We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Black Girl Unmuted a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Black Girl Unmuted , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Lakiesha and I (Kiona) were college roommates that always had a goal to create something for black women that would get us recognized on the annual show we watched together in college called Black Girls Rock. We never knew what the idea would be, but we knew that we wanted it to be impactful and bring awareness to our community. Fast forward to a couple of years later we came up with the name Black Girl Unmuted our goal was to use black culture to help bring healing into the black community by making it relatable with black culture (I.e black sitcoms, music and movies). We both knew that this was an amazing idea but we both encountered personal issues that caused us both to seek therapy. We literally didn’t know we both were starting therapy until one of us texted and said I just booked me a therapy session and the other said ME TOO !!! We leaned on each other a lot through our process of therapy and shared information our therapist given us and realized that even though we been friends for years we were both holding so much in. We decided to start focusing on BGU again and realized we wanted a safe space for women to heal because we became that with each other but incorporate components of our original idea. Fast forward from that we have just had a successful event called “if you’re reading this it’s too late”, a play on Drake’s album where we had over 40 women come and literally give death to the things they no longer want to carry. We asked the women to write their own eulogies, speak on them and lay them to rest while a casket was in the room with us to depict an actual funeral. We had a repast and we watched the women release their burdens. Our goal is to heal women heal and create a safe space for them to heal. I think the most exciting thing about Black Girl Unmuted is doing it with your best friend,

Black Girl Unmuted , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Black girl unmuted goal is to create a safe space for women to speak freely and unapologetically while using the black culture such as movies, sitcoms and music as a tool to make healing relatable and allow us to heal and break generational curses that allowed us to believe our voices shouldn’t and couldn’t be heard because of our gender and race.

Our marketing group is catered to women ages 30-40 years old that want to focus on healing. We are in the beginning stages of our company and we have a plethora of events in store to help with this process. Lakiesha and I have both been in therapy and we feel that it is necessary to “heal out loud” and start the conversations about how successfully we have healed from past traumas, unlearning and learning techniques to navigate in a more positive lifestyle.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I think the lesson Lakiesha and I have both had to learn is that it is unhealthy to let things go unsaid, we have realized that being vocal about things that you are going through is beneficial because it helps you to relate to women that have been through it and grew through or your personal issues can help someone that is going through something/ We have learned in black household things are usual swept under the rug and we are unlearning that way of thinking.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

The best source of new clients has been Instagram.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @Blackgirlunmuted
• Facebook: Black Girl Unmuted
• Twitter: @Blackgirlunmuted

Image Credits
Mike Shealey Olinda Gibbons