In 2014, Brittney Oliver started Lemons 2 Lemonade with a simple conviction: Black professionals needed spaces designed specifically for them. A decade later, Lemons 2 Lemonade has produced hundreds of experiences across multiple cities, helped launch careers, and brokered partnerships for women looking for career support and development. It has done all of this largely without the institutional backing that similar concepts led by non-Black founders attract almost immediately. And she’s not alone.
Black women are among the most prolific builders of community-driven spaces in America. According to Wells Fargo’s 2025 Impact of Women Businesses report, Black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the United States, with their businesses growing by 13% between 2024 and 2025 — compared to just 4.4% growth among women-owned businesses overall. Community-driven spaces are central to what they are building. Sustaining them is a different challenge entirely.
Black women typically build these spaces with bootstrap budgets and borrowed venues. Then they spend years sustaining those rooms against a financial infrastructure that consistently undervalues what they created. The gap between what these spaces produce and what they receive in return is not a coincidence. It is a pattern; one that four Black women founders know intimately.
What It Actually Costs
The invoice for a community event might show venue rental, catering, and a speaker fee. It doesn’t show everything else. Amber Lewis, founder of Social N The City and Detroit’s leading voice in the creator economy, has spent years building a hub for events, community, and culture in one of America’s Blackest cities. What started as a personal lifestyle brand — the go-to girl for things to do in Detroit — has grown into an ecosystem that now includes Detroit Creator Weekend, activating a community of over 700 content creators through education, awareness, and connection. That growth did not come without cost. “You miss family events, you miss meetups with friends, you miss outings,” Lewis said. “Everywhere you go, people want to talk to you about the work or pitch you something. You constantly are advocating and fighting for people who sometimes couldn’t care less about you. You often work with people you don’t personally prefer for the betterment of your community.”
Lewis described the full weight of it as an “ongoing ego death,” one that impacts your health, requires everything you have, and leaves you empty by design. “That is the point of being a vessel,” she said. “To empty yourself in service to be refilled with inspiration, opportunities, and support again.” It is one of the most honest descriptions of what community leadership actually demands, and it will never appear on a scope of work.
Chrystian Woods has spent years building community-centered spaces and named the cost that is most consistently left off the conversation. The mental and emotional toll of holding space for a community — processing their struggles, absorbing their frustrations, showing up with full presence even when you are personally depleted — is real labor. It shapes how you sleep, how you socialize, and how you see yourself outside of the work. It is also completely invisible on any invoice a brand will ever see or approve.
“We’re expected to show up fully for our communities while quietly absorbing the financial stress, the burnout, and the invisibility,” she said. “That’s not sustainable. It’s sacrifice dressed up as passion.” This invisibility helps keep the undervaluation so persistent. If you can’t quantify the cost, you can conveniently ignore it.
The Brand Access Paradox
Here is the tension at the center of this conversation. Brands spend significant budget trying to reach Black women consumers, to understand them, earn their loyalty, and position themselves inside the culture those women are actively building. And yet when Black women build the rooms where those consumers gather — the events, the networks, the communities where trust is established and purchasing decisions are shaped — the investment doesn’t follow. Brands want the access, but they simply aren’t willing to pay the people who built it.
Kristin Buckner, founder of CEO Bae in Atlanta, has watched this dynamic play out repeatedly over years of community building and creative work. She described being asked to do discovery calls, run pilots, and demonstrate ROI before any real budget is committed; a standard that comparable spaces led by non-Black founders rarely face on the same timeline. “I started charging what made me uncomfortable and then doubled it,” she said.
The discomfort, she has come to understand, is not a signal to lower the number. It signals that you have been undercharging longer than you realized, and the market has been counting on you not to notice. Lewis identified the structural assumption that makes the undervaluation possible in the first place. “People know that Black women are going to do the work anyway, with or without corporate dollars,” Lewis said, “because we know the value of community and have always shown up to service our needs.”
That certainty — that the room will get built regardless — is exactly what allows brands to offer exposure instead of equity, product instead of payment, and one-off event sponsorships instead of the recurring revenue that would actually allow these businesses to scale. Lewis also pointed out an education gap on the community builder’s side. Many founders do not know what to ask corporate partners for because nobody has modeled it for them. That gap is as much a structural problem as the brands’ unwillingness to pay fairly.
What Would Actually Move the Needle
The four founders are aligned on what change requires, and it starts before any brand conversation happens. “I think it would take us having a standard as community builders on what we will and won’t allow,” Lewis said. “That is what will move the needle.” When community builders set a floor and hold it, brands will have to meet it or lose access to the rooms they need.
Buckner’s version of that standard is pricing that reflects the community’s full value, not just the event logistics. Building the trust that fills a room took years. The intimacy that makes a brand activation feel authentic rather than transactional cannot be replicated with a marketing budget.
For Woods, the ask is more fundamental. Treat community as infrastructure, not a marketing afterthought. The spaces Black women build are not soft initiatives or feel-good additions to a corporate giving strategy. They are where careers are made, where partnerships form, where the next generation of Black professionals finds its footing and its people. They should be treated as such.
Oliver has been making that argument for ten years. Her business is still producing, building, and proving the concept that should have attracted serious investment years ago. The rooms she has built are full, and the careers shaped inside those rooms are real. “There’s a certain type of person who is called and qualified to lead,” Oliver said. “Be sure to do your own work to be that person.” She has done that work, year after year, city after city, with or without the infrastructure that should have been there from the start. And as unfortunate as it is to say, all of these Black women founders have, and they’ll continue to do so, no matter the level of institutional support.