2018 Annual Report
In this section:
We ended 2018 with immense gratitude for our community of entrepreneurs, partners, and stakeholders working with us towards social, racial, and economic justice. Through their support and tireless work, Propeller ventures are increasing access to healthy food, supporting equitable development in our neighborhood, improving public health, creating high quality, equitable learning environments, and helping our region live and work with water. In this report, you’ll meet entrepreneurs like Ajax, who founded New Orleans’ first Black-owned yoga studio. You’ll meet people like Arpit and Elora, who are partnering with Louisiana’s sugarcane farmers of color.
Individually, our entrepreneurs are business leaders. Together, they are a force. 60% are women, and 65% are people of color. In 2018, Propeller proudly graduated our 215th entrepreneur from our accelerator program. Last year, they collectively served 8,442 students K-12, brought direct health services to 10,313 New Orleanians, restored 15,501 acres of coastal land, and sold $721,000 worth of healthy groceries.
This year, we expanded on our work providing direct support to entrepreneurs by advocating for and contributing to a more equitable entrepreneurship ecosystem at large. We made our first investments through our $1 million Social Venture Fund, advocated for institutions like hospitals and schools to buy more of their produce from Louisiana farmers, and worked with our Mayor to make sure her transition into office included a focus on increasing inclusive, local procurement policies.
We are honored to learn from and build upon the wisdom of our contemporaries and generations of community leaders, business owners, and entrepreneurs who have laid strong foundations and worked in concert with us.
New Orleans has always been a place of imagination, invention, and social innovation. We follow in the footsteps of our city’s visionaries, entrepreneurs, agents of change, and those that supported them to create the fabric of our city’s joy and resilience. We are honored to learn from and build upon the wisdom of our contemporaries and generations of community leaders, business owners, and entrepreneurs who have laid strong foundations and worked in concert with us. From the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, Racial Equity Institute, and Beloved Community, who have guided and worked with us to operationalize racial equity in our own organization, to partners like LaunchNOLA and Coastal Communities Consulting, who provide critical support to our city’s businesses.
Our work would not be possible without those who have worked beside and before us. In this report, we honor a handful of entrepreneurs integral to the history of the areas where we work, from Rhodes family’s multi-generational leadership of business development along Broad Street to the women of Congo Square who became food entrepreneurs to purchase their freedom.
We thank you for another year of support and partnership in our work,
ANDREA CHEN
Executive Director
Propeller
In 2016, Trace returned home to the New Orleans area to begin working at Propeller as Incubator Manager. His passion for supporting Black-owned businesses along the Broad Street corridor is seen in his role as a neighborhood liaison and work to connect partners to our neighborhood through policy and advocacy efforts.
Originally from Santa Ana, California, Melissa moved with her family to New Orleans two weeks prior to Hurricane Katrina and remained after the storm.
She joined Propeller inspired to work on tackling systematic oppression and how inequities can affect a person’s ability to make a living and take entrepreneurial risks.