"I don't even recognize this place anymore." Without fail, this is the exclamation my mother, a Washington, D.C., native, makes every time she drops me off at Howard University each semester. A place she remembers as "Chocolate City" is being priced out in front of us both. Her statement always sticks with me because it names something I've watched my whole life without having the words for it. Community is at the forefront of everything I do. Whether I'm bringing people together through events I produce, mentoring youth inside the juvenile system, or spending time with my friends, I orient my life around the idea that we are responsible to one another. That conviction came from where I'm from. I grew up in Philadelphia, one of the most impoverished large cities in America, and I watched gentrification grow alongside me. As I've gotten older, everything clicked. Gentrification is not simple. It can bring investment, but at the cost of the people who built the culture that made the neighborhood desirable. There is no real exchange when the demographic that created the culture is pushed out of it. The numbers bear this out: Black homeownership sits around 45 percent compared to 74 percent for white Americans, and that gap alone costs Black communities billions in equity that never passes to the next generation. I've seen the human cost up close. When I was 14, I watched as my grandmother, 86, lived paycheck to paycheck, which isn't only heartbreaking, it's fundamentally unfair. I've been blessed with access my older brother didn't have growing up, because of where my parents were in their lives at the time—watching him struggle for reasons that had nothing to do with his ability shaped how I understand inequity. I had room to make choices, and those choices trained my judgment. My career goals grow directly out of this. I want to work in media and entertainment, at the intersection of community, storytelling, culture, and creativity. But my ambition goes beyond creating cool things for cool people; the finish line is alleviating economic disparities in communities that look like the one I grew up in. When I have the capital, I don't want to reverse gentrification; that isn't realistic. I want to build a community development fund that finances affordable housing and keeps existing residents economically tied to their own neighborhoods, paired with a residents' council that gives them real authority over what gets built and who profits. The terms should be set by the people who built the community, not by the capital that arrived after them. Economic inclusion only matters if the community has a hand in shaping the terms. I also want to build on my parents' work. They opened Suboxone clinics in Kensington, one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the opioid crisis, to support people that most systems had already written off. They showed me that a business can be a tool for repair rather than extraction, and that you can serve a community while sustaining yourself; a model i intend to scale. Social equity isn't separate from my business goals. It is the reason I have them. My grandmother spent her life on the wrong side of systems that were never built for her. Every deal I close and every door I open will be aimed at the opposite outcome: putting ownership, decision-making power, and lasting wealth back in the hands of the communities that built the culture everyone else profits from.