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By David Martosko

MIDDLETOWN, Va. — Winsome Sears has it all figured out. Black Virginians like her, she believes, are more conservative than they know and even more irked by a Democratic Party that takes them for granted. She hopes that with the right amount of righteous outrage she can bring them with her to the Republican promised land. Sears is the GOP’s nominee for lieutenant governor.

“The Democrats have been successful in instilling fear in people who look like me,” she told Zenger in a wide-ranging interview. “I have had white liberals talk down to me — talk down to me, and as if I didn’t exist — simply because I’m a Republican.”

“I mean, how dare you? Who told you you could talk to me that way? Because I’m not the right kind of black? Is that how this works?”

Developers who gentrify urban blocks and price black Virginians out of their own neighborhoods, she said, often work hand-in-hand with liberal politicians: “I think we have to consider that most of these places that they’re talking about — gentrification — they’re run by Democrats. They are run by Democrats. And so here we go again. We’re talking about — Republicans are supposedly racist, and Democrats are supposedly the ones who care more about you.”

Sears, who joined the U.S. Marines as an 18-year-old Jamaican immigrant, said black voters should be shoulder-to-shoulder with the GOP when it defends gun owners, especially armed women in urban areas. “What am I going to do? Tell these black women, ‘You can’t have guns’? I don’t think so,” said Sears. “When I’m waiting for the police to come, what do I do? How do I protect myself? I don’t know karate.”

She said her time in uniform didn’t shape her views on firearms, but the black community in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region did. “Do you know that the first gun confiscation laws were against black people? … We were the ones who immediately could not own guns, even though it’s our Second Amendment right,” she said. “And so we’re not going to do away with that.”

The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund made headlines in June when it endorsed Winsome Sears and attorney general hopeful Jason Miyares, but not Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for governor. Its website gives the Democrats in all three races “F” grades but leaves Youngkin with a literal question mark.

The NRA endorsed Republicans for Virginia governor in the last four elections. The organization did not respond to a question about why this year is different. Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter didn’t address the NRA directly, but said Youngkin “supports the right to keep and bear arms.” His opponent, former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe, “wants to repeal the Second Amendment and confiscate your guns,” said Porter. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not subject to repeal by any governor.

Sears said Virginians have the right to resist government initiatives that require COVID-19 vaccinations as broadly as possible. Pointing to the infamous Tuskegee experiments that subjected black men to syphilis for 40 years without medical treatment, she said that according to some in the Black Lives Matter movement, as many as 85 percent of African-Americans in New York are not vaccinated.

The city’s public health data indicate the number is a bit lower, 72 percent, counting all black New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 44. “So what’s going to happen with them? Are they now not going to be able to get a job?” she asked. Sears mused about a future where “you have a restaurant employee, a waiter, checking your medical vaccine status. And by the way, you need a photo ID to prove that this is you on that vaccine record? Are you now going to check for HIV status?”

Spokeswoman Delceno Miles declined to say whether Sears is vaccinated. “As per HIPAA laws, she doesn’t have to disclose any medical information,” Miles said in an email. “Winsome encourages those who wish to take the vaccine to do so, but it should not be mandated.”

Sears believes many black Virginians have sympathized with her furrowed brow as state officials dismantle statues of Confederate generals. “The curious thing,” she said, “is that I have spoken to enough black people, and what they’re telling me is that they wanted the statues up, so that they could talk to their children about who this person was, what they did, what they didn’t do.”

And she would prefer to see a statue of a prominent African-American next to every Confederate statue that remains: “It would be wonderful if we could put up other statues of equal grandeur, to then talk about all of history, so that we could say this is what this person did. We could put up a Harriet Tubman.”

Sitting near the brick hearth of the Wayside Inn — the 18th-century lodge survived the Civil War only because soldiers from both sides stayed there, according to the owners — Sears said she wants to see America’s warring racial politics cool down.

“It is not 1963 when my father came,” she said, recalling her family’s roots in Jamaica. “We can now live where we want, we can eat where we want. We own the water fountains. Excuse me. So let’s not. Let’s stop it. Let’s live together.”

And she was viscerally offended in 2012, she says, watching then-Vice President Joe Biden campaign for re-election in the southern Virginia town of Danville. “Listen to his vernacular, his language,” she said, adopting a vocal caricature of a white man trying to affect a black accent. “‘Republicans are going — ’” Sears stops and ratchets the dialect up one notch, matching Biden’s. “‘Republicans gonna put y’all back in chains.’ Excuse me, who are you talking to?”

“And then when Hillary was in a black church, what did she say?” Sears asked, thinking about a 2007 campaign event at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Ala. “‘Ah don’t feel no ways taahred. I come too faaahr to turn back now,’” she says, mimicking Clinton’s sudden leap to the late gospel singer James Cleveland’s accent.

“This is what I’m saying. They take us for granted,” said Sears.

As a state delegate two decades ago, she represented a 60-percent black district that straddles Norfolk and Virginia Beach. Now she’s one of two women vying to make history in an office that has been exclusively male since the Virginia Constitution of 1851 created it. Her opponent is second-term Democratic Delegate Hala Ayala, whose district in a Washington, D.C., commuter county is nestled between the Manassas Civil War battlefield a giant outlet mall. It’s also 69 percent white.

Ayala has a 4-point polling edge in the latest Christopher Newport University Wason Center for Civic Leadership poll, a nonpartisan survey released Oct. 8. She also has the advantage of being a current lawmaker with party relationships to mine and favors to collect. Sears was vice president of the state board of education a decade ago but hasn’t held elective office since 2004, when she left the House of Delegates and unsuccessfully challenged Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott for his seat in Congress.

But her place in history as Virginia’s first black female Republican lawmaker created enough enthusiasm this year among GOP voters to whisk her past two better-funded contenders during a nominating convention in May.

She did it without strong positions on two slow-boiling issues.

A Texas law that significantly limited the accessibility of abortion by allowing citizens to sue doctors and nurses who perform them. Would it be a good thing if Virginia lawmakers imitated it? “We’re not in Texas, and I’m not going to talk about that,” she said.

Still, Sears is pro-life with the same guardrails that have kept anti-abortion Republicans in the hunt for women’s votes. “I believe that the baby in the womb wants to live,” she told Zenger. “I also believe that, you know, we have to make sure that the life and health of the mother is respected. So that she has those options. The life and health of the mother.”

Should the next governor phase out an unpopular personal property tax on cars? “Well, we have to find a way to fund government as well. So we have to be careful with what we’re doing,” she said. The annual tax, the steepest of its kind in America, varies from county to county but averages about 4 percent of resale value.

Haggling with tax-enthusiastic politicians over the value of used cars might become Sears’ reality again, but for now it’s a world away.

She lives in Winchester, an apple-orchard town more than 220 miles from her old district. The move came after her eldest daughter, DeJon Williams, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Sears and her husband, Williams’ stepfather, cared for her and eventually for Williams’ two daughters.

All three — Sears’s daughter and granddaughters — would perish in a 2012 car crash when Williams, according to police, slammed into a car at “a high rate of speed” as its driver turned onto the highway in front of her. Victoria was 7. Faith was 5.

The years of grief that followed, said Sears, gave her perspective about which issues are big and which are small. And it led her toward career choices that run far afield from the lawyer she wanted to become after she served in the U.S. Marines. A few, she said, confound some voters’ expectations of a Republican.

“I’ve run a homeless shelter for women and children. I’ve had people be surprised by that [and] ask, ‘How could a Republican care about the homeless people?’” she said.

“I led the men’s prison ministry. Every Wednesday, I was there, six o’clock, delivering a message of hope,” said Sears. “These are the things that we do in our lives, and we don’t do them for accolades. We do them because we care.”

Zenger asked her to react to this month’s tussle between transgender activists and comedian Dave Chappelle, whose latest Netflix special minimizes that community’s comparatively fast track to civil rights by attributing it to their whiteness. “I’ve never had a problem with transgender people,” Chapelle says in the broadcast. “My problem has always been with white people.”

Sears didn’t want to discuss it. “I want to be left alone. I want you to leave me alone. I want you to live your life,” she said in a moment of quiet libertarian exhibitionism.

“I’m trying to live my life the best way I know how,” she said. “I’ve got my own problems. And when you’ve had three children go to heaven in one night, you see the world a little differently.”

Sears said she loves gardening — “I had a 20-pound watermelon, I couldn’t even pick it up” — and that her favorite comfort food is Caribbean ackee and saltfish. “It’s the Jamaican national dish and I could eat it all day,” she said.

And she laughed at a question about her first pet growing up in Jamaica: “It was a chicken.”

Did it have a name? “No, because we killed her and ate her!”

“You know, I thought of her as my pet until one day we killed her,” said Sears. “We always had dogs and cats and things like that. But this chicken was my chicken.”

Edited by Kristen Butler

Visuals Edited by Claire Swift, John Diaz and Bennett Chess

The post Virginia GOP Lt. Gov. Nominee Crusades For Black Kids, Clobbers Democrats appeared first on Zenger News.

By Abigail Klein Leichman

A novel approach to treating type 2 diabetes under development at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology uses tissue engineering to create muscle cells that absorb sugar at increased rates.

Diabetic mice treated in this manner displayed normal blood sugar levels for months after a single autograft procedure using their own enhanced muscle cells.

The tissue-engineering treatment is part of a research study led by professor Shulamit Levenberg and PhD Student Rita Beckerman from the Technion’s Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering Laboratory.

“By taking cells from the patient and treating them, we eliminate the risk of rejection,” Levenberg said.

Type 2 diabetes is caused by insulin resistance and cells’ reduced inability to absorb sugar, leading to increased blood-sugar levels. Its long-term complications include heart disease, strokes, retina damage, kidney failure and poor blood flow in the limbs.

Although this chronic and common disease can be treated by a combination of lifestyle changes, medication and insulin injections, ultimately it is associated with a 10-year reduction in life expectancy.

Currently, around 34 million Americans suffer from diabetes, mostly type 2. An effective treatment could significantly improve both quality of life and life expectancy. The same method could also be used to treat various enzyme deficiency disorders.

Researchers observed that the engineered muscle cells not only absorbed sugar correctly, improving blood-sugar levels, but also induced improved absorption in the mice’s other muscle cells.

After the procedure, the mice remained diabetes-free for four months — the entire period they remained under observation. Their blood-sugar levels remained lower, and they had reduced levels of fatty liver normally seen in type 2 diabetes.

Findings from the study, funded by Rina and Avner Schneur as part of the Rina and Avner Schneur Center for Diabetes Research, were recently published in Science Advances.

Other scientists participating in the study are from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto; and Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York City.

Other advances in the field by Israeli companies include LifeWave, a connected health solution that produces a device for treating diabetic wounds, and LabStyle Innovations, which was co-founded by Shiloh Ben Zeev. Its flagship product is MyDario, a compact glucose meter connected to mobile devices through a diabetes management app.

“It was the first time an iPhone was used as a medical device,” said Ben Zeev, whose business model was to sell test strips for the glucometer.

Although MyDario won awards for its revolutionary approach, ultimately what survived was the app rather than the device.

Produced in association with Israel21C.

The post Tissue Engineering Could Provide Diabetes Cure appeared first on Zenger News.

By Percy Lovell Crawford

There’s no way to overcome losing a decade of your life by being in prison. It’s even tougher when you were wrongfully convicted of a crime.

When Jarrett Adams was 17, he attended a college party that changed his life forever. An innocent make-out session led to Adams being accused of rape. An important statement from an eyewitness was withheld from the trial, and subsequently led to Adams being sentenced to 28 years in jail.

Eventually, with the assistance of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, the eyewitness statement was released, Adams’ conviction was reversed, and he was exonerated — but only after having already served 10 years of his sentence. Seeking to keep others from suffering the same fate, Adams set his sights on the other side of the legal system by becoming a top defense and civil rights attorney.

He is also an author, and his recently released book, “Redeeming Justice,” is testimony to his refusal to give up on himself. It points out the cracks in a flawed system and shows his commitment to fighting the very system that failed him.

During a recent conversation with Adams, Zenger got a detailed breakdown of what led to his sentence, why he felt compelled to write “Redeeming Justice,” and much more.

Percy Crawford interviewed Jarrett Adams for Zenger.

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Zenger: I can relate to your story, given the fact that in 1998 you were 17 years old, and I was 18 years old. The only difference is, I was playing high school football, and you were fighting for your freedom. You were falsely accused of rape — how did this situation come on you?

Adams: It was scary if you think about it because I often time tell people, I wasn’t in and out of juvie (juvenile centers), doing drive-by shootings or none of the stereotypical stuff that people would throw on us and say, this kid was bound to be a statistic. What we would do, me and my friends would get together and go party outside of the neighborhood because it was so damn dangerous. If you’re not getting shot or shot at by the dudes on the street, you’re getting pulled over and hoping you survive an encounter with the police in your neighborhood.

We got together and we would do this often. We would tell each other’s parents, “I’m going to spend the night at so-and-so’s house.” We would take off, go to these house parties, and we did that on this night like we did many nights. We went to a college party. The same things that we did was what everybody on campus was doing.

There were make-out sessions in every room, people were drinking and smoking. It was an embarrassing situation that this young lady’s roommate walked in on, but it was not criminal, man. We weren’t them kids. Who would be stupid enough to be the only three black dudes on the campus, go rape a white girl in a dorm full of white people, and allow the roommate to walk in, take a halftime break, and then come back and continue to rape? It never made sense.

We have been depicted in such a way historically that it makes it easy for people to believe the most demonized thing that they can about a young black man — even if you’re faced with the reality of, “Hold on, this doesn’t make sense.” You never give the benefit of the doubt to the young black man. That’s how the system has been designed. My mom used to say all the time: “You can’t do what other kids do.” I never understood the depths of that, but what she was saying was, ain’t nobody giving you the benefit of the doubt when you’re a young African American kid. That’s what life was.

Zenger: The cops got involved; you were eventually arrested for this. At 17, you had to be scared to death.

Adams: It was scary… the real reason it was scary is this: I come from a household where you respect your elders, you don’t talk back, the same way you was raised down South. My people [are] from Jackson and Cleveland, Mississippi. I get home from this party, and about three weeks later, there is a card in my door telling me to come down to the police station, robbery/homicide. So, I call the guy, and I’m like, “You definitely got the wrong person.” And he was like, “No, you’re right. I want you to come on down and take a picture and clear your name. You’ve never been arrested before.”

I take my dumb ass down there listening to this dude. I’m 17 and he tricked me. Brother, listen to me when I tell you, and I know you’re going to feel me when I say this. I thought I had nothing to worry about because I was telling the truth. I was so naïve. I hadn’t had those experiences. As a result of that, it sent my life on a tailspin. That experience woke a sleeping legal giant.

This wasn’t one of those, there is an accusation made, and the police come and arrest me on the spot. No! That never happened. What saved our life is this, and this is why I encourage everyone to read the book because it gives you all the details of how it went down. And what’s important is this: After this young lady’s roomie walks in and they start arguing, we all go downstairs in the smoking area. We’re in the smoking area and that’s when we see all of the college students, and again, we’re the only black dudes there.

It saved our life, because there was a white student named Shawn Demain who had given them a statement the day after this false accusation like, “That’s not what happened. We saw the black dudes, they were up and down the stairs, they were all around.” They withheld that statement from us. We never got that statement from them to be able to use it. It changed the trajectory of everything. That statement is what led to the reversal of my conviction 10 years later.

Zenger: While in prison, you decided you didn’t want to just fight for your injustice but for others wrongfully incarcerated as well. You come out, you pass the bar and become a criminal defense attorney. Tell us about the aftermath of being released from prison.

Adams: It wasn’t an easy feat at all. There was so much life lost. Imagine screaming you’re innocent to the top of your lungs for a decade, and then finally, the courts agree. They overturned my conviction, expunged my record, but the damage was not expunged. I missed the cookouts, I missed the graduations, the birth of family members. You can’t replace that. You can’t replace sitting down and being introduced to the family members who were born while you were locked up, and they looking at you like, “Who is this?”

I vividly remember coming home and visiting people in nursing homes, I’m taking them to dialysis, I’m walking around the neighborhood, and I don’t see a pay phone. I remember getting on the bus with a handful of tokens, and they looking at me like a damn fool. The bus doesn’t take tokens no more.

I want you to highlight this as well:I wouldn’t be where I am right now without the encouragement of my family to get mental health care and to decompress. Let it out. That’s what a lot of our young kids need, and they’re not going to do it unless the people in front of them that they look up to are bold enough to talk about it and share their pain and story. I was angry, man. It wasn’t God-like. A fire within you is good, but you need to keep it in your belly; if not, it will consume you.

I had to learn how to keep the fire in my belly and to not let it consume me overall. Therapy just let me talk about it. You ever been going through something, and you got it out, whether you cried it out, talked it out, you have that relief. That’s exactly what mental health care is. Think about the cities down there in Louisiana and think about Illinois, think about what our babies see on a regular basis. You can’t tell me that ain’t stressful. If it is, it’s not post-nothing, it’s persistent traumatic stress syndrome. If it wasn’t for my family getting me to redirect my energy in a positive light, I probably would have tried to take a shortcut.

Zenger: I read where you said, when you came out of prison, your mom gave you a phone and the first time she texted you, you didn’t even know what a text message was.

Adams: Exactly! When the message came through, I had no clue what it was. Part of the reason I wanted them to put your call through… because my schedule crazy, but I wanted them to slide you in because I get a lot of reporters sticking mics in my face now. I can be sitting on the porch with you right now talking. That’s how comfortable you and I are vibin’ right now. It’s important that we tell each other’s stories as well.

Zenger: Not to give away too much of the book because it’s a must-read, but I have to ask you, do you feel the system is broken or intentionally flawed?

Adams: This is how I would explain it: The system is designed flawed. When we say it’s a broken system, there was an idea that was created around the criminal justice system, the reason why it was flawed is because the people who created it didn’t look like me, you, or any other ethnic person. I’ll give you an example. If you get accused of whatever it is you get accused of, and when you get accused of it, Percy gotta put up his house, or Jarrett gotta put up his land or property.

That sounds good for people who have houses and property. When the people created the criminal justice system and all the things in it, they didn’t take into account people like me and you, our mothers and fathers. If they didn’t design it to equally protect us, it’s going to disproportionately impact us. That’s what’s going on. We don’t throw away the entire idea of cooking with gas just because it burned a steak. We go back in, we acknowledge it, and we fix it.

Zenger: What influenced you to write “Redeeming Justice?”

Adams: I send a shout-out to black women. I used to wonder, “Why the hell I have to always call you when I’m leaving out the house, or just a couple of blocks away, momma? Why I gotta call you when the streetlights coming on or you heard an ambulance? Why do you have to be so worried?” You know what, Percy, I will never ask that question again because I see why. The boys these black women give birth to that they pray become men are under direct threat, and the men that they love and conceive with are under direct threat. Nobody has been stronger than black women in history.

What I wanted to do was tip my cap to my mother and my two aunts. They remained and stood firm. Brother, you know how many family members get lost when you go through something like the joint. I could’ve written the book and clearly said, death to all the people involved, they’re racist, but that wasn’t going to accomplish my goal. I wanted to make sure I acknowledge the black women, the suffrage and the praying. I have had mothers come up to me in the airport and say, “Look, I just want to thank you because that scene you describe of your mother crying in the bathtub was me.”

Zenger: How does it make you feel to receive support from Allen Iverson, Larenz Tate and so many others on the book?

Adams: It means that the light is coming on. If you look back, it was more than Dr. [Martin Luther] King, it was more than Malcolm X and Harriet Tubman. Those are the names they told us about. But there were several other people who were on the front lines moving this thing along. I’m praying through people like A.I. and Larenz that folks understand I’m a part of that generational torch carrier, a person who is leading other people and preparing their hands to carry it the rest of the way. This is about duplication.

This isn’t about Jarrett Adams, this isn’t about the brand, this is about preparing the next hand to carry the torch. That’s what we have to do.

Edited by Matthew B. Hall and Judith Isacoff

The post Jarrett Adams Fights The System That Failed Him After Wrongful Conviction  appeared first on Zenger News.

By Martin M Barillas

A genomic study of Bronze Age mummies of the Uyghur region in western China revealed a genetically isolated but culturally cosmopolitan indigenous people linked to modern indigenous peoples of the Americas and Siberia.

Since the 1990s, hundreds of mummies naturally preserved in the dry climate of western China’s Tarim Basin have been discovered, with their somewhat Western appearance attracting international attention and conjecture.

The mummies, dating from 2000 B.C. to A.D. 200, were buried in boat-like coffins though they were in the desert. They wore felted and woven woolen clothing, herded cattle, sheep and goats and ate wheat, barley and millet, researchers say.

While some scholars speculated that they descend from migrating Yamnaya herders from Russia’s Black Sea region, others said they came from the oasis cultures of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), which has a strong genetic relationship to early farmers of the Iranian Plateau. BMAC refers to an early civilization (2000–1500 B.C.) that was centered in modern Turkmenistan and Tajikstan.

Researchers analyzed genomic data from 13 of the earliest Tarim Basin mummies, dated 2100 to 1700 B.C., and five mummies of the nearby Dzungarian Basin, dating 3000 to 2800 B.C., to better understand the populations that settled at the Xiaohe and Gumugou sites around 2000 B.C.

The analysis revealed that the Tarim Basin mummies were not newcomers but direct descendants of people of the preceding Pleistocene age who had mostly disappeared by the end of the last glacial era, about 11,700 years ago, when the current Holocene period began.

Dubbed Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), some of their genome survives among indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Americas. The mummies show no interbreeding with any other groups. The researchers determined that the mummies show evidence of being a previously unknown people who were genetically isolated long before settling in the Tarim Basin.

“Archeogeneticists have long searched for Holocene ANE populations in order to better understand the genetic history of Inner Eurasia. We have found one in the most unexpected place,” says Choongwon Jeong, a senior author of the study and a professor of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University.

The earliest people of Dzungarian Basin, however, descended from local populations and also from the Afanasievo herders who had strong genetic links to the Early Bronze Age Yamanya people. The ancestry of other pastoralists such as the Chemurchek, who spread northward to the Altai Mountains and Mongolia, was made clearer in the genome study.

The authors of the study, published in the journal Nature, believe their findings will transform the understanding of ancient Eurasians and their migration.

“These findings add to our understanding of the eastward dispersal of Yamnaya ancestry and the scenarios under which admixture occurred when they first met the populations of Inner Asia,” said study co-author Chao Ning of Peking University.

“Despite being genetically isolated, the Bronze Age peoples of the Tarim Basin were remarkably culturally cosmopolitan — they built their cuisine around wheat and dairy from the West Asia, millet from East Asia and medicinal plants like Ephedra from Central Asia,” said co-author Christina Warinner of Harvard University.

Edited by Richard Pretorius and Kristen Butler

The post Study Reveals Origins Of Mysterious Mummies Buried In Boats In The Middle Of A Desert appeared first on Zenger News.

By George A. Willis

Edna Rashid’s story is typical of an aspiring entrepreneur achieving success with the help of Rising Tide Capital.

Rashid found herself a grandmother with 10 children in her care eight years ago, after her oldest daughter Naimah died suddenly of congestive heart failure at age 33. Beyond the heartbreak and sorrow was the realization, Rashid, age 54 at the time, had a family to take care of, including a grandson with special needs.

So, she took early retirement from her long-time job as a management specialist with the city of Newark, New Jersey, and began to brainstorm ideas to support her family. Eventually, Rashid was encouraged to attend a presentation by Rising Tide Capital, a non-profit agency in Jersey City, New Jersey, whose mission is to transform lives and communities through entrepreneurship.

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” Rashid told Zenger. “They don’t just teach you about economic capital, but the value of human capital.”

In 2013, Rashid and her son, Qasim, founded NF Insulation, a full-service insulation company based in Newark, N.J., that handles residential, commercial and industrial contractors. A family business headed by a woman of color is the sweet spot for Rising Tide Capital, which for 17 years has helped hundreds of minority-based businesses launch in urban communities.

Founded by Alfa Demmellash and Alex Forrester in 2004 on Martin Luther King Drive in Jersey City, Rising Tide Capital has trained more than 3,200 entrepreneurs mainly in the northeast, and is duplicating its model in 10 different states.

“We decided to focus on entrepreneurship because of the ways in which it represents pathways for folks who have had a hard time trying to access traditional job opportunities or who have been unable to access higher education opportunities and certainly access financing,” Demmellash told Zenger. “Those were all in play in our mind when we started shaping the mission of Rising Tide Capital.”

Demmellash was born during Ethiopia’s civil war and immigrated to the United States at age 12. Forrester, her husband, is the son of Doug Forrester, a businessman who ran unsuccessfully for governor of New Jersey in 2005. A like-minded friendship turned into marriage, fueling a common interest in multi-generational economics and what can be done to address the root causes of poverty. They looked at ways communities of color have been marginalized and impacted by America’s history of racial discrimination. Eventually, their focus narrowed to expanding entrepreneurship in underserved communities.

“We’ve gone through different situations over the years,” Demmellash said. “But the mission has remained very much the same in its focus, and that’s working with entrepreneurs.”

RTC offers two one-semester curriculums called the Community Business Academy (CBA), an intensive 12-week course on business management skills needed to start, fund and operate a business. The CBA is accredited by Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City, and 90 percent of those who have attended are people of color and 70 percent are women, Demmellash said.

“We believe there’s local talent that has been overlooked and underrepresented,” she said. “Supporting those leaders with the know-how to access community, social, and financial capital is the way we’re going to rebuild our communities from within and address some of the root causes for economic disparities.”

Only 200 seats are available each semester at the academy and those accepted receive a full-tuition scholarship and pay for only their materials and a registration fee based on income level. Graduates of the program enter Rising Tide’s Business Acceleration Services program which assists entrepreneurs for up to three years after graduation. To date, 3,220 have graduated from the CBA, and 80 percent of the businesses the graduates established survived the five-year mark.

Hilda Mera, an immigrant from Ecuador, graduated from Rising Tide Capital’s CBA in 2015 after opening an auto repair shop in Newark two years earlier with her husband, Jose Masache. “I always say Rising Tide Capital is the door that opened the rest of the doors for me,” Mera told Zenger. “They don’t just give you the classes and say ‘bye. Whatever you need from counseling to coaching they’re there. All you have to do is make a phone call, and they’ll help you. They don’t really leave you.”

Mera now teaches at Rising Tide Capital with an emphasis on empowering women to become business leaders in their communities. “It’s something I love to do,” she said, “because I love to help entrepreneurs and tell them if I did it, they can do it.”

CBA applicants must have a firm idea for a business or be actively involved in their own business for consideration. “We want to encourage people,” Forrester said. “People are already out there pushing in this direction and our job is to get behind their efforts and support them and surround them with a community of others who are doing the same.”

Students come from all levels of educational, professional and economic backgrounds. “We’re not looking for the highest potential entrepreneurs and getting behind them,” Forrester said. “It’s really a much larger embrace for what entrepreneurship means in the community as a form of people hearing the needs of others around them and finding ways to respond to that.”

COVID-19 forced a transition to online learning, something that will be maintained as an option when the pandemic eases. Technology is helping with duplicating the CBA in cities like Chicago, Illinois; Charleston, South Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; Wichita, Kansas; Dallas, Texas; Los Angeles, California; Richmond, Virginia; and Brooklyn, New York. “This isn’t about people having a certain level of education,” Demmellash said. “What’s required is people bring a heart and a commitment.”

Rising Tide Capital, funded primarily by corporate, foundation, and government grants, is looking to expand its headquarters in Jersey City to make a bigger impact on urban cities around the nation. A $1.5 million capital campaign is underway to build a permanent hub, complete with workspace, classroom space, training space and affordable housing. It’s a broad vision that could have an everlasting impact.

“What warms my heart is when we see the children of entrepreneurs at events or their parents’ business, and you see the look in their eyes,” said Demmellash, a daughter of an entrepreneur. “Children of entrepreneurs have a high rate of graduation and a better chance of becoming entrepreneurs. It’s long-term transformative thinking that we’re trying to create.”

With many small businesses struggling through the pandemic and unemployed workers looking to start their own business, RTC is seeing a need and meeting it. “It’s so critically important, particularly for people of color, to know there’s a space for them to start and grow their business over the long-term,” Demmellash said. “They are agents of change in the kind of long-term economic transformation we’re seeking.”

Edited by Matthew B. Hall and Bryan Wilkes

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