Wisdom often comes from the mouths of kids. For Chantel Powell, the concept to create Play Pits got here from her then-six-yr-old son, Kam, who insisted on sharing his homemade deodorant with the remaining of the children at his summer camp. Powell created the child-friendly deodorant after first-hand experience with Kam.

“He arrived in a car smelling like a grown man,” he confirms jokingly BLACK ENTERPRISES.

She started product search she could give to her energetic middle child. As someone who suffers from hand eczema, Powell needed to concentrate to product ingredients to avoid irritating her hands. There was nothing in the market. Powell felt comfortable wearing Kam’s body, so she created her own.

“I didn’t want to give him toxic antidepressants with all these harsh ingredients, and natural deodorants were boring,” Powell said.

Play Pits, a kid’s deodorant, was created in the kitchen with ingredients that Grandma Powell taught her so that parents would not should accept harmful ingredients and products that barely worked.

The fire almost destroyed the corporate. From the ashes – rebirth into something greater

Powell got the decision at 3 a.m. in September 2022 that single-handedly modified the whole lot for Play Pits. Business grew 500% between 2020 and 2021. By then, Powell had moved to Atlanta from Maryland. It also moved into a warehouse to maintain up with demand, including demand for Target Stores. Two years after moving into the warehouse, a neighbor called and said there was a fire.

“My husband and I got up without words and left. My body was calm, but my heart was beating like crazy. I saw the hearth from the highway,” she recalled. “I lost the whole lot.”

The loss included the equipment she practically started with. The fire destroyed 7,000 units, all of its fragrances, raw materials and an $11,000 machine that produced deodorants. Worse still, it needed to lay off a few of its employees.

This is Powell, a faithful woman TO BE that God told her that the hearth would only be a part of their story and wouldn’t be the tip. Nevertheless, it was a difficult time for the mother of three children, who devoted herself to business and even gave up her full-time job in the entertainment industry. The hardest part concerning the fire is that insurance didn’t fully cover the damage.

“Everyone kept saying, ‘Make sure you’ve gotten high accountability,’ so I needed to have a certain level of accountability. But nobody said, “Chantel, have you checked your property damage insurance?”

The insurance company paid out only a fraction of the quantity lost. And if that wasn’t enough, the insurance company dropped the corporate from its policy though the hearth wasn’t its fault. Play Pits insurance greater than quadrupled.

Two years after the hearth, the corporate is still recovering. But amongst Powell’s challenges made it on Target shelves, built relationships and partnerships with local youth sports organizations, and made its products available to adults who love them.

“After the fire, everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” Powell says. “When people see the success of Play Pits (or), when they walk into Target and see Play Pits on the shelves, they just see the product. I see obstacles. I see the challenges I have overcome.”

Greater than smelling good. Play Pits inspires the subsequent generation of Black CEOs

Customer service and giving back are on the core of her brand, especially towards those that proceed to encourage her most: children.

She says what sets her other than other brands, beyond giving parents peace of mind with the clean ingredients she uses, is that she treats each customer with care as in the event that they were a member of her circle of relatives. Listening to children about their desires is also necessary to Powell, so she makes sure that children sit on the adult table and meets with them at the youngsters’s table.

“What sets us apart and will continue to stand out is our ability to stay in touch with our customers. I will sit with the children on the floor at a round table. I don’t ever want to feel far from what I’m here for,” he says. “Children have always been at the center of everything.”

Powell doesn’t take her position as a Black woman CEO frivolously. Growing up, the CEOs in her classes were nothing like her. Part of her work in the community is also about showing up as an authentic person and being a representation that can encourage the subsequent generation.

“I know what it means when I walk into a classroom full of African-American kids and they see me walking in in Jordans, a T-shirt and jeans and saying, ‘I’m the CEO,'” Powell says. “When I was a little girl, the CEO was a white man in a suit and it didn’t seem viable to me (…) I’m on the path to continue working in the community.”

Kevan and Ayesha Shelton took off Black men are buying houses to help reduce the black home ownership gap between men and girls.

The growth rate of Black women homebuyers has reached 7.3% since 2017. Growth from 2018 to 2020 exceeded doubled rate of three.4% amongst black men, BLACK ENTERPRISES reported.

The Sheltons are concerned concerning the gap between men and girls. This is a way for them to start buying homes for black men provide information directly to Black men. According to Shelton, the ignorance creates significant barriers for black men Atlanti.

“Black men often face challenges when purchasing homes due to limited information about the process and financial resources, which can hamper their ability to secure funds for down payments, credit and closing costs. The goal of our initiative is to break down these barriers so that more Black men can achieve the dream of home ownership,” the Sheltons said.

On October 12, the Sheltons hosted the inauguration Black men are buying houses event in Atlanta. The event was held in cooperation with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and Operation HOPE. Operation HOPE founder John Hope Bryant was available to impart knowledge on the importance of Black financial literacy and wealth.

While Black women are outpacing men in homeownership, additionally they face barriers. TO BE reported on the barriers women encounter of their pursuit of ownership. Debt, access to mortgages, student loans and low wages are cited. It appears that Black women have access to the precise home buying resources and tools, but they lack the power to use these tools to their advantage.

“…If you are a black woman in America, you will likely have difficulty purchasing a home in many circumstances,” said Jacob Channel, an economist at LendingTree. Channel pointed to “social obstacles that… shouldn’t exist” that make things “unnecessarily difficult” despite the growing variety of black women who own homes.

Black women don’t face these obstacles alone. As organizations, e.g Black men are buying houses, help close the gap between Black men and Black women, the complete community will need to consider how to overcome structural biases and inequalities.

Estimated 18 million Americans are invested cryptocurrency– says the Federal Reserve. And the United States has just chosen pro-crypto-president.

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have change into trendy digital resource. Supporters say crypto undermines capitalism because it bypasses traditional bankers. Crypto perhaps offer quick riches together with an environment of high-tech sophistication.

Early adopters reaped enormous advantages, and plenty of of them became millionaires and billionaires.

Currently, there are approx 100,000 cryptocurrency millionaires. Moreover, cryptocurrency wealth has been built Fairshake, the most important political lobbying group within the US During the last election, it helped elect 253 pro-crypto candidates.

But is cryptocurrency a good ethical investment?

as business professor who studies the technology and its implications, I even have identified three ethical harms related to cryptocurrency which will give investors pause.

Three wrongs

The first harm is excessive energy consumptionparticularly Bitcoin, the primary decentralized cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins are created or “mined” by tens of hundreds of computers in huge data centers, which contributes significantly to carbon emissions and environmental degradation. Bitcoin mining, which accounts for the lion’s share of cryptocurrency’s energy consumption, uses as much as 0.9% of worldwide electricity demand – near Australia’s annual energy demand.

Secondly, unregulated and anonymous cryptocurrencies are the payment system of alternative for criminals fraud, tax evasion, human trafficking AND ransomware – the latter cost victims an estimated $1 billion in fraudulent cryptocurrency payments.

Until about a decade ago, these bad actors generally moved and laundered money through money and shell corporations. However, around 2015, many individuals switched to cryptocurrency, which is a much less cumbersome type of service dirty money anonymously.

The bank cannot store or transfer money anonymously. By law it is a bank passively complicit in money laundering if not enforced get to know your customer measures to curb bad actors resembling money launderers.

However, within the case of cryptocurrency, legal and ethical responsibility can’t be transferred to the bank – the bank doesn’t exist. So who is complicit? Any member of the cryptocurrency ecosystem will be seen as ethically complicit in enabling illegal activities.

I find these first two harms to be probably the most ethically troubling. The first harms the Earth, the second undermines global systems of trust – the interplay of institutions that underpin economic activity and social order.

The third problem of cryptocurrency is its predatory culture.

A predatory system, especially without regulatory oversight, exploits small investors. And some cryptocurrencies have enriched their founders by reaping the advantages lack of investor knowledge about virtual currency.

Some cryptocurrencies, especially smaller coins and initial coin offerings, do Characteristics of Ponzi schemes.

For example, the now defunct Bitconnect promised investors big profits who exchanged their Bitcoins for Bitconnect tokens. New investors’ money paid out “profits” to the primary layer of investors with later investors’ money.

Ultimately, Satish Kumbhani, founding father of Bitconnect, decided to achieve this indicted by a federal grand juryand from 2024 his whereabouts are unknown.

A pernicious myth

In addition to the ethical harms of cryptocurrency, there is a pernicious myth surrounding digital coin. The myth of inclusion is the idea that cryptocurrency has the facility to profit especially socially disadvantaged people without a checking account.

The world’s poor who wouldn’t have bank accounts and who could use cryptocurrency for international money transfers to family back home don’t necessarily enjoy the advantages of cryptocurrencies. It’s for this reason need pay conversion and transfer feessay, dollars to cryptocurrency, after which from cryptocurrency to the local currency of the person receiving the cash transfer.

In fact, the distribution of crypto assets is largely concentrated among the many wealthy. A 2021 study found that simply 0.01% of Bitcoin owners controls 27% of its value.

The democratization of finance is often presented as a move geared toward breaking the dominance of traditional financial institutions – private banks and government central banks. However, this narrative didn’t prove true.

Instead, a latest elite emerged: cryptocurrency creatorsearly supporters of i conservatorswho modify the cryptocurrency’s software code and influence its future direction. This group exercises disproportionate control, including over cryptocurrency management. All of this reflects the concentration of power that cryptocurrency was intended to dismantle.

Just a little more ethical?

To be fair, the cryptocurrency community has not ignored the criticism, including calls for greater environmental awareness.

In early 2021, community members founded Cryptocurrency Agreement. The group has recruited around 250 crypto corporations to cut back environmental damage.

The following 12 months, Ethereum took its most important step with its Ether coin. It has reduced its size energy consumption by over 99% by migrating to a coin mining mechanism called “proof of stake”, which doesn’t require miners to unravel complex, energy-intensive puzzles to validate transactions.

It was a daring move. However, Bitcoin, the most important cryptocurrency, has not followed in Ethereum’s footsteps. Bitcoin stands out in that its energy consumption exceeds that of another cryptocurrency.

To address other harms of cryptocurrency, some Regulatory authorities began to regulate the cryptocurrency market in 2023, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States have launched efforts to curb criminality and protect investors.

In January 2024, US regulators listed funds allowedthat are popular investment funds for investing in cryptocurrencies. The move was intended to assist small investors trade in a safer market.

However, normalizing cryptocurrency trading could have perverse ethical consequences.

For example, probably the most successful ‘ethical’ fund in 2023, Nikko Ark Positive Change Innovation Fundwas successful with a 68% return because he bet on cryptocurrencies. Its manager rationalized this investment by repeating the parable that cryptocurrency allows “providing financial services to underbanked people“

Where does all this leave the ethical investor?

I consider that investors have two clear ethical options regarding cryptocurrencies: they will abandon Bitcoin or no less than put money into other cryptocurrencies that minimize harm, especially environmental harm.

However, even so-called ethical investments raise hidden ethical issues.

Many ethical investors put money into the so-called ESG funds that emphasize social or environmental impact. Some of those ESG funds may avoid holdings in oil corporations by investing directly or not directly in cryptocurrencies.

This doesn’t seem ethically coherent.

While cryptocurrency offers exciting opportunities and the potential for prime returns, its environmental impact, links to criminality and predatory nature pose significant ethical challenges.