“My vision is for Macon Black Tech to be a self-sustaining organization that empowers Black founders so that they can build sustainable companies,” says Christèle Parham.
Macon Black Tech is a community organization in Macon, Georgia – a town of about 153,000 people 80 miles outside of Atlanta. It provides a space for local Black founders to grow in technology and innovation through a social impact framework.
Christèle started it with her husband, Ariane, in 2019. She grew up in Haiti and eventually moved to South Florida, where she lived with other immigrants, before moving to Georgia.
“Something about Macon really attracted me – something that felt similar to Haiti,” she says. “Haiti is communal, so the whole neighborhood knows about you. In Macon, the way people connected, I never met a stranger. Something about being here feels so real, where I feel I have a purpose. I love it here in a way that feels like loving my own culture... I’m looking to change the mindset of what people think when I say ‘Macon.’”
Read the Q&A below to learn about Christèle’s journey.
Where did you learn about entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurship started early for me. In Haiti, I grew up seeing entrepreneurship all around me. My paternal great aunt owned a library in Port-au-Prince, which was my favorite place. I would go to her library so much that I remember my mom used to hide the books that I was reading just to get me to do my homework. My paternal grandfather was a primary physician in the neighborhood where I lived, and my maternal grandfather owned the only auto part store in Jeremie. Additionally, my maternal grandmother owned land, cows, and a shop that sold homemade treats.
I had an entrepreneurial mindset even at a young age. When I was in the first or second grade, I would ask for snacks, but my mom would say no. So, I would wait until my parents went to work and then sell things like homemade candy and drawings to my neighbors so that I could make enough money to buy snacks before my parents came home
How did you and Ariane begin to work in the tech and innovation space?
In 2018 I had lived in Macon for four years. Ariane and I founded HamTECH Solutions, a health IT firm that works around HIPAA and cybersecurity mostly for healthcare practices to ensure they are HIPAA compliant. I was also working in the revenue cycle of the hospital.
One day, the hospital did an innovation challenge where they were looking for efficient and innovative ways to impact the different facilities. The idea really intrigued me. I would always be the person who watched Shark Tank, always the friend with a hundred million ideas in her head.
So, I answered the hospital’s challenge. Since I am very competitive, I started submitting a bunch of ideas that ranged from creative design and research to patient experience. I won the competition and the leaders of the innovation department sought me out.
They invited me to a design thinking workshop, an initiative to encourage staff to come up with creative healthcare solutions to positively impact patient experience while having hands-on training. All of this was done through a human-centered design lens. Human-centered design (HCD) is a technique used to solve problems by involving the human perspective. It is especially useful in designing innovative services, products, and processes from their initial stage of conceptualization until they are ready for deployment. A key objective of HCD is to develop holistic solutions to problems by taking into consideration the needs, motivations, and opinions of the users. I fell in love with the hospital’s innovation department. It was my first experience being a part of a local, nurturing culture. Whatever they were doing, I wanted to be part of it.
I knew I didn’t want to be in a professional space for the rest of my life.
In 2018, the Innovation leader of the Center for Disruption and Innovation of my local hospital invited me to join their department as a healthcare innovation consultant where I managed a few initiatives. It was a fantastic opportunity for me to dabble in entrepreneurship while getting my feet wet in innovation.
I fell in love with it, and I started looking for more opportunities in the innovation space.
What led to the creation of Macon Black Tech?
As I was working as a healthcare innovation consultant and helping Ariane out with the new business, I started attending more events that were for tech and innovation.
I learned that Macon was 54% African American, but our social impact, technology, and startup community didn’t reflect that percentage.
And that statistic reflected our own experience. As Ariane and I were building our businesses, we found it hard to find a space of belonging as entrepreneurs. In certain communities we felt we needed to be guarded because we didn’t feel safe. In certain spaces, Black culture was seen as charity rather than a source of empowerment. And we were wondering why that was.
I started contracting with different local organizations in the philanthropy space. I got more involved in the community and learned about Macon’s history. And as I was spending more time working at HamTECH, I asked myself: “How do I bring all of this together?”
It felt as if everything was conspiring to bring me into this line of work. Around this time, I remember there was an organization that had a strong voice in the community, but they weren’t as diverse in their leadership. One day a national organization challenged them and asked about their lack of diversity, and one of their leaders responded and said there weren’t any qualified candidates. That really bothered me. Black employees walk on eggshells in work cultures that are not intentional about diversity. Publicly sharing inadequacies (that are false) of a race is gaslighting. It can be unintentional, but it creates trauma. Unfortunately, this voice echoed in many spaces. This is what led me to become intentional in creating safe spaces for founders of color.
When you are surrounded with systems that believe in your demise rather than nurturing or empowerment, the damage it creates is internal. And if you don’t find spaces of healing, guess what happens? You transfer it to the next generation. Learning HCD allowed me to see that and equipped me to build an ecosystem for founders of color.
How did you design Macon Black Tech?
I know we wanted to build a community for fellow Black entrepreneurs but what would it look like? I started studying the ecosystem-building work of communities that were outside of Macon. I was very shy and didn’t know where to start. So, I decided my first order of business was to find events that were going on in the surrounding area that included other ecosystem builders. For instance, I had a chance to attend the State of the Community event run by Atlanta Black Tech. It was the first time I was in one room with multiple ecosystem builders in different stages, and they were all founders of color sharing the same hardships that I was experiencing in Macon. Ariane and I were like, “whatever this is, we need this energy in Macon!”
What kept me going was my passion to see more opportunities for Black people in Macon. Looking for examples of ecosystems that nurture founders of color was one thing, but being around ecosystem leaders that poured into me when I felt lonely, defeated, and overwhelmed? That right there nurtured my passion!
As we started Macon Black Tech, we wanted to create an inclusive space, so it was important to listen to the voices of whom we were building Macon Black Tech for. We surveyed some Macon community members to find out how to engage them. Additionally, we were working on inviting tech professionals locally, so we asked some of the founders and folks in those communities how to do this. It was a hard sell. Since we are in the growing ecosystem building stage, it’s been challenging to have people come because we are not like other thriving ecosystems like Atlanta and Miami yet.
It all goes back to storytelling…There’s something I fell in love with in Macon, and I feel like once people get to experience it they will see it too.
Can you describe the first steps you took to turn your idea into reality?
Several years ago, I read a book, There’s No Business Like Your Own Business. The author, Gladys Edmunds, a Black woman, said, in effect, that the reader already has everything they need to create an impact. Whether it was a broom, or whatever it was — she encouraged you to make something out of it to build a company. So, I thought, what can I do with what I have?
That’s how we created Macon Black Tech. I started asking people in Atlanta who are part of the tech ecosystem the following: Would you be interested in doing a podcast episode? They said yes.
Meanwhile, a friend named Shawn Johnson offered to provide a free, build-an-app-in-a-day class that we were able to host at my alma mater, Mercer University. We partnered with the Mercer Innovation Center on a class for app building and then we planned to start running events at the local recreation centers… but the pandemic came. We offered coding classes that didn’t require coding experience. We used the tools that we had at our disposal, like being in the tech space and knowing how to build a website.
People in the community were coming to us with their ideas. We wanted people to feel that there was an avenue to a career in social impact and innovation and technology for them. We started providing classes and networking events around topics like social impact, innovation, and technology.
In 2019, we hosted a table conversation about tech and innovation, and we got some really great feedback. We found out that for the community that we were serving, some of these terminologies like “technology” and “innovation” were intimidating. Those terms felt exclusive.
We knew we wanted to create something accessible. We wanted to create something where people saw themselves, whether they were tech founders or not. A lot of the time when we host events, it doesn’t look very techy. It’s intentional. We want to make sure we create something where people can see themselves. For example, the MaconThon we launched, our message was focused on social impact. Middle GA is a community that deeply cares for social impact.
My vision is for Macon Black Tech to be a self-sustaining organization that empowers Black founders so that they can build sustainable companies.
Can you describe MaconThon: What it is and how it works?
MaconThon is a social impact accelerator program that we’ve created through our experiences that showcases a lot of talent that is disrupting culture locally. Once accepted, the founders join a group in which they receive a challenge related to what they included in their application.Then they spend three months developing their concept while learning from key experts. MaconThon ends with a demo day where founders showcase the minimum viable product (MVP) they created for the community and are able to fundraise for it.
We’ve developed a curriculum where cohort participants go through the human-centered design thinking framework so they’re solving problems for four local challenges that are specific to Macon – including mental and physical health; violence prevention; and increasing awareness about the richness of African American culture to the downtown area.
We chose these challenges as a way to create collaborative efforts between ongoing local initiatives and remarkable talent that can solve them. One cohort group, for example, developed a mental health solution by partnering with a local initiative called Macon Mental Health Matters (MMHM). While receiving insight from MMHM’s founder Andrea Cooke, they built a mental health resource kiosk for community members looking for resources.
Our work is essential because there’s not really a pipeline for founders of color that are interested in working in technology locally. You either have to go outside of Macon or work at the Air Force base (which is a phenomenal place to work by the way!). So, entrepreneurs who go through the programming of Macon Black Tech are not only finding mentorship from other experts in this space, but also finding a community of like-minded individuals that look like them and want to grow in that space as well.
Collaboration is important to us. I always think about collaborative culture and how to bring all the resources out there together: How do we talk? How do we create spaces where the energy flows and empowers Black founders? So, we’ve partnered with individuals from Google and Microsoft to run some classes and to help cohort members build their MVP. (Oh, and we were able to fund the MaconThon this year through Resource, so shout out to Resource!)
When you think about the next few years for Macon Black Tech, what are you most excited about?
What I’m most excited about, in all honesty, is disrupting the mindset that Black people are not capable of building sustainable companies, or providing valuable things to the table, or being part of those conversations that change culture locally.
There’s an opportunity to share stories of so many great local disruptors that live here right now that are building their startups, that are still looking for a safe space to flesh out their ideas so that they can create something powerful.
When I think about the future of Macon, it’s filled with Black founders who fuel the culture and the economy. A diverse Macon has equity at the table through platforms engaging members to build and grow professionally and entrepreneurially. I see Macon in the next seven years creating a dent in the tech and innovation industry globally. It all starts with this work of narrative change and programming that nurture spaces of healing for black entrepreneurs as they are building to scale their products locally.