Learn how a D.C. incubator is empowering and creating opportunities for Black-owned businesses, ushering in a new era of Black Wall Street.
Originally published Inc.com
Sycamore & Oak, an incubator for Black-owned businesses in Washington, D.C.’s Congress Heights neighborhood, keeps the Black dollar in the community.
In 2015, Josei Harris started a spa in the living room of her home in Washington D.C.‘s Congress Heights neighborhood, a predominantly Black community in the city’s eighth ward.
The fourth-generation D.C. native named her business Black Bella DC. But for years, she has operated a location in nearby Lanham, Maryland because she couldn’t afford prime retail space in her hometown. Last year, though, Harris’s dream of finally opening a store in Washington came true.
Black Bella Spa is one of the 13 Black-owned businesses in the 22,000-square-foot Sycamore & Oak retail village in Congress Heights. Launched around Juneteenth in 2023 with the support of the Emerson Collective, an organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs that invests in entrepreneurs, Sycamore & Oak ensures that entrepreneurs in the incubator receive affordable rent and guidance in everything from marketing to supply chain to hiring to paying business taxes.
Josei Harris.Photo: Courtesy Subject
Now, after years of commuting out of the city to run her business, Harris can use her electric bike to take the 11-minute ride from her home to her 200-square-foot store at Sycamore & Oak, where she leads a four-person team that offers facials, massages, and other services. In all, the village provides more than 100 jobs to local residents.
“Washington D.C. is my city,” says the 50-year-old aesthetician. “This is my opportunity to create jobs and resources in the community where I live.”
Black Buying Power
Even though Black consumers’ economic power is expected to expand from about $910 billion in consumption in 2019 to $1.7 trillion in 2030, Black people are more likely than other racial groups to live in consumer deserts, where residents have limited access to basic products and services. This is the reality for residents of Congress Heights, one of the poorest neighborhoods in D.C.
“Many of our shop owners are kids who grew up in Ward 8, and they talk a lot about how growing up there was never an opportunity to shop in our neighborhood,” says Monica Ray, the president of the Congress Heights Community Training and Development Corporation, the nonprofit that administers the Sycamore & Oak Retail Village. “And so Sycamore & Oak has filled that gap of having a real retail experience in the neighborhood.”
Only three of the 13 entrepreneurs in the incubator had a brick-and-mortar store before winning a spot in the incubator: Today, all of them are filling a void for consumers in their community. Sycamore & Oak includes a grocery store, a boutique gym, an art frame shop, a beauty supply store, a fashion boutique, and other unique offerings.
More than 30 entrepreneurs competed for a spot in the incubator through a rigorous, four-month selection process. The selected entrepreneurs received a six-month abatement for their 200-square-foot spaces, and their rent is a portion of their gross sales up to a maximum of about $333 per month.
“The great thing about Sycamore & Oak is that it really creates a safe space for businesses to try ideas,” says Ray. “Without the low cost of rent at Sycamore & Oak, some of these businesses couldn’t afford to be in existence because of the high cost of commercial rent in the district.”
A Family Affair
LeGreg Harrison.Photo: Courtesy Subject
LeGreg Harrison, the 40-year-old co-founder of The Museum, is one of the handful of entrepreneurs in the incubator who had previously run a brick-and-mortar store. Born and raised in Congress Heights, Harrison wears many hats at Sycamore & Village: In addition to being the creator of the incubator program, he is an anchor tenant and the incubator’s experience manager.
When Harrison came home in 2015 after working as a tour manager for the rapper Wale, he noticed that all of the brick-and-mortar stores dedicated to D.C.-based streetwear designers had closed. So he and his co-founder Muhammad Hill started The Museum, which doubles as an art gallery and a space to sell streetwear apparel and collectibles.
Harrison drew from his own experiences as a struggling entrepreneur to craft the incubation program. “Nobody should have to go through what I went through with their first business in Brick-and-Mortar,” Harrison says. “Sometimes I slept in my store. I had to choose whether I was going to pay rent at my store or at my apartment.”
At Sycamore & Oak, Harrison says he no longer feels that isolation and hopelessness. “We’re a family and we’re in this together,” Harrison says. “But we fuss and fight like any other family because we’re all learning together.”
Amanda Stephenson.Photo: Courtesy Subject
Feeding the Village
For most of these 13 entrepreneurs, their family includes the people they serve in their community. Amanda Stephenson is the founder of the Fresh Food Factory, a grocery store in the Sycamore & Oak retail village focused on eliminating food deserts and food insecurity. In Ward 8, Stephenson says, there is just one major grocery store for a population of nearly 80,000 people, and it lacks some of the ethnic foods desired by people in the community. Stephenson, who is 43 and grew up on a farm in rural Virginia, believes that food is medicine.
“If you go down the international aisles of the major grocery stores, you don’t see the indigenous foods of Africa, Central South America, and the Caribbean,” Stephenson says. “I think for us to be in optimal health, we should be eating our heritage foods, and that’s why it’s important for me to offer them at the Fresh Food Factory.”
Through her grocery store, Stephenson offers classes on nutrition and food preparation and safety as well as a workforce development program. She credits a culture of community belonging at Sycamore & Oak for the positive reception to her store.
To ensure that her products are accessible to everyone, Stephenson accepts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, which help over 40 million low-income people by groceries every month across the United States, according the USDA. “We don’t want to be having this conversation the next 20 or 50 years from now about health disparity issues, especially as it relates to food access,” Stephenson says.
But the Sycamore & Oak incubator is also a powerful template for wide-scale change, Harrison says, and members like Stephenson are thinking about their impact. “How do I model this so that other people could have this experience in their neighborhoods?” Stephenson says. “We’re rewriting history for our community and having a continuous conversation as we grow our businesses.”
The New Black Wall Street
On June 15, a few days before Juneteenth, Sycamore & Village held its one-year anniversary celebration at the retail village. As well as a community hub, offering performance spaces as well as incubation for Black-owned businesses, the village is an architectural wonder. Designed by architects at Adjaye Associates–the firm founded by David Adjaye, the designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture–the building is the largest free standing mass timber structure in D.C.
At the anniversary celebration, which resembled HBCU homecomings with food, music, and floats, 30 Black-owned businesses that do not belong to the incubator set up market stalls in the parking lot. “It felt like the resilient Congress Heights community,” says Harrison. “Everybody was there, from toddlers to elders, and everybody had an amazing time. The air was pure.”
Yet for the entrepreneurs in the incubator, there are bigger things on the horizon. Since starting Black Bella Spa with six clients, including her mother and her cousins, Harris has grown her business to include nearly 7,000 customers. “An incubator is the growing space,” Harris says. “So I have no intentions of being there forever. I’m not here for the 200 square feet. I want to be a part of the Big Kahuna.”
Harris plans to be a part of Sycamore & Oak’s phase 2–a nearby mixed-use development planned for the next few years, which will integrate commercial spaces, affordable housing, and public spaces.
But for now, these entrepreneurs can continue growing their businesses in the retail village–and continue building on the impact they’ve already made in Congress Heights.
“We’re showing the rest of the world how to keep dollars in our community,” Harrison says. “We no longer have to go downtown. We don’t have to leave out of our community to get great food, and healthy products. We can get that right there. I feel like we’re the new Black Wall Street.”
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