By Aria Brent
AFRO Staff Writer
abrent@afro.com
The Black Leadership Circle is a local auxiliary group dedicated to providing a safe space for Black leaders in the Baltimore area. The organization is brand new, but they’ve got plans to tackle issues that are decades old.
With a focus on uplifting the Black community and protecting the sanctity of Black spaces, the small but mighty group is ready to make their impact. Much like the AFRO, they believe that Black businesses matter. This week, founding member Chrissy Thornton spoke to the publication about Black business and the Black Leadership Circle as the AFRO prepared for the fourth annual Black Business Matters Expo.
AFRO: What is the Black leadership circle?
Chrissy Thornton: The Black Leadership Circle is not its own entity or organization, I like to call it an auxiliary group. It’s powered by Associated Black Charities. It’s an advisory council right now that will build into general membership. It started as an interest group in September of 2023 and we officially launched in January of 2024. It sought to serve a couple of different purposes. The first was to be a safe space for Black leaders in the Greater Baltimore region, to be a trusting, safe, inclusive and progressive space for us to navigate challenges that leaders face–specifically those where we intersect with being leaders of color and Black people.
The second reason we launched this initiative was because we believe that we should be focused on helping to develop a professional pipeline for more Black people, Black career people and Black workers. We want them to ascend into executive leadership positions because when we’re in those positions, we have both the authority and the interest to make sure that other people have career trajectory and opportunity to ascend to advanced positions as well.
The Black Leadership Circle is an outgrowth of our goal to put together a group of people who would walk in alignment. Many of us have individual interests. We are comprised of nonprofit leaders, corporate leaders, business owners and entrepreneurs in the Greater Baltimore region. We have many different interests– in some cases, competing interests–but we are aligned on one thing, and that is that Black people in our region and worldwide should have the opportunity to be successful and to thrive; and that some of the barriers that Black people face can be mitigated with advocacy.
AFRO: How will this auxiliary group go about moving forward with the mission of supporting a pipeline for leadership positions in the Black profession? What can we anticipate from you guys, especially because you just got your start at the top of the year?
CT: It’ll be in a number of ways. One of the things that we’re committed to is professional development webinars, we’ve actually already started that series. A month or so ago, we held a webinar on leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) in Black professional spaces. It was well attended, but also a really great learning opportunity to learn about how we can maximize the opportunity that this nuancing technology is presenting. We want to start to close the racial wealth gap, to start building knowledge bases in our community and that we can take advantage of this trend of AI and the way it’s showing up in the workplace. We have one coming up that is all about taxes– federal and state and local taxes– led by one of our auxiliary board members.
We will continue to produce content to give Black professionals and others the opportunity to not only learn more about these topics, but also explore them from a lens of how they affect Black people. We also will launch a mentorship program for some of our members who want to reach back into the community and have the capacity and the bandwidth to do so to share their expertise and to share shadowing opportunities, which is really important to us as well.
AFRO: Do you have to work for Associated Black Charities in order to benefit from the work that the Black Leadership Circle is doing? As somebody who’s on the outside, how can I benefit from this? How can I get involved ?
CT: Oh, absolutely not. In fact, Associated Black Charities is really upholding the operational structure of this group and that’s it. The group itself right now consists of about 36 advisory council members and they represent most of the organizations that we’re familiar with across this region. Many of them are nonprofit organizations, some of them are very high visibility corporate organizations and then we have a number of venture capitalists, and business owners, who are in this region who are also part of the group.
The group is not staffed or for people in relationship with Associated Black Charities, it’s quite the opposite. Associated Black Charities, through my membership, gets the benefit of being a part of this group. There are many things, like our professional development webinar series, that the general public can partake of, and there will be other opportunities that will be member based. We planned to open general membership in April, but we’ve pushed that back a little bit because we want to make sure we get it right.
AFRO: A large part of your mission is aimed at creating change by cultivating an environment of support, sponsorship and alignment amongst Black leaders. What does that look like to you and members of the group?
CT: I think it looks like having a collective voice. You go to other assemblies of groups of professional people and you see that. Most leaders don’t look like me and when you congregate in a room of leaders who have influence, who have resources and who have authority, they tend to be rooms of older White men. While that has been the status quo for some time, the landscape is starting to shift and change.
We need to make sure that our collective voice can not only push forward change, but keep our communities at the forefront of that change to make sure that when we’re talking about access we’re considering Black people. Specifically here in Baltimore, it’s so important. Our demographics rely on the fact that Black people need to be successful for society’s work ecosystem to be successful.
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