Resource Stories: Benjamin Vann & Lucy Huang, Impact Ventures

Benjamin Vann’s three core values are faith, family, and service. Benjamin, who comes from a long line of community leaders, members of the clergy, and entrepreneurs, recalls how his family background and history of service contributes to his experience as an entrepreneur. “I preach economic justice,” he says. “My pulpit just looks different.”

That family history and sense of purpose helped inspire Benjamin to create Impact Ventures, a startup accelerator and integrated capital fund with a mission to help talented, yet under-resourced women and entrepreneurs of color build generational wealth through inclusive entrepreneurship and integrated capital.

Since 2017, Impact Ventures has supported nearly 3,500 entrepreneurs through community networking events, hackathons, workshops, and summits. In just the past year, their flagship accelerator program has helped 120 founders collectively raise more than $5 million.

Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?

Benjamin’s grandmother was one of the first women pastors in the PAW (Pentecostal Assemblies of the World). She was also a seamstress whose business had the tagline “sewing souls for the kingdom.” Her dream was to be a costume designer on Broadway, but Benjamin watched as technological advances in textiles and mass production, as well as limiting gender roles, created challenges for women who wanted to succeed in that business.

Benjamin went to college at Washburn University as a standout football player and studied finance, committed to learning the ways of the global economy. One of his formative experiences was reading Reginald Lewis’ memoir, “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?” Lewis was the first Black billionaire in the private equity industry, and he challenged his readers to follow their dreams.

Benjamin followed his family to Dallas after graduation and got a job at Fidelity Investments to cut his teeth in the corporate world. He then transitioned to Fidelity Charitable, its donor advisor fund, and started advising clients on strategies for philanthropic giving. This work gave Benjamin the feeling of doing something purposeful in his career.

His sense of service still pulled at him. As a side gig, he started a social enterprise called Mobile Empowerment Group, an initiative to convene and connect founders of color in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. They eschewed traditional venues like hotel ballrooms in favor of more inspiring spaces; one convening was held on a boat. The community grew quickly, and soon enough, Benjamin merged the initiative with the Dallas Black Professionals Social Network. Shortly afterwards, he was asked to join Dallas Mayor’s Star Council.

“I was 24 at that time, and I was suddenly at the forefront of all things concerning the wellbeing of Black residents in the region,” he recalls. “Being in the Mayor’s Star Council gave me both an inside and birds-eye view of the city, its rich history, and the people who work to make it the best place to live, work, play, and do business.”

He took that experience and served as a board member for many local nonprofits and held commissioner seats as an appointed city official. He also served in several board and volunteer positions throughout organizations in Dallas.

The list is long:  the local Urban League and NAACP; the South Dallas/Fair Park Opportunity Fund; the Grand Park South TIF District; Bishop Arts Theatre Center; Anthem Strong Families; ISD’s IDEA Academy Advisory Board; and Social Venture Partners’ Dana Juette Social Venture Residency.

Benjamin’s credentials extended to national and global efforts as well. He joined Dallas’  the World Economic Forum’s Global Shaper Vice Curator, and led a countywide Get Out the Vote initiative, registering more than 10,000 people to vote. Serving in these capacities, and working as a consultant to NGOs and startups, he grew to be known as a sought-out leader within the Dallas business and civic community.

In 2016, Benjamin started a new job at the Good Returns Group, an organization that coordinates microloans in developing countries. The role opened his eyes to the power of impact investing. 

“I saw how the philanthropic sector that was heavily focused on grants was just not sustainable,” he says. “Leveraging tools and infrastructure within the private sector could provide more sustainable strategies to create change.”

The experience also showed him that more diversity was needed in the private equity sector.  ”Those writing the checks did not look like me,” Benjamin noted. “When you come from the Ivy League schools, your social network plays into getting your connections and patronage. It’s not a rule, but it’s a trend. It’s harder to raise money if you don't come up from that pedigree.” He saw the need to develop a new system to co-exist inside the dominant one. So he launched Impact Ventures. 

Developing a New System

Like many startups, Impact Ventures had a rocky start – including an early pivot.

Benjamin’s first vision for Dallas’s BIPOC founders was building a co-working space in South Dallas – the area south of the Trinity River, Downtown, and I-30 – or what he calls, “the highway that divides Dallas into two cities.” 

The area is heavily Black and Hispanic, and historically under-invested, including a notable lack of entrepreneurship hubs.

In July 2017, Benjamin opened up Impact House, a two-story building in South Dallas. It was a passion project; he refurbished the tiles by hand and built out the finish on the building himself. He even wrote his vision by hand on the walls.

But the Impact House quickly ran into the endemic challenges of creating an entrepreneurial hub in an under-resourced part of the city. 

“Two of the most important pieces essential to coworking are coffee and the internet,” Benjamin says. “While we had plenty of coffee, the infrastructure within the part of town we were in did not allow for sufficient internet access. This was a problem many of the residents faced as well, day in and day out.”

Benjamin knew that an entrepreneur has to be flexible. So, he shifted the focus of having a physical space to building a community. “We learned that it wasn’t the space that brought people together, it was the sense of community.” Benjamin says. 

To that, he began building the next phase of the vision – an accelerator.

Impact Ventures

In 2020, Impact Ventures launched its first accelerator cohort, the first minority focused tech accelerator in North Texas. The accelerator was nearly derailed by the pandemic, but they completed it and noted how it could be expanded to specifically address innovation in underserved communities.  

We often quickly associate innovation with technology, while overlooking the cultural competencies and uniqueness that can also be deemed as culture innovation,” Benjamin noted. This revelation led Impact Ventures to expand its program offerings to include a focus beyond tech to include consumer products and goods as well as other innovative types of businesses that fit across the value chain, like corporate or government procurement and retail opportunities. 

Impact Ventures runs two program tracks simultaneously. The LEAP (Local Enterprise Accelerator Program) track is designed for local businesses in North Texas that have the ability to become employer firms and create livable wage jobs that help sustain local communities. LEAP program alumni include innovative service-based companies and consumer goods companies across industries, including packaged food products that sell into stores like Central Market, Royal Blue Grocery, Whole Foods Market, and other specialty retailers. 

The Inclusive Innovation track focuses on high growth, SaaS, tech-enabled startups. The cohorts include many North Texas startups and founders from around the United States. The curriculum is designed to support every founder's unique problem and stage of business. Founders have dedicated subject matter expert advisors that help develop and implement milestone plans and roadmaps focused on key areas of their business.

Both programs run twice a year for 10 weeks and support 15 entrepreneurs per program. Benjamin believes that this dual strategy is important as founders all have unique sets of challenges, saying: “You can't have a cookie cutter solution to complex challenges.”

Lucy Huang, chief program officer for Impact Ventures, leads both accelerators. She is proud of the connection-driven nature of Impact Ventures’ programs. Both tracks use a “peer review” process inspired by Village Capital’s peer-selected investment model, where cohort members evaluate each other on their progress.

“We start off in week 1 by asking the cohort, ‘what are your top priorities?’” she says. “Eighty percent will say that they need to fundraise, but they don’t know what they’re fundraising for. So, we show them Village Capital’s VIRAL Diagnostic, and that helps them see ‘Oh, those should be my goals.’”

Lucy is excited about Impact Ventures’ ability to help founders build conviction in their ideas. 

“The biggest thing we’ve seen is an increase in confidence, which you can’t measure,” she says. “It means everything when you walk in a room and you don't have that confidence; investors don’t believe in you if you don't believe in yourself. We teach founders that it’s important that you come in owning your lived experience, what you know, what you don’t, and why you’re speaking to them.”

What’s Next for Impact Ventures

Impact Ventures is currently wrapping up their fourth cohort. The alumni of the first three cohorts have raised more than $5 million in additional capital and created nearly 110 jobs.

While the organization has had success in supporting under-resourced founders, they believe founders of color are still too often over mentored and undercapitalized. To this end, Impact Ventures has launched Inclusive Capital, Texas’ first place-based integrated capital fund providing flexible debt and patient equity capital to close the racial wealth divide. The fund supports existing women and minority-led businesses and startups with at least two years operating history and $100K in annual revenue.

The fund removes traditional barriers like having high credit scores and collateral required to gain access to flexible debt like revenue-based loans, purchase order financing, and lines of credit, while also providing patient equity in the form of SAFEs and convertible notes. It also may enact impact covenants to ensure businesses are not only doing well financially but are also treating their people well by focusing on inclusive ownership, providing livable wages, racial and gender equity, and other covenants that ensure businesses are also being good citizens.

“This unique fund model takes our traditional financial system and flips it on its head, advocating that capital should be aligning with community needs versus the latter,” Benjamin says. “We are excited to be a part of a growing community of financial activists that are building new systems and structures that move us all towards a more just economy. Thanks to organizations like Boston Impact Initiative, RSF Social Finance, Common Future, and many others who are leading the way.”

In 2020, Benjamin was named on the Future 50: Dallas-Fort Worth Innovators and Disruptors list and D CEO Magazine’s “Dallas 500” list of powerful business leaders. He is a recent fellow of the Boston Impact Initiative Fund-Building Cohort and a current fellow at the Just Economy Institute, an initiative of RSF Social Finance.

Benjamin is now re-reading the book he read in college, “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?” 

“The similarities in our life journeys are striking,” he says. “Why are we trying to solve the same problem that folks 30 years ago were trying to solve. We have so much more work to do.”