Natasha Bray is small business royalty. Most of her family members in Negril, Jamaica have a business – or businesses – of their own. Her uncle was the first president of the chamber of commerce there in the 1970s.

Eight years ago, she was running her own consignment shop in Flemington and getting her small business consulting firm Wallace & Partners Consulting off the ground. Some of her customers, she noted, weren’t just coming in because they liked her stuff. “[They] were coming to support me because I was a small Black-owned business. And not just Black people. It was people from all backgrounds,” she said.

At the time, there was no localized repository for New Jersey-based Black businesses. So in 2014, she made her own, starting with a social media page and growing into a website.

“I thought, if not me, then who? … I knew that I was always intentional when I was supporting Black-owned businesses. I knew it was important for our community in terms of bridging the wealth gap and creating jobs for people and contributing to the local economy,” Bray said.

“So I just said, I’m going to do it, and I remember running this idea past a friend and I remember them saying, ‘you’re going to create a social media page to support Black businesses? You think people really want to support Black businesses like that?’ She chuckled, and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And I’m glad I did,” Bray said.

In eight years, Bray’s New Jersey Black Businesses social media pages have highlighted thousands of Black-owned businesses, from financial planning firms to beauty salons to tech firms, for her thousands of followers. The New Jersey Black Businesses website lists around 100 businesses statewide.

The May 25, 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis, by then-police officer Derek Chauvin mobilized many Americans to find their place in a movement focused on racial justice nationwide. Kevin Stoute, a firefighter in Montclair, felt it himself.

That Friday, he was frustrated. He was ruminating on what he could do to support his community with his wife, Kadienne.

“There [were] lot of protests and marches, and there were a lot of good organizations leading the charge on that. What I felt that I could do, especially with my beliefs and with the things I’m good at, was to lend a hand in the economic arena that I feel may have been under addressed for younger people,” Stoute said.

He and Kadienne developed Black Owned NJ, and their approach was twofold: they created a Facebook group, out of which emerged several moderators interested in helping the cause to highlight Black-owned businesses. Facebook would be part grassroots movement, part bulletin board where folks could advertise—or seek out—anything from a Black-owned retailer to a small team of landscapers armed with weed-whackers and lawn mowers. The Stoutes also created a website with a free directory, complete with a map of the state, featuring established, Tax ID-clad brick-and-mortar businesses.

“My thoughts were if we could somehow get the number up … African Americans spend about 2% of their income in the Black community. If you could double that 2% to 4% of the Black dollar staying within the community, the investments you could make in terms of education and owning your own neighborhood—you could change the politics and in turn hold some of the institutions more accountable,” Stoute said.

According Nielsen’s October report The Power of the Black Community: From Moment to Movement, buying power among Black Americans was $1.4 trillion in 2019 and will be $1.8 trillion by 2024.

“At the end of the day, this is America. We’re a capitalist society. It’s very difficult to control what happens in a community when you don’t have ownership, and you can’t have ownership without the financial means to,” Stoute said. “That starts with supporting your own. That, in turn, leads to job creation, and when you get that engine running that leads to ownership. It starts there and kind of cascades into all these other categories that change a community. When you’re owning, you have a say in the school system, a say in politics.”

Black Owned NJ took off like a rocket after the Stoutes created it—within a week, the Facebook group had close to 100,000 members. Now, it boasts nearly 300,000. Being a firefighter is “a lot of quick decision-making,” said Stoute, which is what he had to do to create the page and in a short time turn the social media movement into a 501c(3) nonprofit.

What’s special about Black Owned NJ for him, he said, is the palpable change it’s caused in the lives of folks within its online community. Early on, he said, a business owner who participated in the group was on the brink of losing his home, and within a few weeks of posting an ad, was able to make rent from sales of services to other Black Owned NJ members. One of the page’s moderators told Stoute that posting an ad himself caused a “huge spike” in his own business.

“It’s that feeling of knowing you’re in the right place at the right time and knowing that everything is working out,” Stoute said.

Bray said hits to NJBB’s website and socials have increased since Floyd’s death as well. It happens “all the time,” she said, mentioning a few of the unarmed Black men whose deaths have been highly publicized in the years since she started NJBB.

“Each of those situations brings a flood of people coming in, following our pages, subscribing to our emails. But last year, in light of the whole George Floyd thing, I saw more allies joining. I got a lot of non-Black followers, and they were reposting the page and sharing the website, and they’re still supporting to this day. They still engage, and I’m grateful for that. That had never happened before,” Bray said.