The Great Girlfriends
What’s in a legacy? Everything!
And we’re building our legacies, choice by choice, brick by brick as women to secure our impact and blaze trails for generations to come.
We’ve partnered with Essence and Pine-Sol to amplify the power of the Build Your Legacy Campaign, a multi-year empowerment campaign dedicated to providing financial resources to women who are making a difference through entrepreneurship.
And when we say financial resources, we mean $100,000 each year to the recipients! WOW!
Listen in as Essence/Pine-Sol Build Your Legacy Winners Niani Tolbert (founder of HireNow) and Djenaba Johnson-Jones (founder and CEO of Hudson Kitchen) come together with Erica Jacobs (Associate Director of Multicultural Marketing at The Clorox Company) to discuss how this program has helped to shape the legacies of Niani and Djenaba’s businesses for years to come.
Learn more about the Build Your Legacy Campaign HERE.
About Djenaba Johnson-Jones
Djenaba Johnson-Jones is the founder and CEO of Hudson Kitchen, a food business incubator that enables entrepreneurs to start, sustain, and scale profitable food businesses.
After working in business development at some of the biggest media brands for 15 years, Djenaba was clear about one thing when she was laid off in 2014:This was an opportunity for a new beginning.
The creation of Hudson Kitchen came out of Djenaba’s own experience of facing countless obstacles when planning to launch her own food business. Upon doing more research and realizing this pain point also presented an opportunity, she shifted to the Hudson Kitchen concept.
Hudson Kitchen provides members with 8,000 square feet of commercial kitchen and storage space, mentorship and coaching, networking events, and educational programming. In 2021, member businesses created 58 jobs and generated almost $9 million in collective revenue. They’ve appeared on QVC, Vice Street Food Icons, in the New York Times, and raised millions of dollars to fund their empires.
About Niani Tolbert:
Niani is a marketer-turned-tech recruiter-turned founder of the #HIREBLACK Initiative. #HIREBLACK started as a viral LinkedIn post requesting help in offering 19 Black womxn to receive resume feedback on Juneteenth, and grew into an initiative whose goal is to help 10,000 Black womxn get trained and hired promoted in corporate positions. #HIREBLACK is now a network of 15,000 people and counting featured on Forbes and ESSENCE.
Since its inception, #HIREBLACK has worked with companies like Amazon, Disney, Conde Nast, Niantic, Spotify, Uber, and more. Their resources have reportedly increased the total compensation of the HIREBLACK members by over $1.2 million.
Her work has garnered praise and recognition, and she won the Essence x Pine-Sol Build Your Legacy Contest in 2021. In 2021, Niani won the Future of Work grant by Create & Cultivate, was an honoree of the Future is Female award by Advertising Week, and was an honoree of the Diversity and Inclusion Award from the Women’s Empowerment Institute in 2020.
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