A dozen years ago, Janice Malone, at the time a franchisee in Mobile, Ala., looked around a group of fellow business owners and saw “no one who looked like me,” she says.
Minority-owned businesses weren’t having the success that they deserved, Malone says. She vowed to change that by training Black small-business owners, and “that’s what I did,” she says. In 2018 she started Vivian’s Door, a nonprofit that this year was awarded an AARP Purpose Prize.
Now, says, Malone, “I get to be a part of helping business owners live their dreams, reinvest and build wealth for themselves and low-income and marginalized residents in their communities.”
At different times over 25-plus years, Malone, who is now 69, worked as a small-business consultant and as the owner of two franchises that helped small companies build client-referral networks. She had some 1,500 clients herself at one time in Alabama and Florida, and took numerous business classes over the years.
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