When Camille Heard moved back to Cleveland in 2018, she had a harder time meeting other like-minded entrepreneurs and creatives than she’d had living in other cities. As the co-founder of FELOH, a beauty product marketplace app, she knew that building a network is essential for entrepreneurs to secure funding, tap into resources, and expand the reach of their businesses.
She teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Charron Leeper, who founded head wraps and hair accessories brand Perfect Pineapple. The two formed an organization called Tastemakers United to help entrepreneurs and creatives of color build community in Cleveland. Leeper has since stepped away from Tastemakers to focus on her business. As chief visionary officer, Heard leads the organization’s small team.
“A tastemaker is a person who’s on the cutting edge of what makes things cool, what makes culture, what makes society thrive,” Heard said. “And the tastemakers of culture usually are people of color that are creating innovative sounds; they’re artists; they’re innovators; they’re entrepreneurs doing really creative things, and then they get absorbed by the mass culture at some point in time.”
Heard and Leeper are at the forefront of efforts to help underrepresented entrepreneurs thrive in Cleveland. They’re leaders of the FutureLAND conference, which launched last year and featured panels, live performances, and pitch competitions focused on increasing diversity in Cleveland’s tech ecosystem and highlighting arts and culture.
The second annual conference will take place Oct. 5-6 in Playhouse Square. Meanwhile, Tastemakers, which curated the augmented reality art show and concert at last year’s conference, is in its second year of putting on free and low-cost events focused on building community among artists and entrepreneurs of color. These efforts to build community help entrepreneurs expand their networks and get access to funding opportunities, Heard said.
Tastemakers is hosting its second annual “For the Culture Mixer” on Thursday, Sept. 7 from 5:30 – 9:30 p.m. at the art gallery at Worthington Yards (725 Johnson Ct.) in downtown Cleveland’s Warehouse District. The event is free and includes food and drinks, but registration is required. RSVP for the event here.
With support from FutureLAND, Tastemakers is partnering with the art gallery, YARDS Projects, to put on the mixer. The event will celebrate the second year of the FutureLAND conference, and it will also serve as the opening night for an art exhibit at YARDS Projects titled “ON LINE: Drawing our reality.”
When Heard became entrepreneur in residence at JumpStart, a business support nonprofit that sponsored the FutureLAND conference, she said she became more aware of the need to create ways for artists and entrepreneurs to meet each other and connect to resources and funding.
“Cleveland has a very robust ecosystem of all these different collaborative partners that will serve entrepreneurs and creatives. They are here. But there is a big gap (to) bridge between the people that need it and the organizations that are soliciting it,” she said.
Creating spaces for artists and entrepreneurs to build community
Tastemakers focuses on convening entrepreneurs and artists, and their events have drawn crowds, typically selling out within a week. The organization aims to put on one event each quarter on top of collaborating with other organizations on additional events.
Sterling Braden, who founded an app called Friend A Felon to help people with felony convictions find jobs and housing, said that he attends every Tastemakers event he can, and he’s gotten to talk to CEOs and leaders there.
“Tastemakers are the premier cultivators of experiences in the city of Cleveland right now. They not only have the voice of the Black community, but the entrepreneur community as well,” Braden said.
When founders and creatives like Braden meet fellow entrepreneurs and business leaders, they can find mentorship and support, and break into spaces they haven’t been in before, Heard said. A connection an entrepreneur makes at an event may turn out to be a collaborator or customer, or someone who opens doors and makes introductions for them.
“You have to know people that are going to speak your name into rooms that you are currently not in,” Heard said. “Even though I’m still rising and growing myself, I have been able to verbally champion people in spaces that they have not been in. And that’s the power of connection, and that’s the power of network and networking.”
The events also highlight art, culture, and innovation in the community. Artists are entrepreneurs too, Heard said, and Tastemakers helps create a “wealth ecosystem” where creatives can hire and buy from each other. Plus, artists who photograph or perform or showcase their work at the events gain visibility, she said.
Funding the events and helping entrepreneurs get funding
A Tastemakers event in April inspired by the ’90s movie “Love Jones” featured spoken word poetry and live music at 27 Club Coffee. The first “For the Culture” mixer took place last summer on the rooftop of the Ernst & Young building.
“I have never seen a view of Cleveland like that in my entire life. I knew that our community deserved to see that,” Heard said. “They deserve to see the sunset over the lake in Cleveland, Ohio, looking like we’re in Mexico.”
Sponsors of Tastemakers events include nonprofits like JumpStart, the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland, and The Presidents’ Council, as well as Huntington Bank and the Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival.
Funding has been a challenge, said Heard, who contributed her own money for the first Tastemakers event. She said that the organization has considered applying for grants, but they often come with strings that “can dictate how the organization grows.”
“A lot of the larger organizations that have a lot of grant dollars, they have to abide by the grants’ terms, and many times it doesn’t really involve event curation and doing things like this,” Heard said. “A lot of times it has to be framed up a certain way, it has to be programmatic, it has to be educational. And when you do that, you don’t really build community; you create programming. And now you have to market programming to an empty stadium.”
Tastemakers helps entrepreneurs get funding for their businesses, both by helping them make connections that can lead to funding opportunities and by providing cash directly.
At the event on the rooftop of the Ernst & Young building last summer, Tastemakers used some of their sponsorship funding to surprise three entrepreneurs with $500 checks.
One of the checks went to Braden, who founded the Friend A Felon app. Tanisha Velez, founder of microgreens business Cleveland Fresh, and Amanda King, founder of arts organization Shooting Without Bullets, received the other two checks. Tastemakers hopes to grant larger amounts of money to entrepreneurs in the future, Heard said.
“We literally said, ‘We don’t want people to pitch … but we want to put money in the hands of the people,’” Heard said. “There’s just too much money in this world for some of it not to go to people that are doing incredible things, to propel them forward.”
Visit Tastemakers’ website here and Instagram page here. You can reach them by email at hello@tastemakersunited.org. RSVP for the upcoming “For the Culture Mixer” event here.
JumpStart is a sponsor of The Land, supporting economic development coverage.
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