Beyoncé pledges another $1million to Black-owned businesses
Beyoncé has pledged to give another $1million (£756k) to Black-owned small businesses via her BeyGOOD foundation.
The star set up the philanthropic organisation in 2013 and has used it to help provide Flint, Michigan with clean water, victims of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and, most recently, those affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
The previously announced Black-owned Small Business Impact Fund was launched in July in partnership with NAACP and gave 20 Black-owned businesses across the US a $10,000 (£7,558) grant each.
Now, a second round will open in September, as announced on the BeyGOOD Instagram page. “Proud to announce $1m in additional funds from Beyoncé to help Black-owned small businesses,” it read. “Round two of funding opens this month with our partner, NAACP.”
The first round helped a range of businesses, including a barbershop, tennis academy, bakery, martial arts school, performing arts company and more. You can see the full list of recipients from round one here.
Meanwhile, Beyoncé released ‘Black Is King’ – the visual companion to her Lion King soundtrack ‘The Gift’ – in July. However, she had to revise her plans for the project because of the current pandemic.
The film’s directors said in a recent interview with The Fader that travel restrictions stopped them travelling to South Africa to shoot additional footage, forcing them to work with that they’d already got.
“We were planning to add more to the story,” Kwasi Fordjour said. “We had to table that idea and really look at everything we had and go, ‘OK this is what we’ve got, here is the messaging, here is the story. How can we enhance this?’ We had the key ingredients and all of those things helped tell the story the way we told it.”
