15
Tue, Oct

Kolor Society hosts KolorCon at All In Coworking of Inglewood

Business

This event features an incredible line-up of panelists, moderators, and facilitators to discuss topics such as business, technology, education, politics, art, and entertainment.

 

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Zaneta Smith (left), founder of Kolor Society. Photos by Jason Lewis
 

By Megan Reed

The second annual KolorCon will take place February 5, and this year’s event will center around productivity, collaboration, and service.  Like the inaugural KolorCon, which was held in View Park in 2020, Kolor Society will bring together local Black Millennials and Gen Xers who are in business, technology, art, entertainment, and many other fields.  

This event will have main stage sessions, breakout rooms, a business grant competition sponsored by Innovative Entrepreneurs Hub, and the Black Cooperative Investment Fund will be on hand to discuss funding for local businesses.

One reason why Kolor Society and KolorCon were created is because many Black entrepreneurs in Los Angeles rarely cross paths.  Zaneta Smith has been working to change that.  She created TEDxCrenshaw, which is a community organized TED-like event designed to spread ideas, spark conversation, and address changes affecting Black people.  Attendees of those events were looking to connect more, so Smith created Kolor Society, a members-only social club that features business and tech mixers, quarterly member-curated events, and quarterly branding camps.  Soon afterward KolorCon was created.

“Black people asked for this,” Smith said.  “The reason why we did KolorCon in 2020 is because we have so many people who wanted to do a lot of different things, but there just wasn’t enough time to plan separate events.  So we put everything that people wanted to do in one event.  We had vendors, coffee tastings, and staged events.”

One of the major goals of this event is to create networking opportunities so Black professionals can collaborate with each other.

“Our goals are to increase connections and to increase partnerships,” Smith said.  “Our networks are so big.  I know ‘such and such,’ you know ‘such and such,’ but ‘such and such’ might not know each other.  So the idea is to bring people in the room to increase those connections and partnerships.”

Most of Kolor Society’s events are in Black neighborhoods, as they have hosted events at Mingles Tea Bar and Sip & Sonder, both in Inglewood, and at the Metaphor Club in Leimert Park.  

“When we were creating Kolor Society we did research around Millennials and Gen Xers and we asked them what areas did they want the events to be in,” Smith said.  “And all of the areas that they named were south of the 10 freeway.  Our commitment is that the majority of our events will be south of the 10 freeway because that’s what our community wants, and that’s where the Black people are.  There’s a lot of great businesses that have sprung up within the last three to five years that we can have events at.  The whole point of Kolor Society was to have our events in Black owned spaces.”

Matthew Newman, owner of All In Coworking of Inglewood.
 

This year’s KolorCon will be held at Black-owned All In Coworking of Inglewood, which is located at 11011Crenshaw Blvd. Suite 102, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.  For more information, visit www.kolorsociety.com