Our Village Unitedis a non-profit dedicated to supporting the growth of Black solopreneurs and microbusinesses based in Atlanta, Georgia through training programs aimed to grow their operations and scale their businesses.
Challenge
COVID-19 affected many Black-owned businesses who operated brick-and-mortar stores. Our Village United’s goal was to support 100 Black-owned businesses in Atlanta, Georgia by providing resources, tools, mentorship, training, and wellness support to help these businesses grow from sole operators to thriving businesses with multiple employees.
Surthrive was responsible for building the end-to-end infrastructure for Our Village United’s new program, ELEVATE. We were tasked with designing a custom curriculum, lesson plans, program activities and implementing program management tools.
Solution
Curriculum:
Surthrive carefully crafted a curriculum designed to help Black-owned businesses transitioning their businesses online to reach new customers outside of their geographical location.
The curriculum was delivered in a 12-Week incubator program that consisted of 10-Lesson Plans and 8 Templates & Frameworks divided into 4 learning modules: Operations, Marketing, Sales, and Fundraising.
The curriculum also included a syllabus, program calendar, and custom program activities such as Workshops, Office Hours, and Peer-to-Peer working sessions.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs):
We helped Our Village United develop key objectives for the program which included:
Increase sales to create a livable paying wage for business owners to go full-time
Hire at least one new employee to grow from a sole proprietorship to a business
Develop one strategic partnership that relieves work and scales business operations
… And key metrics to track the progress and success of the program:
# of Units Sold and Revenue Generated
# of Employees or Contractors Hired
% of Profit Margin Change
Evaluation:
To collect as many data points as possible and track the progress of entrepreneurs throughout the program we developed 300 questions delivered in 22 surveys.
