Moving to a new city is hard enough. But moving to a new city alone and spending the first six months trying to figure out the best happy hour, the best natural hair salon, or the place with the best burger, is a particular kind of haze.
When Jason Kelley started The Wave in Washington, D.C. in 2016, he had one idea that spoke exactly to this: give Black professionals a way to find their people, in whatever city they were trying to make home. It began as a GroupMe chat for 13 friends, and today it has over 40,000 members across 40 cities, a national bar crawl, a weekly newsletter that reaches 20,000 subscribers, and a consulting arm that brands pay money to access. He runs all of it alongside his business partner, Sabrina Harvey.
And after all these years, it still runs on the same logic it did on day one, and that’s simply just friends adding friends.
What it never quite became, at least in Kelley’s mind, is a nightlife company, even though that’s the label that follows The Wave into every new city it enters. Yes, the organization produces R&B nights and Juneteenth celebrations, but it also runs a housing group that grew to 5,000 members, a tickets exchange, game nights, and finance events alongside its bar crawl, which has generated economic returns for Black-owned businesses in cities across the country. Now how many nightlife companies do you know doing all of that?
Before The Wave, he spent years as a studio tour guide at CNN in Atlanta, walking groups through the building and talking with visitors from every corner of the world. Doing that all day, every day, will over time, change how you see people.
“For years I spent hours of a day talking to humans from all across the world,” he says. “And in that hour that I had with them, I got a chance to learn a little bit more about their communities and learn more about their culture, which really made me much more proud of my Black American experience.” That’s the version of Kelley that showed up when he started The Wave, and it’s the one that still runs it. “I see The Wave as a community building platform,” he says. “There’s more people that need housing than they need nightlife.”
In March 2016, Kelley was at brunch with Greg Jackson, the community organizer who would become his co-founder, and the conversation with these two Black men turned into a plan. He set up the GroupMe chat that weekend, seeded it with his existing network, and within two months it had grown to 2,000 members with no outside marketing at all. The growth was entirely organic, with friends adding friends, which Kelley credits as the reason the culture held as the numbers scaled. Over the years, the organization has channeled millions of dollars into Black-owned venues and businesses, and The Wave newsletter now lands in 20,000 DC inboxes every week.
On a good Black Bar Crawl day, eight Black-owned bars see more revenue in six hours than they might in a regular week. Their biggest DC crawl brought 2,500 people through eight venues and generated about $80,000 in business on a Saturday afternoon, no bottle service required. The crawl has since traveled to Atlanta, Oakland, Jacksonville, Houston, and beyond, with local Wave group chat members helping identify the right blocks and businesses before Kelley even arrives in town.
“We’re keeping doors open in some of these Black owned bars and establishments,” he says. “I can specifically think of quite a few of them where this one six hour event is going to pay their rent for the month.”
Not everything The Wave does is meant for the same person, and Kelley designs it that way on purpose.The Kentucky Derby party draws one crowd, the monthly R&B night at Ivy City Smokehouse draws another, and game night is something different entirely. Kelley loves game night the most, partly because it does what every good event should and almost never does: it gives strangers a real reason to talk to each other. Then 2020 arrived and none of it was possible anymore.
Two years of not being able to throw a single event and a global pandemic will clarify things in business. When events stopped, Kelley went deep into investor pitches, took business courses, and watched a proprietary tech platform build stall out before it ever launched. What those years gave him, more than anything, was clarity about who he was actually building for. “People who are plants and they can’t find people because they just don’t know where they are,” he says. “They go to work, they go home, if they can’t find a barber, they can’t find a hairdresser that knows how to do their hair because they’re the only one at their job.”
Now a decade in, Kelley has written a document he calls The Worldwide Wave, somewhere between a business plan and a vision board. He’s thinking about small business owners who need an audience, politicians trying to reach constituents in ways that feel organic, and people with real gifts who just need someone to point them somewhere useful. “If it is someone who is the best at doing something locally,” he says, “I want them to know that we could be a source for them to help find funding, find mentors in spaces to amplify whatever it is that their gift is.”
What Kelley was actually solving for was loneliness, and if you’ve ever experienced it, you know that sometimes it comes from being new somewhere and having nobody to call. The Wave is the answer to that, built entirely on the idea that the right room was always out there, you just needed one person who’d already found it to hold the door.
The post The Wave Started As A Group Chat For 13 Friends. Now It’s A 40,000-Member Network Changing How Black Professionals Find Community appeared first on Essence.
Author: Kimberly Wilson
Read the original article on Essence.
Leave a Reply