We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ritha Pierre a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ritha, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I recently directed and produced a documentary on Black Women in Small Business that was released on December 4, 2022 (my birthday). This documentary was created to motivate and inspire Black women to follow their dreams and start their businesses. This project was the first full documentary I made, and the cool part was that it was shot using my iPhone. Black women are leading in starting small businesses. However, they struggle in several areas needed to maintain their businesses, and funding is one of them. In this documentary, I spoke to Black women small business owners in various industries to find out why they started their businesses, what obstacles they had to overcome, etc.

So far, we have a little over 16K views on Youtube and have received great feedback from the community about the documentary. This project was meaningful to me because I know many women who want to start a business and those who are already in business but want to give up. I myself have wanted to give up so many times due to obstacles and struggles with funding. But listening to the stories of those who have made it and those who are currently struggling, like me, is inspiring and motivates us to keep going.

I am currently working on the next project, which will explore anxiety and depression in Black professional women. I hope to release this project in May 2023.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an attorney by trade; that is my day job. Outside of working for the man, I run a media company focused on the Black diaspora. I have always been creative as a child. I was always involved in the arts. I grew up singing, playing musical instruments, writing and reciting poetry, dancing and acting in plays etc. I also loved all aspects of storytelling. I was an avid reader and movie watcher. I grew up in a very strict Haitian household in the U.S., where school, church, and home were the focus of my life. Thankfully for me, these institutions provided great opportunities to explore my creativity, but at no point was I encouraged to pursue anything creative as a career.

In college, I wrote for the school newspaper, and that is where I truly fell in love with storytelling. As the years went by, I started blogging about my life and the random things that used to take place. I continued to find opportunities to write creatively in law school, and in 2017, when I started my accessories company, I started a podcast called FREEda’s World. This podcast is still going and is geared towards professional Black women with a focus on total wellness. In 2018, a friend approached me about creating a show for WJMS Radio, now WJMS Media, and that is how According to RP began. This show is also still alive and well. There we talk about everything Black community. We focus a lot on raising awareness of important causes and issues affecting our community and highlighting local business owners. Under these various brands, I curated networking and spoken word events throughout New York City,

In 2020, I decided that I wanted to do more. I created Black Ivy Media as the central powerhouse for all the media content I created. Under this brand, we host live panel discussions, curate in-person and online spoken word events, create documentaries and short-form videos, and create social media content that raises awareness on causes affecting the Black community. We have helped create and produce a number of podcasts focused on the culture, a few of them are featured on the website, etc. We create opportunities for young adults trying to break into the media world through our internship program. We have interns literally from around the world that contribute to Black Ivy Media, and we have helped them grow and expand in their craft by allowing them the creative license needed to truly test creative limits.

I am very proud of what I have built, and although there are times when I am frustrated with social media response or the lack of funding needed to take things to the next level. I keep going because this is truly what I love. I love creating spaces for people, I love creating platforms to amplify voices. I love making content that challenges people to think critically beyond their own perspectives.

My call to action for those who read this is to follow me on social media. Subscribe to the YouTune channel because numbers matter. Become a contributor/ collaborator. We love collaborating with like-minded individuals. Let’s promote each other.

The Black diaspora is beautiful, it is complex, its vast. We are different, yet we are very similar. For us as a people to truly move forward, we have to talk about the things that divide us, hold us back, and keep us up at night. We cannot move forward until we start peeling back the layers of the onion to discover who we are as a collective and as individual groups. There is so much infighting because of a lack of understanding. So our mission is to find creative ways to highlight these issues.

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

One of the biggest things I have had to unlearn is that you do not have to do everything on your own. That collaboration is beautiful and can bring forth great impact.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

People do not understand the power of social media likes and comments, sharing posts, downloading episodes, and streaming content. Numbers matter in the grand scheme of things. When it is time to make the real money moves, the powers that be want to know how many views, how many streams, how many followers, and how many attendees. It should not be like that, but that is the reality. The biggest thing a supporter can do is share our content with their networks and help us be seen.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.blackivymedia.com
• Instagram: blackivymedia
• Facebook: Black Ivy Media
• Twitter: blackivymedia
• Youtube: Black Ivy Media