The Village NetworkYou already want to shop Black and Brown-owned. Woven tells you who to trust.
Join the Village for perks at Woven Certified businesses, a voice in who gets recognized, and a community that spends with purpose.
Spend with intention · Grow with purpose
Download the appStart with the block.
The bakery that opens before sunrise.
The barber who knows your sister’s name.
The salon owner who hires from the neighborhood and sponsors the girl’s soccer league.
These are the places that make a block feel like home.
Now look at who gets seen.
48% of New York City identifies as Black or Hispanic. Yet they own fewer than 1 in 10 of its businesses with employees.
Woven is a membership built to create an interdependent ecosystem amongst New Yorkers and Black and Brown small businesses. It’s time to put our dollars where our values are on an everyday level.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 (population); Center for an Urban Future, analysis of 2017 Census Annual Business Survey.
Wanting to shop Black and Brown-owned is easy. Knowing who to trust is hard.
Woven is how we close it.
Businesses earn a standard they’re proud to carry. Members help hold it up, with honest feedback shared with care.
This is a village. Come be part of it.
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Your membership opens doors to the businesses, the gatherings and the people of Black and Brown New York.
Perks that mean something. Discounts and special access at businesses that have earned certification, encouraging consumers to spend. Each partner chooses its own perk.
Gatherings in real spaces. Events hosted at partner businesses and community spaces, so you meet the owners and neighbors behind them.
Ways to give back. Community service projects bring the village together and give back to everyday New Yorkers across the city.
People to know. A village that values members, owners and allies, connecting them to resources, opportunities, and each other.
The words we use, and what we mean by them.
A trust-based ecosystem where New Yorkers, businesses, organizations, and allies choose each other first: to spend with, refer amongst, and build with. The Village is for everyone who wants to invest in Black and Brown New York, including visitors who browse the free Guide or join an open event. Members bring dollars, referrals and voice. Certified businesses bring goods, perks, space and neighbors. Woven brings them together at events, through service projects, and through intentional feedback mechanisms, so economic power is shared and stays in the community.
Our ecosystem building is guided by four values:
Someone who is interested in becoming an active participant in supporting Black and Brown business across the city from a place of care. Membership is for everyone: BIPOC New Yorkers and allies alike. Members get perks at certified businesses (e.g. discounts, early access), business nomination access, and a meaningful feedback loop with business owners.
A business a member has put forward based on their experiences. At 10 member nominations, a business is invited to be evaluated for Woven Certification.
A business that has earned Woven Certification. We get to know the owners, try what they offer, check how they treat customers and community, evaluate against industry standards, and review community feedback.
Woven Certification requires evaluation across four pillars in alignment with industry standards:
Our free guide to Black and Brown-owned businesses in New York that have been nominated by members or certified by Woven. Anyone can browse on the app.
After you visit, rate the business on the four pillars. Ongoing rating creates a stronger feedback mechanism.
Your feedback stays private. Owners receive it anonymized and aggregated into key insights, so they know what is working and where to grow.
Certified businesses are committed to listening to member feedback. When a business makes changes, members are the first to know.
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It backs Black and Brown businesses. Your membership points your spending toward the businesses you want to see thrive.
It creates communal experiences. Events in community spaces and service projects bring members, owners and neighbors together.
It gives owners key insights. Member feedback reaches owners in a monthly insight report, anonymized, so they know what is working and where to grow.
It adds accountability. Certification rests on a standard, community feedback, and lived experiences. Partnered businesses commit to taking action.
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These are the founding partners who became Woven Certified and committed to the community experience from day one. The list grows at the speed of trust, because every business is reviewed before it earns the mark.
You are not building alone. Woven members have already committed money to supporting Black and Brown businesses, and they are looking for reasons to use their membership. Certification brings a visible trust mark, events in community spaces, and neighbors who invest in your success. There is no fee to be certified.
Loving Black and Brown businesses means holding them accountable.
I’m Simone, a West Indian educator, curator, and community builder. I built Woven because I love my hometown of NYC and firmly believe in the power of a village. As a daughter of Jamaican restaurant and food-truck owners, I grew up learning firsthand what it means to build from scratch, to serve your community through culture, and to hold yourself to the highest standards of excellence.
Woven is for the people who are interested in exploring the magic of cooperative economics: where brands, members, and community grow because we’re invested in one another. Brands earn the Woven Certified mark by meeting a standard of excellence, and members spend with them knowing why they’re worth it.
We can love supporting these businesses and hold them accountable at the same time. That is how we’re redefining what it means to buy Black and Brown today, and how wealth stays in our community in every form – money, but also knowledge, access, and care.
Spend with intention. Grow with purpose.
— Simone A. Francis
Woven's promise rests on trust in the Woven Certified mark. Our founding advisors bring outside judgment, real standing in Black and Brown community, and a people-first approach to building the Woven ecosystem.
Tap a portrait to read their story.
Jusna is a systems thinker and wellness practitioner who leads with heart, structure, and spiritual grounding. A Director at Basta, she is redefining career access for first-gen students of the global majority. She is the founder of HELD by Jusna, a somatic coaching and facilitation practice, and A Common Center, a civic platform turning compassion fatigue into action. A Brooklyn-based founding advisor to Woven, she believes our communities' excellence deserves to be seen, trusted, and sustained.
Everton is a Brooklyn educator, DJ, and event curator whose work is guided by a Pan-African worldview. By day he works with middle school students and their families, and by night he brings people together through music and events across the city. He is currently completing a graduate degree in Entrepreneurship, where he is building a new perspective on how business can create lasting impact in the communities he cares about. Everton joined the Woven Council because he has lived the problem Woven is working to solve, and he wants to make it easier for New Yorkers to find and support Black and Brown businesses. For him, Woven is personal; it's the kind of platform he would use every single day.
Lonnie, dubbed The Mayor of Brooklyn by friends, is a well-known event curator, connector, photographer and lifelong resident of Flatbush, Brooklyn. In addition to his role as a public servant helping New Yorkers every day, he has produced two weekly series, The Weekend Warmup and The Flatbush Social, a last minute pop-up series, SLMDS, and is a co-producer of Girlstown, a dancehall reggae party hosted by reggae legend Buju Banton. Lonnie's vision and advice have helped businesses like Aunts et Uncles, 333 and The Rogers Garden succeed in bringing fresh ideas to the market that are well-received by those in the community and beyond.
Asiah has called New York home for nearly two decades, building a career in media, tech and advertising as a creative strategist. She is Creative Strategy Lead at Pinterest, where she develops sector playbooks and culturally resonant partnership roadmaps across industries. Before Pinterest, she spent nearly a decade as a Marketing Director at Condé Nast, driving multi-year partnerships and co-founding the Women's Network Resource Group, after earlier work at Ebony, Jet and BBC America. She mentors students and volunteers with organizations that uplift communities of color.
Tony is Co-Founder, President & CEO of Coffee Uplifts People (CUP), one of the most rapidly expanding coffee brands in America. CUP imports directly from six major coffee-producing regions, is sold through Whole Foods, Amazon and Target, and supplies enterprise partners like Pfizer, Goldman Sachs and American Express. Before CUP, Tony spent much of his corporate career in Nike's sportswear division, then co-founded the sneaker boutique WOODstack, where he built community programming from weekly yoga to book clubs and a community library. He is known for storytelling at the intersection of community, culture and conscious commerce.
Membership is for everyone: BIPOC New Yorkers and the allies who shop alongside them. Spend with intention, in community. Woven is built to strengthen trust between consumers and Black and Brown businesses.
30 days free, then $18/month, or $180/year (save $36).
Start with 30 days free. Download the app to join; you add your card at signup and nothing is charged until the trial ends.