Dear WomenVenture Community:
It has been a heartbreaking time for Minnesota and for our country. We are hopeful that passionate public outcry and demand for systemic change will be sustained and lead us to a Minnesota where justice, equity, and opportunity abound for all our people.
WomenVenture stands with those advocating for change and justice in the wake of countless acts of racism perpetrated against our Black colleagues, friends, and neighbors. We stand by the entrepreneurs in our neighborhoods rebuilding their small businesses. We stand for our clients having equal access to small business loans, contracts, and investment capital.
We feel encouraged by the stories of our clients who have opened their doors as places of solace, who have been posting from the frontlines, who have provided medical support, who have organized food drives, supply runs, and so much more.
At WomenVenture, we pledge to step up and do our part; we are committed to actively living our values of embracing diversity, treating others with integrity, being persistent in achieving our mission, and acting as an agent of change.
Many of you have reached out wanting to know how you can help. We have aggregated and are regularly updating a Resources for Justicesection on our website. We can only start to learn from these injustices and restructure our broken system by centering Black, Brown, and Indigenous voices. Therefore, we will be organizing actionable steps to help our community in the now – including an upcoming supply drive. We will update you as soon as more information is available. We stand by our commitment to learning, growing, and taking action every day.
Together, we can create the change we need to see in the world.
Yours in solidarity,
The Staff of WomenVenture
