Nagea Kirkley
2024 Parity Project Innovation Challenge Winner
Project: Bonded Dollas
“Take this time to go for any and every opportunity.” – Nagea
Hi, Nagea! Tell us a little bit about yourself!
I am a recent graduate of Howard University and a current student at Johns Hopkins University. I am getting my master’s in international relations, and I would like to be a social impact entrepreneur in the future.
What is a social impact entrepreneur?
Basically, it means running a nonprofit-style business where you can still make a profit and run like a regular business, but you put in your constitution and bylaws that you will help certain causes. You can have a greater impact and people know what to look for when they’re shopping with your business.
Tell us the pitch for your 2024 Parity Project Innovation Challenge submission.
I proposed a project where we can socialize the Black American masses to come together and build social and financial capital through things like a lottery system and cooperatives. Through an app, we will help facilitate the coming together of Black individuals to create Black businesses, Black nonprofits, and Black institutions so that we can have more capital coming in and help from our community. We have enough resources by ourselves to do whatever it is we need to do.
How does the app work?
The app would have gamification.
Think of Duolingo. Duolingo sends you a lot of notifications a day, and they send you points and gems and streaks and all of these things that help you keep learning.
That’s what my app would look like. It would look like a gamified version of social media.
On regular social media, you just scroll and scroll. In my app you would get points for activities like scrolling and connecting with others.
On my app you would have different tabs—a home tab, a business directory tab, a business cooperation tab, a profile page, and other tabs to basically help navigate what you want to do.
So maybe you’re a business owner and customers can find you in the business directory. Or you can post what you sell on your personal profile and then people can find it in the business directory.
Or what if you’re an individual who has a business idea but doesn’t know how to start? You can go to others, all types of Black Americans, in the app from different backgrounds.
So that’s what it would look like: a group of people coming together to create things using their different backgrounds and specializations.
Where did you get the idea for this project?
Right now, I am a 2023-2024 English Teaching Assistant in Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa. During my Fulbright, I assisted teachers and got to know the community, and I learned a lot about their community culture. I talked a lot about the African American community and culture as well.
One thing that I noticed was that almost their entire economy was imported. Then, I realized quickly that it was the same back home in African American neighborhoods.
And I realized that that leaves little room for African Americans or Black Americans or Black people globally to have ownership in anything. In order to survive in this type of system, which is the capitalist system, we have to have some form of ownership of something in order to make profits to provide for ourselves. You can’t just be working for someone else; we would never be able to build anything. So that’s one of the biggest things I’ve noticed here, and I got the idea for the Parity Project out of my experience here, trying to find a way to reverse the trend using the power of the community.
What does parity mean to you?
Parity means equality. It means equity, to a degree, but mostly, I feel like equality. If you have $50, you work as hard as you can to get the next person $50 and so everybody has $50. That’s when the equity part comes in because everybody has different needs. So you may have to work only a little bit to help somebody else get $50, but you might have to work a lot to help the third person get $50 so that they can match the first two.
Why should someone do the Parity Project Innovation Challenge?
They should do it for multiple reasons.
For example, I knew I had this idea born out of my experience in Fulbright, which started as a research proposal. I needed a way to turn it into action, so I thought, “Why not apply?”
If you want to be taken seriously as a future entrepreneur or potential future entrepreneur, pitch competitions are the way to go. That’s why someone should do something like this. It’s low stakes. The only thing that people can say to your idea is, “It was great, but we’re going with somebody else’s idea.”
They should also do it because it’s a financial opportunity to kickstart your business. If you can get $2,000 to kickstart your business, you may turn into the next big entrepreneur.
Why is STEM important to you?
STEM is becoming the backbone of our society. Ever since the Cold War in the 1960s, STEM has been the focus. As a result, large economies and societies have become very skilled in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. There’s no way that you can create a large-scale change in today’s society without some form of technology. That’s why it’s important to learn hard skills like coding, and skills like being able to do pre-calculus.
It is important because technology creates opportunity. And the more technology we create, the more opportunities we have to find our niche. Our niche is important to find through technology because it can have a butterfly effect on everything else in the world, just elevating and upgrading infrastructure globally.
Who is someone who inspires you?
I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m also an HBCU graduate, and there’s this HBCU graduate who graduated from Clark Atlanta University named Pinky Cole. She created this vegan food restaurant called Slutty Vegan. She just wanted the community to be healthy. But as a result of having one successful location, she was able to raise millions of dollars and expand so quickly into other locations, as well as give one of the graduating classes of Clark Atlanta University free LLCs. And she pays the rent of other entrepreneurs.
This app that I’m proposing would put people like Pinky Cole in the same space as somebody who is a junior in university trying to get their idea off the ground. So she’s somebody who inspires me.
Do you have any advice to share?
If you’re young, like me, take this time to go for any and every opportunity, even if it’s tiring. Go at your own pace. Take your time to sit with yourself and think: What does the world need? What do I want to contribute? How can I be paid for it? And how can I make it happen?
Pitch your idea so that other people can hear it. And apply to things like the Base 11 Parity Project Innovation Challenge.