Black business owners are getting the support they deserve thanks to a powerful alliance with United Masters, Ally and popular podcast Earn Your Leisure.
During the Chicago leg of the Earn Your Masters Experience tour, powered by UnitedMasters and Ally, aspiring entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to Earn Your Leisure founders Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings founders, Ally‘s Marketing Lead of Multicultural Marketing, Inya Davis, and performance poet J. Ivy, for a chance to win $50,000 in business funding.
Among the list of speakers at the event was Jason Weaver, fellow Chicagoan, beloved long-time actor and staunch advocate of Black financial literacy. The Lion King animated movie star made headlines when he shared the wise money move he made as a child that set him up for life-long financial security.
During an interview, Weaver said Disney put a $2 million check in front him to voice young Simba in the hit film; the actor shared it was the most money he’d ever seen at the time.
“That amount of money, to an average middle-class family in Chicago in the early 90s, I mean … that’s something. But immediately, my mom goes, ‘Wait a minute,’” Weaver told the interviewer. “She was able to see the playing field and go, ‘Wait a minute, this is going to make a lot of money over time. So, what happens when my son turns 40. Is he still going to be able to get a check from this when they eventually re-release this.”
Now, years later he’s helping spread the word about the value of fiscal responsibility.
Jeff Darko from Chicago won the pitch Earn Your Masters pitch competition on August 6 with his platform MIXPLUG, an A.I. powered platform that empowers that allows artists to create professional grade music projects without experts. The winning idea earned him the chance to move forward to the grand prize at the tour’s final stop in Miami during Art Basel.