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Md. business owner awarded $10K grant
Listen to this articleShanae Jones of Laurel-based Ivy’s Tea Co. was one of three winners of a $10,000 grant from Seagram’s Escapes national online holiday marketplace event.
The event ran Nov. 16 to Dec. 31, 2020 and featured nearly 2,000 Black-owned businesses each offering unique gifts perfect for holiday shopping.
Ivy’s Tea Co. is a hip-hop inspired herbal tea company that offers herbal tea, herb infused honeys and “hip-hop inspired fine china.”
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, its customers – they are 60% first-time tea drinkers and more than 90% Black women — have turned to Ivy’s Tea Co. for information they can trust about ways to build immunity and support themselves physically, mentally and emotionally during quarantine.
Jones and her team have also given back to the community by sponsoring The Black Woman Trademark Fund to help Black women entrepreneurs legally register the trademark for their businesses; launching a grant to send a marginalized person through an herbal apprenticeship program; and helped host a back-to-school afternoon tea with adolescent Black girls for the Greenmount West Community Center in Baltimore.
Jones said the grant allows her to invest in a food cart to take advantage of additional revenue streams for her business in the warmer months of the year and eventually add more employees.
Seagram’s Escapes created and launched this program in an effort to relieve financial stress for Black-owned businesses during these unprecedented times.
