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Black-Owned Busi­nesses (For Dum­mies) Fea­tur­ing Jada Har­ris


Since May, the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment has yet again caught on fire. Protests have sparked a na­tional out­cry for change and dis­cus­sions on racial jus­tice and have caused peo­ple across the U.S. to be­come more aware of the im­por­tance of sup­port­ing black-owned busi­nesses. How­ever, ac­cord­ing to a 12-month graph from Google Trends for the U.S The search term “black owned” reached a value of 100 ( the peak pop­u­lar­ity for a term) from May 31 to June 6, 2020. 

Since then, the in­ter­est over the time for the search term has largely been on a down­ward trend, with a few spikes in June and July. With this be­ing said, now more than ever we need to sup­port our lo­cal black-owned busi­nesses to bridge that wealth gap and pro­vide con­sis­tent sup­port for the move­ment. 

With a plethora of black-owned busi­nesses at your dis­posal, it may be a bit over­whelm­ing to fig­ure out which one to try first. Well, to make it a bit eas­ier for you, this week The Kitchen Sink (Black-Owned Edi­tion) will be tak­ing a deeper look at a cur­rent Maryville stu­dent who has turned her pas­sion for art into a beau­ti­ful brand high­light­ing black women, Gifts of JAH.

Ques­tion Time!

This week we asked Jada Har­ris, a cur­rent Maryville stu­dent, a few ques­tions about her bud­ding small busi­ness and what black-owned busi­nesses mean to her.

So Jada…who are you ?

Hello! My name is Jada Har­ris. I’m a third-year in­te­rior de­sign ma­jor and a mem­ber of the or­ga­ni­za­tions ABC (As­so­ci­a­tion of Black Col­le­giates) and Mocha T.E.A. on cam­pus.

What is the in­spi­ra­tion be­hind your art­work and busi­ness?
The de­vel­op­ment of my art­work and busi­ness, Gifts of JAH LLC, was in­spired by my pas­sion for draw­ing, and my love for God. My ini­tials, JAH, are also a com­mon name for God in Chris­tian­ity, so I was cer­tain of adding that to my brand. I’ve al­ways been in­ter­ested in cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple things and not lim­it­ing my­self to just one cat­e­gory. I love draw­ing, paint­ing, graphic de­sign­ing, fash­ion de­sign­ing, in­te­rior de­sign­ing, and many more. I have many gifts that God has blessed me with to of­fer to the world, which is why I de­cided to add the word “gifts” specif­i­cally to my name brand.

If you had to de­scribe Gifts of JAH in one word what would it be and why?

If I had to de­scribe Gifts of JAH in one word, it would be “em­pow­er­ing.” I say this be­cause the pur­pose of my busi­ness is to em­power women, es­pe­cially black women, to have con­fi­dence and to love them­selves. Black women have been told nu­mer­ous times that their hair, their skin, or even what they wear, is­n’t beau­ti­ful or ac­cept­able in so­ci­ety. Be­cause of this, some black women may tend to feel in­se­cure at times and as­sim­i­late into the stan­dards of Eu­ro­pean beauty just to feel beau­ti­ful or ac­cepted. With my busi­ness, I want to keep re­mind­ing all black women that every­thing about us is im­pec­ca­ble and we are truly pre­cious. It is so im­por­tant you black women, es­pe­cially black girls, to know that they are beau­ti­ful too. Rep­re­sen­ta­tion mat­ters and I strongly be­lieve that if a want to see a change, then I have to start with my­self.

What does sup­port­ing black-owned busi­nesses mean to you?
Sup­port­ing black-owned busi­nesses means putting wealth back into our com­mu­nity. I be­lieve that this is one of the ma­jor is­sues in the black com­mu­nity be­cause we tend to give our money away to al­most every com­mu­nity but ours. It is okay to sup­port other busi­nesses but we should also have wealth in our com­mu­nity too. Sta­tis­tics shows, our fa­mil­ial wealth is pre­dicted to fall to $0 by 2053. Al­though this is very un­for­tu­nate, black peo­ple still have time to change this if we learn how to start sup­port­ing black owned busi­nesses now.

Do you have a quote or any­thing sig­nif­i­cant that you would like for our read­ers to know?
A quote that I would like to share, which has mo­ti­vated me through­out my jour­ney of be­ing a busi­ness owner is to, “in­vest in your­self.” As you can see, the av­er­age per­son tends to in­vest in multi-bil­lion dol­lar busi­nesses daily, not re­al­iz­ing that they can use that money to in­vest in them­selves. I made it a vow to start in­vest­ing in my­self be­cause I want to be able to take va­ca­tions and en­joy my life while also run­ning my busi­ness the way that I want to.

If you would like to know more about Jada’s beau­ti­ful busi­ness please feel free to check her out on in­sta­gram and her web­site: 

@gift­sof­jah

https://​gifts-of-jah.com/

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