Photo courtesy MKE Black
Rick Banks - MKE Black
Rick Banks
MKE Black is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to highlight and promote Black-owned businesses, events, and culture across Milwaukee. Started in 2019, the organization provides funding and resources to help such businesses and also functions as a mobile app, featuring a directory for everything from restaurants to shopping to entertainment and more.
Rick Banks is the co-founder and executive director of MKE Black. He gives some backstory on its conception.
“It was created by myself and my co-founder Paul Wellington, who is a friend of mine I’ve known since middle school. I first thought of the idea when I was in college at UWM studying political science and economics, and I wanted to put that knowledge to use. If we wanted to have successful Black communities, we needed to have successful Black businesses. In order to be able to support those businesses you have to know what those businesses are.”
Paul Wellington came in with the technical skills to program the app and help Banks launch it.
“One day a little over two years ago [Paul] texted me out of the blue past midnight and said he had this idea called MKE Black, where it’d be a website that’s a database of Black-owned businesses and we could showcase what’s happening in the city. I told him I had the same idea except it’d be a mobile app, so we came together and made it happen. He found a good platform called BuildFire and he just built the app himself.”
Fundraising for Businesses
Having launched right before COVID, MKE Black fundraised for struggling businesses during the pandemic as well as for businesses impacted by property damage during the uprisings last summer. They continued finding ways to support while presented with unique circumstances, whether it was through purchasing water and snacks for last summer’s protestors or doing virtual events. Coming into this year, MKE Black held their food truck-vendor market which provided space for many Black-owned businesses to be showcased together.
Banks shares why it’s important for specifically Milwaukee to have a platform like MKE Black. “When you look at how Milwaukee is frequently ranked as one of the worst places to live or raise a child as a Black person, we have to think ‘we’ I mean the whole city of Milwaukee; we’re only as strong as our most disadvantaged members.”
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MKE Black is guided by the seven principles of Kwanzaa.
“We’re dedicated to not just supporting Black-owned businesses but Black culture in general, and so Kwanzaa being one of the few recognizable definitively-African holidays in the country, it just made sense for us to adopt those universal principles as how we’d promote unity and self-determination within our community.”
In the last year their team has expanded significantly beyond just Banks and Wellington.
Making Connections
“We’ve been blessed to have amazing individuals join us on this journey. We’ve added Ayrton Bryan, who is our Director of Strategic Partnerships and Initiatives, and he’s honestly been our new MVP connecting us with so many great people in the community and driving a lot of our programming. We also have Kim Erdman, who is our Event Planner; she’s the brains behind our food truck and vendor market. Solana Patterson-Ramos is our Community Outreach person; she and I go back to college like 10 years ago so we’ve always been organizing projects together. She’s done our logo and flyers.
“Then we’ve got Mina Mungekar maintaining our database, Ben Schneider works in the corporate sector and he’s our Engagement Specialist helping us with our fundraising strategies, Mairin Jerse helps run our internship program, and Asha Sawyers is our business development specialist who has a wealth of knowledge with really getting the word out about what we’re doing. We’re also in the process of expanding our Board to provide more oversight and better serve the community.”
Banks shares where he hopes MKE Black will be a year from now.
“We are 100% a volunteer organization right now and so we’re about to embark on a big fundraising push; we’d love to be able to hire one or two of us to work on it full-time. We’re also looking to revamp the mobile app to add more features so that folks can better engage with it and save their favorite restaurants, possibly even order products and food online. Those are our two big goals. We also have some programs that we’re trying to get off the ground; one being a youth entrepreneurship program. We’re just trying to get to a point where we’re sustainable and having a bigger, more positive impact. We want to get MKE Black onto the phones of every person in Milwaukee.”
To get involved, businesses and individuals may fill out the official form on the MKE Black website.
