Unpublished, but not Unsent v4

Dear Editor,

If your readers are worried about Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court, they should be. And if your readers marched in protest on October 17th, 2020, I’d like to thank them for marching for me. It’s been simpler for me to accept what Barrett’s appointment will mean while still fighting mightily to protect the rights we will lose, as best I know how. Every day, EVERY DAY, I think of those six-year-olds shot in Sandy Hook; yet federal protection of the Second Amendment will be strengthened. Every day I think of the words of Maxine Waters as she spoke them at the 2017 Women’s Convention in Detroit:

“Keep your hands off our backs and our goddamn bodies!”

Yet federal protection for reproductive rights will be overturned. I’d like to tell your readers: This is happening on our watch.

Dr. Willie Parker notes:

“Liberals may hear about [anti-abortion] laws enacted elsewhere, in states where they are not likely to live, that require counseling and waiting periods, widened hallways and hospital admitting privileges, and shrug...From the relative safety of the blue states, voters who support abortion rights can be insulated from the devastating impact new [anti-abortion] laws make on women’s lives.”

I’d like to tell your readers: Do not let this happen to you. Barrett’s appointment means we will need to spend the next forty+ years fighting everyday to keep from losing the basic rights our mothers procured for us. If you don’t or can’t remember life before Roe v. Wade, read “The Story of Jane, the Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service,” by Laura Kaplan. Roe v. Wade stated that abortion is a medical decision to be made by a woman and her doctor. That’s all it protects, and the right to that decision is what Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and especially Barrett, are going to take away from you.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v3

Photo of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford giving testimony

Dear Editor,

In the days of my youth the phrase we used for what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified to experiencing at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh was “date rape.” Most of the girls I knew who suffered date rape did so as members of a church youth group and in fact, the date rapists were usually boys in the same church youth group. Date rape meant three things: 1) you knew the assailant, but not well; 2) you blamed yourself for what happened; and 3) you didn’t mention it. Except word always got out, because generally the girl who’d been date raped and then had to keep silent about it would be traumatized just enough to make a half-hearted suicide attempt before recovering more fully (if that’s possible).

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018, throughout Dr. Ford’s testimony, many American women recognized that with Kavanaugh’s inevitable appointment, the same type of man capable of committing date-rape with which so many women are familiar - that can result in a forced pregnancy - would be the very same man responsible for criminalizing abortion, thus removing choice on both ends of the conception spectrum. It was simply too much to bear. It still is.

Dr. Willie Parker notes: “If a woman is not in control of her fertility, she is not in control of her life.” Date-rape is (sadly) common enough, even still, and in plenty of instances a woman becomes pregnant without choosing to do so. That has been the case since time immemorial; abortion access gave her back some control. With Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment, you can bet we’re one step closer to losing it, at the federal level, for good.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v2

Dear Editor.

I am angry. I have been angry since Election Day 2016. It’s amazing to me that this anger has ceased to subside; it’s a little like grief in that way, it simply burns true day after day. I’m angry that as a working mom I have to dedicate any spare time to the Resistance, which means, as an introvert, having to spend my Saturday afternoons in anguish, phone banking for Democrats. I am especially angry about the fear that drives my anger to exhibit itself in unexpected ways, like a crying-jag in public. And I am not alone. I can name scores of other women, who, like me, are angry. These women are changed, some (you’d be surprised how many) have quit their jobs to join the Resistance, to lead it. These women have been transformed into activists.

Now you might ask, why does this matter? What has the transformation wrought? I can tell you this, these women are living differently, every spare moment (and just ask a woman how carefully life must be ordered to allow for a spare moment) is spent educating themselves about this current political reality and using the activism tools they have created to fight back, run for office and broaden the progressive, liberal ideals with which they were raised. I am angry, and I know now that I should have been angry LONG before the 2016 election. The interesting thing about this anger is that it has birthed not violence, but generosity and action. It is a wellspring of motivation that these women have used to create communities.

Today when I realized that being in the “Resistance” actually just means taking part in our democracy, my anger suddenly subsided a bit. I’m thankful to have been forced to participate and take action, to fundraise and phonebank for Democratic candidates who will defend progressive politics. Yes, I am still angry that a conservative Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade; but I am grateful, finally, to have learned the hard way the value of taking part. Taking part IS the same as fighting for. And I will never stop, taking part.

I hope you won’t either.

Unpublished, but not Unsent v1

In September of 2020, I began writing a series of Letters to the Editor of the New York Times, which I submit, but which are, needless to say, never published. The letters are lamentations, mainly, on dealing with the consequences of, as I saw it originally, a post-trump reality. What I’ve learned since is that what, for me, was “post-trump”, was just normal, everyday life for other people.

I write these letters to self-soothe, whenever my Current Affairs anxiety needs leveling.

Dear Editor,

When I was teenager, about the age a mother-daughter relationship is just beginning to transform into a friendship, my mother told me a story she’d told many times before, but with a new twist.

When she became pregnant with me in her late twenties, she was ecstatic. My parents were married but their relationship was rocky and she wasn’t sure where he stood on the subject. So she made an appointment with a doctor to listen and learn more about abortion. This was 1975, only two years after Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now an option for her, a freedom she had the right to exercise. “I wanted to have you,” she told me, “but I wanted your father to choose you, too.”

He did, and I was born. But it was the abortion right that helped my parents commit to having a family. When it came time to have my own family, I felt honored to access the same right to a safe, legal abortion as my mother. I, too, did not exercise it and now have a beautiful daughter.

The terrible thing is, I desperately wanted to have more children but after battling endometriosis was unable to conceive a second time. And at the same time I lie awake at night drenched in fear that Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment and Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death will destroy the one freedom that made my family possible. The right to an abortion did for my family what it was supposed to, it allowed me to choose to have a family. How can I now be expected to parent a daughter knowing she will not have that same right? I already carry with me the painful burden of unfulfilled longing for more children; now I must brace myself to say goodbye to my daughter’s right, as a woman, to seek an abortion and, terrified for her future, carry that burden too.

Raising Capital to Fund your Small Business

Photo by Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash

One of the most significant stumbling blocks to growth that the majority of small business owners will face is access to capital. You can have an incredible product, talent, or service specialty, but if no one wants to pay for it, you can’t earn a living.

If you launch a business that does good, you have an added incentive to turn a profit because all those sales you so painstakingly secure directly equate to increased financial support for a cause you’re championing. Your growth catalyzes your cause’s success. At Mata Traders, we launched a fair trade fashion brand produced by women co-op members in India and Nepal because we saw, time and time again, that women with economic power use it to stabilize their families and educate their children, helping to end the cycle of poverty in marginalized communities.

While access to capital can feel near impossible sometimes, I can suggest four ways you can obtain it and further your growth.

Seed Capital

In the early stages of your business’s development, your options for access to capital will be limited, and some may be more risky than others. If you need seed capital, which almost everyone will to get started, there are at least two ways to raise it. You can either self-fund, or ask friends and family for a loan or gift. At Mata Traders, we did both.

To self-fund, we took out multiple no interest (0% APR) credit card cash advances with long repayment terms, either 36 or 60 months. With a basic cash flow statement and a short term sales plan with strategies and tactics built twelve months out, we felt comfortable with that level of risk. We drafted out repayment schedules to insure the money was paid back before the end of the term, which kept the money interest-free and boosted our credit score to make us more appealing to other types of lenders.

The next thing you’ll need to be able to do is sell, sell, sell whatever it is you’re marketing. At Mata, the more dresses we can sell, the more business we can provide the women who make our dresses, which amplifies our mission. We would vend at street festival booths, and exhibit at trade shows and conference expos. We’d take road trips to visit customers and sell out of the back of our van.

Because we invested in product development and could actualize sales dollars, we established a track record of profitability that helped us woo bank lenders when it came time for that.

We also found that leveraging the support of bigger companies like ModCloth and Stitch Fix really helped legitimize our brand. A vouch from them went a long way with their loyal customers, and helped establish a pathway for our growth.

Debt Financing

Once you can establish a solid sales history, make relationships with lenders. We found three avenues with which to access additional growth capital, and we succeeded in all three because we built relationships with those institutions that had capital to lend. The first, most traditional route is to obtain debt financing through a major national banking institute.

All I can recommend is when it’s time to make the big ask, avoid your local branch.

You want to find a lender motivated to act as a mediary between you and the bank’s underwriters, and oftentimes these people are headquartered in the bank’s corporate offices. Make an appointment with a business banker at the bank’s headquarters located nearest to you. Ask to partner with a business banker who handles small businesses specifically. Our bankers work in teams, but one handles businesses like ours, with revenue under five million; the others handle much larger businesses and wouldn’t be a good fit in the immediate future.

Cooperative Lending Societies

The second type of lender to look for is one who lends specifically within your niche. We launched at a time when fair trade clothing labels like ours had virtually no competition; which is something I’d recommend to anyone. Find a niche market and ask: what are these customers missing? What can’t they get? And then give that to them.

Once you’ve identified your niche, there may very well be lenders who exist solely to help businesses within that niche survive.

We found an ethical investment organization called Shared Interest that shares Mata’s mission to alleviate poverty through fair and just trade, and who will only lend to other accredited fair trade businesses and organizations. Because we are members of the Fair Trade Federation, they agreed to take us on and over the years have given us access to a credit limit three times the size of the line of credit are allotted from our bank directly.

Grants

The third type of lender to invest resources in connecting with is an organization who provides grants to businesses like yours. We found more success with this type of lending at the local level, as opposed to national. Two places to look would be your neighborhood chamber of commerce and your local municipality. We found two resources in our city through which we were able to access funds; our city had a center set up to specifically support entrepreneurs, which we qualified as, and our city also had grant funds set aside specifically to aid businesses in our sector (i.e. fashion). Grant research can be daunting and there are so many options out there to wade through. One thing we found to be helpful was to establish a rapport early on that encouraged local business owners like ourselves to communicate often and share resources.

The thing to remember in all of this is that as your business grows and prospers, and your revenue and net income increases, your business will become more and more self sustaining. Financing options will become less of an imperative and more of an aside. We learned, as Viola Davis puts it, “Your ability to adapt to failure, and navigate your way out of it, absolutely 100 percent makes you who you are.” That ability can also make or break the success of your small business. I wish you so much good luck with your own venture, and may any problems you encounter along the way become stepping stones to greater success.