Resource Stories: Melinda Weekes-Laidlow, Beautiful Ventures

I am the granddaughter of folks who traveled to New York City from North Carolina during The Great Migration and of immigrants who traveled from the island of Montserrat, via Ellis Island, to that same New York City. My parents met as youngsters on 167th Street in the South Bronx, where both of their families settled looking to build a better life. They got married at the age of 19, and had three kids, each nine years apart. I am the youngest, the “oops child.”

Melinda Weekes-Laidlow is a storyteller at heart. She knows how to tell a story, and she believes in the power of stories to heal, to educate and to affirm the humanity of Black people. She also believes in the power of getting a message out at scale. That’s why she started Beautiful Ventures, a social enterprise focused on building the entrepreneurial skills, narrative power and generational wealth of Black, story-driven creatives.

With Beautiful Ventures, Melinda has built a community of “creative entrepreneurs” that seek to use storytelling – narrative, visual and even immersive technology – to disrupt anti-blackness in popular culture. They want to elevate perceptions of Black humanity by telling their stories, their way.

A Second Harlem Renaissance

My dad was a postman. He didn’t finish college but he always read the newspapers. He was a “race man,” reading up on the political happenings across the African Diaspora. He wanted me to deeply understand who I was and where I came from. 

Melinda grew up in The Bronx in the tight knit Wakefield-Williamsbridge community, where she learned the transformative power of stories. While she and her mom faithfully attended church on Sunday mornings, her father watched newsman Gil Noble’s award-winning public affairs show, “Like It Is,” as if it were also church. Her parents  made sure Melinda was exposed to the artistic abundance of riches that was New York City, including its theatre scene: The Wiz, Dream Girls and Mama I Want to Sing! were some of the productions that made an indelible impact on her as a youngster. 

“My parents and community instilled a deep regard for the culture, the genius and the liberation struggles of Black folk,” she remembers. “Both in the United States and across the African Diaspora. Those sensibilities still anchor me.”

She’s been working creatively for as long as she can remember: her first job as a teenager was as the music director of her home church's summer day camp. She proudly recalls how she insisted campers commit to memory all four verses of Lift Every Voice and Sing - the Black National Anthem. 

After graduating from Wesleyan University, Melinda went to NYU School of Law and practiced transactional law for ten years. She then matriculated to Harvard Divinity School and has worked bi-vocationally ever since, having been ordained as clergy in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Later, as Managing Director at Race Forward, she grew as a manager, and deepened her work in racial justice through its journalism, research and consulting arms.

In spring of 2016, inspired by the Movement for Black Lives, Melinda was resolved to spend her energy and skills on solutions to  meet the problem of structural racism, and  the problem of anti-blackness in particular. She started an consulting firm, Weekes In Advance Enterprises, and began incubating the idea that would later become Beautiful Ventures. During that time, she was invited by Echoing Green’s celebrated CEO, Cheryl Dorsey, to become the impact fund’s first ever Social Entrepreneur in Residence.  

Beautiful Ventures launched on Juneteenth 2019 as a social enterprise dedicated to building an ecosystem of relational, business and capacity-building infrastructure for Black, story-driven creatives. Melinda describes them as a “diverse community of artists, filmmakers, writers, poets, Afro-futurists, producers, performers and folks that love Black people and Black culture. We are a community clear-eyed on  wanting to see this current narrative changed once and for all.”

Beautiful Ventures’ current entrepreneurial support offerings include negotiation, collaborative leadership and relational culture workshops and training.. Her team is gearing up for the 2022 launch of The Renaissance Initiative – a program to scale the number of sustainably run, community-wealth creating, Black-led enterprises that deliver Black-humanity-affirming stories to the marketplace. 

"There is no pop culture without Black culture"

We know there is no pop culture without Black culture. If we can leverage Black cultural power with Black entrepreneurial prowess and Black consumer consciousness, we will be able to bend the arc of narrative history. We are working together to build narrative legacies for generations to come.

Melinda’s muse for Beautiful Ventures has always been the Harlem Renaissance: the era in the 1920’s and 1930’s when Harlem grew into a Black cultural mecca. It was “a moment when Black cultural production shifted the way Black people were seen at the turn of the 20th Century, and more importantly, it also shifted how we saw ourselves,” Melinda says.

Nearly one hundred years later, American culture still has a paucity of humanizing stories of Black folks’ lives. A recent McKinsey report found the entertainment industry has fewer Black executives than even Wall Street. Melinda’s vision is to cultivate a tipping point for a second Harlem Renaissance – one that will disrupt anti-blackness narratives as the norm in popular culture and popular discourse.

Melinda’s vision is to cultivate a tipping point for a second Harlem Renaissance – one that will disrupt anti-blackness narratives as the norm in popular culture and popular discourse.

Melinda argues that there is a market demand for Black stories, and that it’s not being met. That matches the findings of the McKinsey report that found that Hollywood loses $10 billion a year due to not addressing structural racism in the entertainment industry. “Last year all 50 states and six out of seven continents held solidarity marches in defense of Black Lives -- during a global pandemic!” Melinda says. “That’s proof that there is a global market for stories that affirm Black lives.”

“We can’t keep relying on Hollywood green lighters or gatekeepers. We have to get these stories out into the marketplace to the many people who crave them. The current Hollywood structure is not going to prioritize this, so we need to build our own Black-led institutions to do so.”

Rewriting, retiring and replacing

Our organizational vision is ‘a world where the humanity of all Black people is presumed, affirmed and unchallenged.’ We are certain that Black story-driven creatives have a vital role to play in rewriting, retiring and replacing the anti-Black narrative in popular culture.

Incubated since 2016 and launched in 2019, Beautiful Ventures has long been ahead of its time. “When the so-called racial reckoning happened last year, we already had our Clips and Conversation community-building program, our Baldwin Morrison Writers Group, a national network and momentum in our work of disrupting anti-black racism through storytelling,” Melinda says. “Unfortunately, it took the awful display of unrelenting Black death for more people to ‘get’ what we were talking about.”

Now Melinda is leveraging this historical moment. She and her team are mobilizing resources, recruiting partners and building the membership of the Beautiful Ventures Network; in a few years in the running of The Renaissance Initiative, she says they will launch a Community Capital Fund for traditional and non-traditional  investments  Black-led creative businesses  whose stories, products and services heal and humanize Black people.

Melinda is rooted in the present, buoyed by the past and future minded: “We are storytellers and story lovers cultivating the ecosystem for the next Harlem Renaissance.” With its three core services - network building, entrepreneurial support and a creative capital fund - Beautiful Ventures is made for the times we are living in, and also shaping the more beautiful future we all deserve.

- Written by Ambika Samarthya-Howard