BLKTECH Fills A Gap In Charlotte For Tech Entrepreneurs of Color

BLKTECH

North Carolina already performs well as a good place to land for entrepreneurs of color — Durham is ranked a top city for black-owned businesses and plays host to the Black Wall Street Homecoming entrepreneurship conference as well as Google for Entrepreneurs Exchange for Black Founders. Now, a young organization is catalyzing the Charlotte tech and startup community: BLKTECH Interactive.

Started in 2016, BLKTECH Interactive is the Queen City’s first community initiative supporting technologists and entrepreneurs of color. Sherrell Dorsey, the founder and president of the community development consulting firm that runs BLKTECH, says the initiative launched to fill a gap the city’s existing organizations weren’t focusing on.

“Our first foray into this was to galvanize and really do some research into what the black tech and entrepreneurial ecosystem looked like in Charlotte, trying to find out the who and where,” says Dorsey. “There wasn’t one space where people of color were gathering specifically to talk about tech through an entrepreneurial lens.”

In the last two years they have secured partnerships with technology companies like airbnb and Charlotte-based fintech unicorn AvidXchange, and reached about 800 entrepreneurs.

One of their primary goals this year is to double that audience. This past weekend they opened their first physical space, a 1,200 square foot office in Charlotte’s smart innovation district at Camp North End, sponsored by a one-year foundation grant from OrthoCarolina.

“The space allows us to have a place to call home. We’ve been using other organizations to host events. I think that having this physical space, a space for black and brown tech talent to say, hey, we have a space in this city… it’s going to provide us with tremendous impact,” says Dorsey.

Though thus far the organization has limited their BLCKTECHCLT event series to Charlotte, they intend to spread their economic development footprint throughout North Carolina. One avenue for this is their $100,000 fund, launched last year in partnership with Carolina Small Business Development Fund. The fund provides micro-loans (less than $10,000) to entrepreneurs and small business owners, and offers one-on-one counseling and technical assistance to help them grow.

Dorsey, an entrepreneur and technologist herself, has a background in data research and data journalism (she also founded ThePlug Daily newsletter, which focuses on news about founders and technologists of color). She says BLKTECH Interactive can serve as a platform to collect data that can be turned into actionable insight. For example, corporate partners who want to actively encourage inclusion can tailor recruiting efforts to attract a more diverse demographic.

“We’re trying to be driven by data. It’s not just collecting info about our group, but being able to share that on a city level with policy leaders… to also our corporate partners.”

Eventually, Dorsey thinks this insight can even inform policy decisions.

“I think there’s a deficit in knowledge on what actually is happening in this black entrepreneurship community, so we’re able to stand in the gap by leveraging what we’re learning and what we know, to leverage it to really affect policy.”

Photos by Alvin C. Jacobs, Jr.