Catering company partner A’Ja Rolfe is director of marketing for Minding My Black Owned Business, a Little Rock nonprofit that promotes Black enterprises. (Steve Lewis)
Minding My Black Owned Business, a Little Rock nonprofit that elevates Black entrepreneurs, business owners and young people, has a catchy name — and a story behind it.
A’Ja Rolfe, the co-founder of MMBOB, said her catering business partner, Gabrielle Wilkerson, devised it.
“She said it’s a funny thing: Black people don’t mind their own business; we mind everyone else’s business but our own,” said Rolfe, the nonprofit’s director of marketing. “We just wanted to reclaim that, and to reclaim a lot of negative stereotypes when it comes to Black businesses and Black entrepreneurs.
“We wanted to say that we can become a community to take action and do what needs to be done to continue pushing us forward.”
MMBOB holds an annual vendor expo to offer exposure, networking and growth opportunities for Black-owned businesspeople. This year’s event will be June 22, the Sunday after the Juneteenth holiday, at the Space With Grace venue at 8316 W. Markham in Little Rock.
Vendors will showcase their wares and services to a devoted audience and join a vibrant community, Rolfe said. They’ll gain visibility on social media and receive insights on business success through a pre-event roundtable. And not least, registered vendors will be listed on MMBOB’s online directory, where supporters of minority enterprises can readily find them.
Legacy of a Food Truck
“Minding My Black Owned Business actually came out of a fundraising idea for a food truck that I had with Gabrielle Wilkerson, and we got so much positive feedback from the public, the mayor of Little Rock and others that we decided to run with it,” said Rolfe. “We applied for nonprofit status with the state, and federally as well, and we haven’t looked back.”
The first expo was the Juneteenth weekend of 2021, when an overflow crowd at a small venue surprised about 50 vendors. The annual event attracted more than 80 vendors in subsequent years, and it usually has two to five sponsors, Rolfe said.
Rolfe and Wilkerson transitioned their business into a catering service, Southern Pasta Twist LLC, after vandals wrecked their food truck in 2023.
“We just could not recover financially, even though we did have an amazing community to support us,” Rolfe said. “We pivoted and decided to stick to catering. And we became BUILD Academy graduates, so we’ve been able to get contracted to be vendors to the city, and we have been able to quietly cater for the past year. We do corporate parties and all different kinds of events.”
BUILD Academy, the short form of Businesses United in Leadership Development, is the city of Little Rock’s 12-week business development initiative.
Operated out of the city’s Small Business Development Office, BUILD describes itself as “the front door for entrepreneurship in Little Rock south of I-630.” Most of the city’s Black population lives south of Interstate 630.
Rolfe said MMBOB has built a network of more than 150 businesses that have been vendors or sponsors during the past five years.
They include retailers of custom T-shirts and tumblers, beauty product vendors, food companies, education enterprises, nonprofits and others.
Financial Literacy
“We are really big on making sure that our community has financial literacy,” Rolfe said. “We teach how to understand and get contracts, how to network and even walk into a room confidently.”
Another commitment is to youth engagement.
Every year, MMBOB holds a Self Love Symposium for girls 14-18, offering mental health and personal hygiene tips and a spa trip for facials. Last May’s symposium featured talks by Jamie Washington on self-care, Adama Chisley on mental health, Shamim Okolloh on financial literacy, Lanetra Whitmore on budgeting and Yolanda Joiner on health and wellness.
“We want to make sure that they have great hygiene skills and a mixture of knowledge that they can lead with to connect.”
The nonprofit also hosts Skills 2 Stack, a program to teach essential financial skills to young adults. Topics include budgeting, saving, investing, credit, entrepreneurship and economic development. Graduates also get $100 to open a savings account at People’s Trust Federal Credit Union. The classes are weekly, and dinner is served to every student.
“It is a six- to eight-week course, and we have mentors, entrepreneurs and industry leaders talk with the students and show them real-life scenarios,” Rolfe said. “How to balance a checkbook, things to do after school like starting a trade, paths to college and an overall sense of financial literacy and independence.”
MMBOB and Southern Pasta Twist are sidelines for Rolfe, at least for now. She is administrator of properties at Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock. She oversees capital projects, ranging from replacing the concourse floor to construction of the new canopy at the terminal’s entrance that fliers have surely noticed recently. “It’s been interesting joining the team and getting to see the ins and outs of the airport.”
Lessons From Wynne
But Rolfe, who grew up in Wynne, has her own entrepreneurial spirit, and a quest to achieve.
She left the Delta after the 10th grade to board at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences & the Arts in Hot Springs. That competitive high school led to success at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. “I graduated [in 2020] with a degree in marketing and a minor in professional sales,” Rolfe said.
“MMBOB is something very dear to my heart, and something that I definitely want to take full time in the future, and that’s something we’re working on consistently,” Rolfe said. “Being from the Delta area of Arkansas, where we didn’t have as many resources, and then moving to central Arkansas, and seeing the plethora of resources here, made an impression on me. In Wynne, we had a Boys & Girls Club, and that was about all you could do, other than hanging out in the Walmart parking lot. So it’s imperative that we have programs like MMBOB” and its youth outreach.
“Last year was the first time I was able to have a few of my family members come to our vendor expo. Just seeing them go to the different booths and talk with our vendors just blew my mind.”
Rolfe said the nation’s recent political turn against diversity, equity and inclusion programs has only inspired her.
“Coming from a small, rural town, I grew up around a lot of people who look like me,” she said. “But when I’d go to school, I wasn’t around a lot of people that look like me. So for me, Minding My Black Owned Business makes a bold statement. It’s not just a Black thing; it’s a platform to promote Black businesses and connect them to the resources. I don’t see the things that are happening in the political landscape right now as diminishing to us. I see it making us work even harder to make sure we’re able to continue giving Black businesses in Arkansas a platform.”
