MONROVIA – Richelieu Dennis, co-founder of New Voices, rang the Opening Bell of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ).
By Lennart Dodoo, [email protected]
Ringing the bell (for the opening or closing of daily trading) is a marketing and publicity benefit offered by the New York Stock Exchange primarily to public companies as an enticement to list their shares on the exchange, but also occasionally to charitable organizations to show the NYSE’s support.
At the ceremony on Friday, Dennis thanked his supporters and partners and said “I co-founded the New Voices five years ago, and in that time frame the family that has been built, the eco-system that we put together that is now empowering and driving real values, real wealth in the black community is just outstanding. The number thing I want to say this morning is ‘Thank you’”.
He expressed his gratitude for the trust put in the company. According to him, the topmost challenge has been finding the resources and the dollars to invest in people of color.
“Five years later, few years after George Floyd, we’re still seeing these abysmal numbers, we’re still seeing the regression in the commitments that were made. We’re not going to regress, we’re going to continue to forge forward.”
He challenged his audience not to forget to invest back in the communities.
New Voices was co-founded in 2018 by Richelieu Dennis, a storied entrepreneur, investor and innovator who made a fortune when he sold Sundial Brands, the personal care company behind the Shea Moisture and Nubian Heritage brands, to Unilever.
Speaking during the opening press conference of the 2018 ESSENCE Festival in New Orleans on Thursday afternoon, Dennis was affirmative, optimistic and energetic as he announced the official launch of the $100 million New Voices Fund. He established the fund in 2017 following the highly-publicized sale of his Shea Moisture brand, and in alignment with announcing his purchase of ESSENCE Communications. The purchase returned the ESSENCE brand to 100% Black ownership and provided the all-Black, all-female leadership with an equity stake in the company.
Expanding on his goal of specifically creating the fund to provide monetary resources for existing and aspiring women of color entrepreneurs, Dennis emphasized the invaluable importance of investing in the community that has served as the foundation for his unprecedented success as a business owner himself.
“We are going to leverage the businesses that we’ve built—many of you know, Shea Moisture, Nubian Heritage, Madame CJ Walker—we have leveraged those businesses to generate capital to invest back in our communities and this is the first step in that journey. With the ESSENCE platform, we’ve now also formed a partnership between New Voices [Fund] and ESSENCE.”
Born in Liberia, Mr. Dennis came to the United States to attend renowned business school Babson College. When he graduated in 1991, he was unable to return to Liberia because of civil war. Driven by his passion for entrepreneurship and sustained by a vision to fill unmet consumer needs, Mr. Dennis partnered with his best friend and college roommate, Nyema Tubman, to address skin and hair care issues traditionally ignored by mass market companies. Drawing from his family’s roots in Africa and passed down to him from his grandmother, Mr. Dennis incorporated four generations of recipes, wisdom and cultural experiences into natural bath and body care products, co-founding Sundial with his mother Mary Dennis and Nyema Tubman.