reflection. 

As a part of this journey, we’ve decided to pause and reflect on what we’ve learned in pursuit of these goals and share them with you. 

This, my friend, is for us. A chance for all of us to be inspired about what we’ve accomplished together.

We are thrilled to kick-off The CityBridge Rewind, a month-long highlight reel of the leaders and ideas that have passed through our incubator and what we’ve learned from and with them. Across this month, you will gain more insight into our approach to this work from members of our team, preview the tools we use, and share in the learning that results. 

Upcoming stories will provide insight into how we:

• Deploy curricula and coaching that will improve the effectiveness of early stage ventures: Listen in on a conversation with Coach Kim and some of the leaders she coached through Fellowship. They’ll share about the partnerships they built, the ways they grew as leaders, and the fun they had through the process.
• Share our ideas to offer critique and reflection: Read Jim’s story about his work with the CapX and how it exemplifies how we keep students at the center of our work, while being creative, flexible, and innovative about ways in which we can push impact for kids. Read about how we had to pivot our approach after being rejected by the PCSB, but ultimately embraced obstacles as opportunities for students in DC.
• Deploy curricula that will improve the effectiveness of early stage ventures: Read Andrew’s story of his work with two amazing leaders at Friendship Public Charter Schools. We help educators and entrepreneurs incubate their ideas with a widening toolkit of equity-design methods. One of the most powerful tools? Reflection. Read about how Felicia Ow0-Grant and Ayinde Spradley at Friendship PCS used reflective tools to explore, test, and learn.
• Activating leadership: Join us at 5:30pm, Thursday, June 23rd as we celebrate the work of all of our alumni at Entrepreneur Journeys event at the Gathering Spot DC. Email Morgan Marler at mmarler@citybridge.org to RSVP.

This post is a part of The Rewind, our month-long highlight reel sharing what we’ve learned and spotlighting the leaders and ideas we’ve supported from 2020-2022.