About Us
Our vision is economic justice for Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.
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Our mission is community development through entrepreneurship.
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We believe education, home ownership, and entrepreneurship are the three pillars of closing the racial wealth gap in America - our focus is on entrepreneurship. As startups and small businesses grow, they provide jobs and services for their communities and create wealth for their founders and their families. "Majira" means summer in Swahili. In a nod to the growing season, we believe just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to grow, startups and small businesses need consulting, coaching, connections, and capital to grow.
Majira was founded in 2016 as a partnership between Msaada Partners and the Boston office of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as a way to spur community development through entrepreneurship. While working in various entrepreneurship programs across Boston, our founder Kerry Bowie noticed the lack of diversity in the traditional entrepreneurial ecosystem and the disparity in resources available to entrepreneurs outside of the ecosystem. With the support of his friend and classmate Roger Premo, they launched a pilot to provide six companies led by founders from and working in underserved communities with consulting from the Boston BCG office and coaching from Msaada Partners.
The inaugural cohort in 2016 with BCG consultants and the partners from Msaada
In 2020, the Majira Project spun off of Msaada Partners and formally incorporated as an independent non-profit. With four years of iteration and proven impact in the Boston region and spurred by the COVID-pandemic and national racial "awakening", the Majira Project went virtual and expanded operations to New York, Chicago, Dallas & Los Angeles, more than tripling the number of companies it was able to impact. It has since only continued to grow, expanding and deepening it's impact to startups and small businesses across the nation.
How the Majira Project has grown over the years