Kerry Bowie likes to talk about his work with the Majira Project, closing the racial wealth gap for Boston’s communities of color in terms of cultivation – planting seeds and helping them grow.
“Majira means ‘summer’ in Swahili,” he says. “The name is a nod to the growing season. Just as plants need nutrients to grow – sun, soil, and water – companies also need specific resources, like consulting, coaching, connections, and capital.
The Majira Project recently finished up its seventh cohort of entrepreneurs from traditionally- overlooked backgrounds. And like their alumni, the Majira Project is in a growing season. In 2020, the accelerator went virtual and expanded operations to four additional cities beyond Boston, more than tripling the number of companies it was able to support. That’s all part of Kerry’s long-term vision of cultivating an organization that can make real change.
From Student to Mentor
Kerry earned his undergraduate education at MIT, far from his home state of Alabama. He shared, “I only applied to Alabama, Auburn, and MIT. And I only applied to MIT because they sent me an application. My mom said she would buy me a car if I stayed. But I wanted a challenge,” he says.
He added on a graduate degree in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan. He spent ten years working as an engineer at Texas Instruments before moving back to Boston to get his business degree at MIT Sloan.
Kerry graduated from business school in 2006. For the first several years of his career, he worked in government roles on brownfields, climate justice, and food policy at the Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. “I became the person to help navigate clean tech, disaster management, coastal management, and other energy and environmental rules,” he says.
During this time, Kerry returned to his MIT roots. He started volunteering as a mentor for MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), one of MIT’s many entrepreneurship programs – helping entrepreneurs understand how to navigate the state government’s grants and funding opportunities for cleantech startups. When he showed up to mentor, he found two surprises:
First, there were no other Black men or women mentoring. “It makes sense - these were 90-minute sessions, in person, conducted for free,” he says. “You can only do that if you're retired or independently wealthy.”
Second, the playing field for entrepreneurs needed to be leveled. He’d worked with entrepreneurs before, but never saw the level of support that the MIT students had – access to competitions with prize money, aunts and uncles writing $25,000 checks, and room and board paid by their parents.
“If I had to bet on who would secure venture capital funding, I would bet on a white, male MIT student before a Black woman from Roxbury because of the resource gap and what traditionally occurs in venture capital funding,” he says.
Kerry knew that entrepreneurs of color lacked a safety net. “We aren’t even giving people the opportunity to fail,” he says.
The Majira Project
Kerry founded Msaada Partners in 2015 to fill the gap he saw for founders of color (msaada means “service” in Swahili). The vision behind the nonprofit was to serve communities of color by providing technical assistance to budding entrepreneurs.
But Kerry soon realized a snag in Msaada’s impact thesis: most of the entrepreneurs he wanted to help couldn’t afford to pay consulting fees.
“We would get commissioned by the city of Boston for the occasional contract – for instance, doing a two-hour business planning workshop for immigrant entrepreneurs,” he says. Kerry realized that this wasn’t moving the needle.
One day, Kerry connected with a friend who worked at the management consulting company Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and shared this frustration. The friend pointed out that BCG was always on the lookout for opportunities to support the local community. That led to the idea behind the Majira Project.
The Majira Project was founded in 2016 as a pilot partnership between Msaada Partners and the Boston office of BCG. The goal: to spur community development through entrepreneurship by equipping founders of color (or companies serving underserved communities) with pro bono consulting, coaching, and connections.
The program works similarly to a pro bono consulting engagement. Each cohort is paired with a consulting team and business coach for a 16-week engagement focused on tackling 2-3 company-specific business questions and challenges. Over the course of the program, Majira also brings in speakers to cover a variety of topics relevant to entrepreneurs, from fundraising and operations to mental health and self-care. All parties work together to help facilitate connections for companies.
“Understanding how to navigate power dynamics, figuring out how things really work behind the scenes – those are burdens that Black and Brown people in this country have to bear to succeed,” Kerry says. “It’s hard, especially when you grow up in a society where things are so difficult for some people because of the color of their skin.”
Kerry quickly points out that the accelerator is based on the companies’ needs, not a prepared curriculum.
“I’m proud to base our model on the question ‘How can we help you?’,” he says.
Majira also distinguishes itself from other accelerators by its personal touch. Kerry or other business coaches check in with business monthly to ask, How are you doing - not your company, but as a person, how is it going? And also, how can we help? They have also run a pilot program over the last three years to match some of their alumni with leadership coaches after the formal consulting engagement.
What’s Next?
Over the past several years, Kerry has run seven cohorts, with a total of 128 alumni - including startups that have seen traction like BlocPower, Varuna Tech, Code Wiz, Fresh Food Generation, Paerpay, and NOBULL.
2020 was a big year for Majira. The project operated as the pro bono program of Msaada Partners for its first four years, but in June 2020, the project spun out and was formally incorporated as an independent non-profit.
“We built this on dental floss, bubble gum, and duct tape,” he shared. “We were robbing Peter to pay Paul: we were taking consulting engagement money to set up the non-profit.” Now Majira is its own 501(c)3 able to fundraise and establish a strong financial future.
Meanwhile, with the COVID-pandemic, the project went virtual. This allowed them to expand operations to four additional cities beyond Boston – exponentially increasing the number of founders of color they could help.
“All of a sudden, there were 30 companies in the program from Boston, New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Dallas, Manhattan Beach,” Kerry says. “Everyone wanted in.” BCG also became an official consulting partner.
Beyond adding additional cities, Majira also plans to expand the type of assistance they're able to offer companies through new partnerships. While BCG has been extremely valuable to companies needing traditional strategy, operations, and market research support, they’ve had companies ask for help with tech and data strategy, finding legal services, and more. Majira hopes to add complementary partners that will allow them to provide more robust assistance in getting companies to grow.
In 2021, Majira had a major fundraising victory. NOBULL partnered with Artists for Humanity on a project to bring funding to three Boston nonprofits. Majira was one of them and brought in more than $100,000 from the campaign. Kerry used these funds to hire Majira’s first full-time employee.
Down the road, Kerry is thinking about leveraging his alumni to build a fund, so the project can support founders of color with direct investments.
“I want Black and Brown folks to win: we are trying to close the racial wealth gap,” he says. “We need more successes - there's so much doubt in the community. If we can help make these companies be just that much better, they will be able to fulfill our mission of “community development through entrepreneurship” and hire Black and Brown people themselves.”