SEASON 2: EPISODE 01 TRANSCRIPT
Will Acuff & Shana Berkeley
Will Acuff: A lot of work that was focused on Black and brown neighbors and historically what we would describe as underestimated neighbors still had in their leadership only white people. And oftentimes, the mission was, "Hey, we are going to develop leaders," but then you said, "Oh, man, you've been here 40-50 years. Where are those leaders that you made? Why aren't they leading your org?" And so right from the beginning we said, "If this is going to feel authentically like the community, then we are going to get out of the way fast." And so it was built into the DNA of Corner to Corner to say, "We are going to hire from within the community. We are going to hire from our graduates and I am not going to be the executive director for long." That was on purpose.
Shana Berkeley: Our neighbors have passions, talents, drive, creativity and the mindset is that we're doing this together. That is new. I wouldn't say the entrepreneurship mindset is new in the sense of resiliency or problem solving, but what is new is your life is your own. One of the things that we talk about a lot is, "I don't want to just be somebody's. I want to be somebody." And how are you somebody? That you have control over your own life. And so we help with that, but we don't create that for other people. They create it for themselves. They flourish on their own terms.
Dr. Greg Jones: Our world is facing significant challenges, and at every turn, another conflict seems to await. Yet, we survive, we overcome, we even thrive by relying on an intangible and undeniable gift. Hope, it fills us, connects us, highlights our individual purpose and unites us in the goal to do more together. Hope fuels us toward flourishing as people and as a community. My name is Greg Jones, president of Belmont University and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with people who demonstrate what it really means to live with hope and lean into the lessons they've picked up along their journey. They are The Hope People.
Today, you'll hear from two champions of hope, Will Acuff and Shana Berkeley. As co-founder of the nonprofit Corner to Corner, Will, along with executive director Shana are tackling economic inequalities from its roots, offering early opportunities for young creators and early-stage entrepreneurs from marginalized communities. Today, we'll uncover the duo's God-sized dream, which is to launch 10,000 Black-owned businesses in Nashville. You'll also hear Will and Shana reflect on their commitment to meaningful impact and the importance of self-awareness, mentorship and strategic planning in achieving entrepreneurial goals.
I see Corner to Corner in both you as agents of hope in the midst of challenge. I'd love to do a little bit of the origin story. Will, just tell us a little bit about what gave rise to your vision for Corner to Corner.
Will Acuff: Yeah, so I co-founded Corner to Corner along with my amazing wife Tiffany and that started with this trip overseas to Nairobi where way back in 2002 I got to go with an epidemiologist from UNC to see what faith leaders and business leaders were doing in the face of the AIDS pandemic. And we didn't go to build anything or to do anything ourselves, rather we went with the posture of learners. And that was my first time out of the country and it was one of those moments where it's a cliche saying, "Middle-class white boy has to learn that poverty is real by going to Africa," right? But that's absolutely what happened.
And I came home from that realizing that I had been raised in this wonderful faith, right? I'm a pastor's kid, but I realized that I didn't have a theology of neighbor. Like as N.T. Wright would say, "We talk a lot about the virgin birth and we talk a lot about the crucifixion, but what do we do with the middle bits?" And when I met and married my wife, one of the questions that we wrestled with as we were dating was this idea of, "If the gospel is anything, it's lived-out adventure and lived-out adventure towards those who are maybe most marginalized, most underestimated. What would that look like?"
Through a long roundabout path and God turning us in many directions and humbling us in a lot of beautiful ways through suffering brought us to Nashville back in 2007 and we intentionally moved into a historically low-income neighborhood. And my wife who's way tougher than me. Anybody who has met us for more than nine minutes knows that this is true. She started working in the men's prison behind bars as a former offender job training specialist, helping former offenders come back to stable employment. And we moved into that neighborhood thinking, "Oh, we're going to go welcome the stranger, right?" but instead we realized we are the stranger, right?
And that community welcomed us and we just kept an open front door policy for five years of just doing life together, repenting of our biases and our prejudices and the things we didn't even know we carried, but we did, almost like having the lenses fall off that you didn't know you were wearing, and eventually, launched Corner to Corner with this vision of, "What would it look like to have a nonprofit that is focused on economic equity, right? How do we create opportunities for neighbors to economically thrive on their own terms?" But that is just the first part. The real thing is life-on-life relationship, because otherwise, we're just creating neighborhoods with no neighbors. So, "What does it look like to have that relationship piece as the center while being laser focused on economic equity?"
Dr. Greg Jones: That's a great vision and great story. Thanks for sharing that. Shana, how did a nice young lawyer, graduate of Belmont College of Law get caught up into Corner to Corner?
Shana Berkeley: I was on Facebook and I saw Mignon Francois, The Cupcake Collection, have an ad about a business class. And I always say there was somewhere in my history probably from my mom that a seed about entrepreneurship or owning your own business or doing your own thing was planted. And that day, it felt like it grew into a full tree simultaneously as I'm watching this video. And so she told the number to text if you're interested in this class and I text that number. And the next day, someone texted me back and said, "Hey, we have one more seat if you're interested. Class starts on Tuesday," and I texted him back and said, "Oh my gosh, yes, great." And I thought that it was like a company or a corporation and it turns out it was Will's cellphone because Corner to Corner-
Will Acuff: It as a one-man shop.
Shana Berkeley: I was going to say, had one person who worked there and he used his personal cell phone number as the business line ...
Will Acuff: Still do, still do.
Shana Berkeley: ... which entrepreneurs will understand that, "Hey, you have to get how you live." And so I left my law office that day and went into this business class and I find so many things that I had sacrificed on my life to become a lawyer, to have a doctorate degree, to really achieve certain goals. I found community in a way that I hadn't had it in so long. I found joy, I found autonomy and I found creativity in my own way. A lot of people may understand, when you're entering into a professional realm in your life, nobody really cares about your ideas. You're learning the business of being a lawyer, you may be learning how to be a doctor or a nurse, you're not changing anything, right? You're becoming a part of something that's already established.
And so to be able to create something on my own really set my heart on fire in a way that I couldn't identify in that moment, but I knew. And then in 2019, I became a staff member, and in 2022, the executive director. And was able to not only grow that program from 40 entrepreneurs to over a thousand, but to grow our staff from two people to 19 to date. So it's been a really fun and fulfilling ride.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's amazing. I'd love to hear both of you talk about the ways in which you engage the community and the people you seek to serve because part of that sense of being an agent of hope, particularly in an under-resourced community, is trying to help instill a different vision and empower people. How have you gone about doing that?
Shana Berkeley: One thing that's really important to me and I think is part of my marquee as a leader is that my staff is very important. As somebody who's been a staff member, I know that it feels like everybody's focused on the customer or the client or the participant or whatever it looks like, you can fill in the blank, but a lot of times it feels like you become not an important part of that. And I'm reminding our staff and reminding ourselves like, "No, we are just as much as a part of the community as the entrepreneurs." In fact, over 60% of our staff actually went through The Academy program. They are people who have vision and who have businesses and so they really can speak to what our community is growing and learning.
And so I'm very intentional about how we make Corner to Corner just a great place to work and a place that you can be yourself and you can learn and you can grow and you can apologize and you can try again. We have so much wisdom and learning is going back and forth that it's really just a blessing. Like on Mondays, it's buzzing. Everybody's so ready to come to work, which is a gift that I know a lot of us can really understand or will understand if you are entering into the workplace, as a gift. It's both heart and head that we teach entrepreneurship in a very functional way, in an educational way that we make sure people have markers for growth, that we ask the tough questions, that we teach new lessons, but then also we play together.
Our graduation is a celebration where it's like one part vendor village, farmers' market, one part family reunion, one part pitch contest and all parts celebration. And so having that mix of asking the hard questions, doing the hard thing, but marrying that would also caring about you as a person and an individual, I think, is the secret sauce to saying, "How can we create some stickiness and neighbors who build neighbors?"
Will Acuff: I think I'd answer that from a co-founder's perspective. I would say something that we saw in the landscape of nonprofit work in Nashville, and maybe this is true throughout the Southeast, but was that a lot of work that was focused on Black and brown neighbors and historically what we would describe as underestimated neighbors still had in their leadership, in their C-suite and in their board only white people. And oftentimes, the mission was, "Hey, we are going to develop leaders," but then you said, "Oh, man, you've been here 40-50 years. Where are those leaders that you made? Why aren't they leading your org, right?"
And so right from the beginning, we said, "Hey, if this is going to feel authentically like the community, then we are going to get out of the way fast." And so it was built into the DNA of Corner to Corner to say, "We're going to hire from within the community. We're going to hire from our graduates and I am not going to be the executive director for long." That was on purpose. And so I think, to your original point of how do you do community development in a different way and how do you invite neighbors to the table, one of the ways is that you show that you are not about consolidating power and that, when you can see that and feel that and you walk into a room and go, "Oh, this feels like space that is crafted for me because it was crafted by my neighbor, my auntie, my friend, my cousin." You know what I mean? There's a different thing that happens.
And so to brag on Shana for a second, right now, she has a waitlist of over 6,000 people for The Academy Business Training Program, right? That's crazy. And one of the main reasons she has that is because she has developed a team and a staff and a training group, the people actually lead the program, who are all graduates or community members. And so that word-of-mouth thing that, "Oh, I can do this because I see my friend do this," that has become a primary driver for us.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's incredible. You don't just do community development, you actually have a pretty strong focus on training entrepreneurs. Talk about how that works and we like to think of cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset and that's a big part, which isn't something that often is cultivated in under-resourced communities.
Will Acuff: So it reminds me of this moment where I was doing a backyard fundraiser, and if you're in the nonprofit world, you do backyard fundraisers. And this one gentleman, very successful business leader, he asked me the question, "Well, Will, how are you teaching resiliency in your programming?" And I almost laughed out loud because the answer is we're learning resiliency from our neighbors, and if the point is that it takes resiliency to be an entrepreneur, good Lord, we are surrounded by some of the most resilient neighbors you can imagine who are day in, day out doing three to five different things to make their economic life work in a given year.
So if you take that same skillset, which is a problem-solver skillset, and then you give it a business structure, which is simply, "What problem are you solving for a customer? What need are you going to bring to the table for them? How are you going to meet them? What's your financial model? What's your breakeven point? Should you be an LLC and why? We demystify business because business on some level is what you've been doing your whole life. We're just giving you the structures to then bring that idea into the marketplace." So it does not feel like we're giving a new mindset. It feels like rather we're giving a structure to an existing mindset.
Shana Berkeley: And another way to frame that is that we are co-creating meaningful economic activity. The beautiful thing about co-creating is, one, it doesn't put pressure on the creator. Because if you're creating something for an audience, then they're going to critique it and tear it apart and have no patience and no understanding and have a short fuse of forgiveness, but if you're co-creating, that means that you hold nothing sacred. The only thing sacred is the relationship. The only thing sacred is the community saying that, "We want to do good for and to one another. We never want to be hurtful. Other than that, this particular class, I'm not married to this class. If we don't need a website class, let's say websites are no longer helpful, then we can mop ball that class and start something else because we are creating this together. What are you looking for? What are we able to help you with?"
And so to not be a savior and to not prescribe what's right for people, but instead be their neighbor and say, "What is it that you're looking for? Who do you know? What can you bring?" Because our neighbors have passions, talents, drive, creativity and the mindset is that we're doing this together. That is new. I wouldn't say the entrepreneurship mindset is new in the sense of resiliency or problem solving, but what is new is your life is your own. One of the things that we talk about a lot is, "I don't want to just be somebody's. I want to be somebody," and how are you somebody? That you have control over your own life. And so we help with that, but we don't create that for other people. They create it for themselves. They flourish on their own terms.
Will Acuff: That's so good. I'm writing that down, Shana.
Shana Berkeley: You're welcome.
Dr. Greg Jones: Take us through the key elements of The Academy.
Shana Berkeley: The Academy is a two-phase program. The first phase is 10 weeks where we help entrepreneurs plan, start and grow their own small businesses. That looks like we take them through the foundations of entrepreneurship, your customer, your mission, accounting principles, your legal structure, your breakeven point, your price point and costs, cost of goods, what you really need to understand to enter into the landscape of entrepreneurship. After that, it's very similar to electives at a college. So based on where your business is, we have a lot of programmatic offerings. And so that framework of the 10-week foundational and then the elective experience for you to be able to pick out where you are with your business helps entrepreneurs have that agency, flourish on their own terms, create the business of their dreams and move at their own pace.
Because a lot of times if you stay in a really structured class system or maybe programmatic system where they matriculate based on where I think they should be, it can stop movement or people can get lost or falling behind because, "I don't notice that we're moving too fast." So allowing them to pick and choose and then have our staff be touchpoints for them or have our staff do those one-on-one check-ins create some stability and them feeling like they're successful. What we don't want to do with having over a thousand graduates is have people look into their left and their right and comparing their journey to somebody else's. "No, your journey is a singular journey. Entrepreneurship is yours alone and so our job is to just come around you and to make sure that, again, your terms are really set out clearly and that we're celebrating those wins, and the places where you feel like you're lacking, we're able to subsidize that with either education, with mentorship. We have a B2B mentorship program or bridges to other programs that can help you rise and elevate."
Dr. Greg Jones: It's a wonderful description. You have over a thousand graduates. What are some of the success stories you're proud of stuff?
Will Acuff: Man, one of my favorite stories is Adrienne Bowling who came through the program after launching a business called A1 Mobile Notary because a mobile notary is such a good idea, because if you've ever tried to get a notary, you know they only work for nine minutes every third Tuesday.
Shana Berkeley: Exactly.
Will Acuff: And Adrienne sees this opportunity, she goes, "Oh, I'm going to be the mobile notary, right? And I'm going to show up where people need me." And she started that before meeting us and she did about 35k right out the gate, but then her growth started to stall. So she heard about Corner to Corner through a friend. She came to our program and within 12 months had done 85k in revenue.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow.
Will Acuff: And now she's tripled in size since those days. But the best part to me is that, for Adrienne, she then immediately said, "How can I pour back into this community?" So she became one of our trained facilitators. She's led three cohorts of fellow entrepreneurs, helping them to understand what those first 10 critical steps are that took her to her next level of growth, right? And so I love Adrienne's story that she immediately got the benefit and then wanted to give it to others. And to us, that's how you create a virtuous cycle where community members are pouring back into community members and it starts to take on its own momentum, right?
Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful.
Shana Berkeley: What I love is that we mean when we say that, "We want you to flourish on your own terms." So I'll give you an example. One of my students way back in the day was a grandmother who inherited her grandkids. And so she was very clear, "I have lived lots of lives and had lots of jobs. I am not interested in running an Uber. What I want to run is a business where I can make a couple hundred dollars each month, so my grandkids could do football and dance while I'm on a fixed income." And so we were able to sit down and workshop that with her and she figured out how to make a couple hundred dollars a month and to be able to put her kids in extracurriculars. That was flourishing on her own terms. And most people would say that that was a waste of our time, that $300 isn't changing the GDP, but it changed her life. It changed her grandkids' access to things that make kids kids, right? To make memories. That is valuable.
We also have an alumni who crossed a million dollar mark last year and got this great award from one of the conferences that she went to for entrepreneurs, and now, she's actually doing small business loans for about 25 of our current alumni, $5,000 each, teaching them how to fundraise, how to use Kiva, how to pay back loans. That is fantastic, because again, she's teaching in her own way and also been able to grow her own business. And we have so many people in between who are running successful Facebook ads, who are creating funnels, who have ... One of my favorite balloon artists, he's crossed $300,000 last year. And so last year was a huge graduation for us.
And one of our entrepreneurs does door clings and floor clings and banners and all these paper products. And instead of ordering offline to somebody we don't know, we were able to actually put money back into our entrepreneur who is actually a donor of ours, right? So that really is saying, "We believe in you," and he's saying, "No, I believe in you." What does that look like to be able to hype each other up and then share that joy around the corner and down the street into each of our neighbors houses and homes? How is that changing the emotional value, not just the financial value, because we can talk about what that looks like and we can see that, but the intangible things, which is community, joy, love, creativity, honesty, being a neighbor, welcoming? Those are the things that are palpable in our neighborhoods that really matter to me so much.
Dr. Greg Jones: You all have accomplished so much in a relatively short period of time. You've encountered, I'm sure, numerous obstacles along the way. Describe some obstacles and how you've managed to work through them or overcome them.
Shana Berkeley: I think the first time I really was like, "Oh, wow, this is serious," was COVID. Now, if you are in Nashville or remember, we had a tornado the week before everything shut down. And so one of our locations was hit by the tornado for our classes, and the other location, they had the power outage that happened. So the actual structure was fine, but it was a lot happening. And so I remember the day of the tornado, I woke up and Will was already there. He's a morning person. He was there helping them clean up and do the whole community building thing, right? We show up, but I also had a class that was starting the next day. And so trying to figure out how to pivot them, and in my mind, I was pivoting them for one day, "Here's an obstacle, but it's also people jump in."
Over the next week, actually everything closed for COVID. So I had to figure out how to transition 100 people, plus I think I had 12 facilitators online. I don't know if anybody was prepared for it, but I can speak personally that I was not prepared to carry the emotional weight and didn't know what to do with it. And so having Will who gave me a lot of great counsel and then growing spiritually in our faith and then being transparent to say, "Guys, we're in this together. I don't know what to do. We're co-creating an environment," was really one where it solidified my heart. It gave me more space to do that, to have more bravery and courage and my honesty about my leadership.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow, that's terrific. Will how have your beliefs and convictions helped shape your leadership and navigate all the complexities of what you've been developing?
Will Acuff: I think beliefs are not meant to be static. They're meant to be dynamic. And so my beliefs have shifted a lot. Starting from a place of ... I got my master's in biblical studies and so you think you have your doctrine done. When I first was in the community, I had the arrogance of thinking I had a definition of the gospel that was perfect. And so that was the first belief that went out the window. And then as that shifted, this idea of to love neighbor as self means you actually one need to know yourself, so the journey of spiritual self-awareness. I think we're in a society that is obsessed with teaching you how to do work, but not how you work. And so developing the, "Oh, huh? I get really anxious when this is happening. Do I know enough about to know why that is? And further, do I know how to invite the abiding spirit into that space and walk that out? And then on another level, do I know how to welcome my team into that space?
Because the work we're doing is not just financial, right? We can talk GDP and economic output, but people are doing those numbers. And so how does our team learn how to hold that space with and for each other?" And so I think the biggest shift for me has been, "If I'm only ever focused on these outward metrics that somehow define us as success, then I've missed it completely, because the results will never be worth it, period. Because you're only as good as that day was or as bad as that day was. And so how do I anchor my heart to something deeper? And then how do I teach and invite my team?" right? Because that's an invitation, you can invite, you can't indict and how to say, "Oh, this person isn't ready to be there," but I can still love them and hold this space and they can take the time they need to get here.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. Belmont, we like to talk about God-sized dreams and then executing on them. I've heard you and Will talk about some God-sized dreams you all have for Corner to Corner.
Shana Berkeley: Those dreams are so exciting to me, but also a little nerve wracking. And I say that transparently because it's okay if we feel that way. We, at Corner to Corner, talk about great vision, great heart, great processes and I am the great heart. I care about all the people. I'm like, "Yes, everybody, I love you all," and sometimes the great vision can feel hard. It can feel overwhelming. So I want to share the vision, but I also want to just share that that comes as you grow as a leader and walking into that comes with wise counsel and it comes with mentorship. And as someone who graduated from Belmont, you think you're going to take over the world and be this thing. You learn how interconnected you are with other people and sometimes other people's vision is what propels you forward.
And so I'll say that Will's vision propelled us forward at the beginning, and then we began to do a lot of research around entrepreneurship and Black entrepreneurship and equity around different races and particularly Black communities. And so we found research like Goldman Sachs and the Federal Reserve and Path Initiatives 1555 and they all really pointed to a really specific issue, economic disparities amongst Black people and white people and how entrepreneurship can work to close that gap quicker. Now, it takes all kinds and all people, so we're not saying that's the only answer. We're saying it's one of the answers. And based on that research and a lot of the things we learned around Nashville and the population, our audacious goal at Corner to Corner is to launch 10,000 Black-owned businesses in and around Nashville in the next 10 years and there is space in place to do that.
And so we are so excited about what we're building. We're so excited about the partners who believe in the work that we're doing and come alongside of the work that we're doing and we're so excited about those 10,000 entrepreneurs being able to create the life that they love and turn that business dream into a moneymaking reality.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's amazing. I like to say that, if you have God-sized dreams, you lead by nausea.
Shana Berkeley: I like that, Greg.
Dr. Greg Jones: You're just going to always say, "What are we saying?"
Shana Berkeley: "We're doing it."
Dr. Greg Jones: I can imagine it could make you nauseous when you wake up in the morning, but that's really exciting.
Shana Berkeley: It's exciting.
Will Acuff: Well, I just want to point out, Greg, you said something really interesting that it is a God-sized dream, but then the tactical side, how do you actually implement that? And so on that front, about 18 months ago, we put together a strategic scaling committee to serve under our board that has people from fancy business schools as well as graduates of our program working together. And they built a 10-year model.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow.
Will Acuff: And then we were able to hire a gentleman who had done 25 years at Asurion, one of the bigger companies here in Nashville. We couldn't have afforded him in the center of his career, but after he retired, we were able to bring him on, this gentleman Aman Nasser and he has really put the gas down on, "Okay, what are the systems we have to get in place? What are the standard operating procedures? We just got back from the Microsoft Global Summit for nonprofit leaders focused on AI, right? So how are we going to harness AI to meaningfully improve processes on the backend that our neighbor would never know we're using, but we'll increase our efficiency tenfold?"
Dr. Greg Jones: Awesome.
Will Acuff: And so we're thinking about it in that both ways. So Shana is focused on moving at the speed of relationship and that is the heartbeat of how we engage with the community. And behind the scenes, our team is thinking, "How do we move at the speed of business and then how do we have the wisdom to know where to apply which?"
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow, that's brilliant. Really powerful. I want to close by asking each of you, what would your advice to a young aspiring entrepreneur be?
Will Acuff: My biggest piece of advice would be, as soon as you're done school, find a small thing where you can sit next to the executive director or the CEO, a small team where you can learn the 40 different things they're trying to solve for. If you can get that seat and that access, you're going to fast forward your growth outside of the theoretical and into the practical really fast. And what that's going to give you is a shorter distance between ideation and implementation. So whatever that thing is, that is your driving why, take that two, three years to learn that and then go execute on your why.
Shana Berkeley: My advice would be to lean into yourself. You hear a lot, "Be yourself," and that's hard and also who you are is ever shifting. And so when I leaned into my working styles, individualization is one of my StrengthsFinder ... Like all these tests that were taking about personality, when I actually leaned into that, I was like, "Oh, okay, what would help me be successful is to meet people face to face. Because I knew, if I met them and talked to them and remembered their name and followed up an email, then that will create stickiness based on my personality. If you're more introverted, figure out other systems to get people to be sticky. It could be you're really active on LinkedIn and write lots of think pieces. It could be your social media is really engaging and interesting and that's okay. Lean into who you are because that can be the key to unlock what you want.
Dr. Greg Jones: Well, that's beautiful. I think it's fair to say that you both can fire people up.
Shana Berkeley: Thank you.
Dr. Greg Jones: And you both are agents of hope and Corner to Corner is just an incredible sign of hope in our community and for the people whom you serve. And I wish you well with that audacious God-sized dream. Thank you for participating in this conversation with The Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself and to help us cultivate a sense of wellbeing for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show, visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation, remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content intent.