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he terms “women’s liberation” might have meant something wholly different around the time when Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a former kitchen slave, was born in 1867. Said term was coined in 1964, about 30 years after Mrs. Walker passed on,

but throughout her life the entrepreneur, banker, and phi-lanthropist had been a champion for the women and black people on a whole.

The Oprah of that generation, Maggie Lena Draper Mitchell as she was born, developed an early feel for business as she was very active in her mother’s laundry service, something t hat would be instrumental later in life.

Much like William Reuben Pettiford, the focus of last week’s article, Mrs. Walker’s endeavours were borne mainly out of duty towards blacks who were being marginalized and had few, if any, financial options at that time. A teacher by profes-sion, Mrs. Walker took up volunteer work at the Indepen-dent Order of St. Luke Society (IOSC) a fraternal organiza-tion in Richmond, Virginia after getting married as only single women were allowed to teach at the time. Score one for the business community.

The IOSC had been set up as an insurance scheme of sorts which catered to the health care and burial needs of its mem-bers but in 1899 when she was elected executive secretary of the organization, the IOSC was almost broke and on the way into the ground. Public relations hasn’t evolved much in a 100 years and Mrs. Walker founded a newspaper, the St. Luke Herald, in 1902 to spearhead her massive membership drive which gained over 100,000 members in more than 20 states. With that many members and an opportunity rapping like a weary traveller, Mrs. Walker took the opportunity to form the St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank in 1903 and took up the role of president.

Walker is quoted as saying “Let us put our money together...let us put our money as usury among ourselves and reap the benefits ourselves”.

Mrs. Walker’s phi-losophy worked and worked well. After severing ties with the IOSC in 1911 and weathering the Great Depression through a merger with two other banks it be-came known as Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. Still thriving today, Consolidated stands as a symbol of black co-operation and entrepreneurship borne of philanthropy and is a fitting symbol of Maggie Lena Walker’s spirit.

yourmoney ezine

Nickels into Dollars

start ups

by andre Burnett

T

Maggie Lena WaLker

Start/Ups concludes its Black History look at trailblazing black entrepreneurs this week with a look at Maggie Lena Walker, a turn of the century entrepreneur and banker.

More Time: The Magic Medicineyour Money Tip:

’m amazed as I glance through the New York Times to discover that physical exercise is the cure for yet an-other disease. The first page of a Google search links exercise to the prevention of Parkinson’s, cancer and several other diseases. It’s the “magic medicine” with

more power than any pill, surgery or therapy.

The great thing about the information age is that we may al-ready know this fact. It’s also likely, however, that we are not in an exercise programme because “we don’t have the time.” In other words, we can’t manage ourselves well enough to find the time.

Here in Jamaica, (like anywhere else) we compare our time management skills against those of our friends, colleagues and family, and we often conclude that “they aren’t that bad.”

However, Jamaicans who migrate to Toronto or New York can share with you the specific moment when they realized that they had to take their time management skills to another level. I remember arriving 7 minutes late for an appointment shortly after I arrived in the US for college, only to be told that it had been canceled because I hadn’t shown up on time.

I was shocked.

I had to improve my skills in order to make the grade. Here in Jamaica, the fact is that we give each other a “bligh” when-ever we can, reinforcing our generally low standard of time management. We are OK having skills that are “not so bad. ”Unfortunately, feeling good isn’t the same as being fit. Our excuses prevent us from having the benefits of the “magic medicine.”

We also use a “lack of time” to justify all sorts of good things in our life. We can’t add in another responsibility at work, more fulfilling experiences with our kids or a volunteer posi-tion at church.

And we certainly can’t take full advantage of that gym mem-bership. We simply “don’t have time.”

Luckily, we can carve new options for ourselves, and make the time, if we are willing to think differently. First, we need to stop looking for impossible solutions.

One fantasy to surrender is that we’ll ever get everything done that we want to do.

The fact is, our creative, restless minds come up with more

new things in a week than we can ever do in several lifetimes. Our imaginations aren’t limited by vacation days, retirement ages or money. We’re also not likely to see a drop in email anytime soon unless we close our ac-counts and quit the in-ternet altogether. For most of us, that would mean quitting our jobs! We need to stop think-ing that we can ever do it all. The second thing we need to do is look for an upgrade to our time management systems.

The chances are good that the systems we are using simply weren’t built for the internet age, and are based on the hab-its that we taught ourselves back in high school. An upgrade would mean starting with our current system, understanding its faults and taking it to the next level. We don’t need to endure the shock of migration to do this.

Instead, we can start with a simple commitment to bring more peace of mind to our hectic jobs right here in Jamaica. Those of us who are continually upgrading our time manage-ment skills are able to enjoy the benefits of the “magic medi-cine” that time can be, as we give themselves more chances to not only be fit, but be as productive as we can be without limitations.

That’s something we can relate to, especially given the re-search showing that our employees are the leastproductive in the Caribbean.

Francis Wade

Iby Francis Wade

yourmoney ezine

your money mind your Business

yourmoney ezine

ack Dorsey, founder of the social networking and microblogging service known as “Twitter” might have faced questions like those above when he pitched that idea. In fact, it’s almost a surety that he and anyone who tries to explain the phenomenon that is Twitter will be met with at least a modicum of incredulity and maybe a little ridicule.

It’s hard to see what the hype is all about and to be fair it is quite hard to see the value in disseminating small amounts of information at a time without giving Twitter a spin. Twitter, the website drew 73.5 million unique visitors in January alone and this does not take into consideration the users of the many twitter clients for different media such as “Ubertwit-ter” for RIM’s Blackberry.

Obviously if something draws so much attention market-ers are going to try to sell something using it and so far all and sundry have started adding their “follow me” to their ad pitches in an effort to maximise their reach. You could find many internet self help articles revealing the best ways to get followers, update followers without annoying them and what not, but maybe understanding why twitter works may provide some insight into your approach to it as a marketer.

Nobody ever figured out how to make money off instant messenger clients such as Windows Live Messenger. That was mainly because it was so private; twitter allows one per-son to share with all the people that think they’re interesting enough to keep up with them in one go. No more “Chinese Telephone”, one person can start a “trend” just by attach-ing“#” in front of a statement and immediately draw atten-tion to whatever it is they’re talking about.

Twitter mainly does one thing and it does it very well with no lag and it is very fleeting. Once a tweet disappears from a person timeline it basically dies which is why no one could ever pin their entire marketing budget on Twitter. Compa-nies have started to battle this with more standard ads on

a number of free clients with non-obtrusive ads right into a user’s timeline.

The fact remains that regardless of your perception, it is too big to fa...that should be ignored. With a little savvy and some persistence there must be some mileage to be gotten from such a melting pot of opinions and cultures. Social network-ing is a transient lifestyle but in terms of speed of growth and ultimate reach, Twitter should be a tough act to follow.

your money insights

by andre Burnett

J

FoLLoWing The Trend: The Evolution of Communication

“Let me get this straight Jack, you’re going to create a platform where users can speak about anything but they can only use 140 characters at a time? And you “follow people and find out where they are and what they’re doing? What’s the point of it all Jack?

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