In Congress Heights, a retail village of homegrown entrepreneurs brings hope
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But now the soaps weren’t just for her.
“I’ve already made two sales,” she said. It was her first day open for business at the Retail Village at Sycamore & Oak in Congress Heights.
Rhodes is among more than a dozen local entrepreneurs at the new incubator space in the heart of one of the city’s most economically disadvantaged areas. Some have faced barriers after incarceration. Some have worked as violence interrupters, or to raise awareness about mental health and wellness through their products and services. All are residents of Wards 7 and 8, many opening a brick-and-mortar space for the first time, who say the space fills a gap in their neighborhood.
It’s not just a retail center, they said. It’s also a community center. It’s also an arts and culture hub. It’s also a job pipeline. “It’s big for me,” said Pierre Batchler, a Ward 8 resident and owner of Paradyce, a shop full of art and merchandise intended to inspire people to get outside, “just because Ward 8 has been ignored for so long when it comes to retail or things like that. And I think for us to have it now in this space and it’s as beautiful as it is — it’s special, you know?”
Sycamore & Oak — a 22,000-square-foot retail village built of mass timber, a sustainable composite wood material — is the latest addition to the city’s St. Elizabeths East revitalization effort on the campus of the old St. Elizabeths Hospital. The businesses include a wellness spa, clothing shops, jewelry and art sellers and small restaurants or cafes, including a “Chefs-In-Residence” training program from the José Andrés Group. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) joined the business owners and Council member Trayon White Sr. (D-Ward 8) last week to cut the ribbon, while Monday drew a Juneteenth celebration.
“Today is hope,” White said, describing the historical barriers that Black-owned businesses across the country have faced in access to capital. “Today we change that narrative.”
The District had partnered with the Congress Heights Community Development & Training Corporation to brainstorm the space, identifying emerging local entrepreneurs who could benefit from training and support to carve out paths to opening their own shops. They had been working out of trunks in pop-up spaces or online. They had ideas but lacked resources to grow, coming up in a community that had faced decades of disinvestment and disproportionately high unemployment rates — a stark illustration of the city’s persistent racial and socioeconomic disparities east of the river.
A February Ward 8 community economic development report examined the ward’s small business ecosystem, underscoring the challenging economic climate. The report found a lack of diversification: More than a third of establishments were geared toward social services or health care, including religious organizations — an economy geared toward addressing poverty, said Mustafa Abdul-Salaam, a former advisory neighborhood commissioner who facilitated the report.
Even for pots of money intended to help small business owners struggling to access capital, Ward 8 entrepreneurs only received about 2 percent of federal Community Reinvestment Act small-business loan money that went to D.C. overall between 2015 to 2019. They also only received about 2 percent of Community Development Financial Institution small-business loans citywide, the report found.
“Our small-business base is almost nonexistent,” Abdul-Salaam said in a recent interview. “The capital that comes in to support them is nonexistent.” But, he said, “the more we increase small businesses and mom-and-pops, that’s where the employment happens.”
Monica Ray, president of the Congress Heights Community Training & Development Corporation, said that was broadly the hope for Sycamore & Oak — both to grow the business enterprise but also provide a pipeline for those who are unemployed. “If you have a dearth of small business, it makes sense that you also have a dearth of local hiring,” she said.
Now, of the 100 new jobs created at Sycamore & Oak, 60 are going to residents referred to the retail village from the city’s Department of Employment Services. DOES has partnered with Sycamore & Oak on a training program, subsidizing wages of trainees working on retail, security and building maintenance at the site, attaining new skills to care for the sustainable mass timber. Once their training ends they may be offered permanent job placements at the retail village or elsewhere in the city, Ray said.
“It’s building generational wealth. It’s transformative. It’s all the things that this community needs,” Ray said of the project. “You’re talking about a community that’s been a food desert. We’ve been a retail desert, we’ve been a jobs desert, and one building has been able to bridge all of those deficits.”
One of the storefronts at Sycamore & Oak is for the BlackBone Project, which provides a platform for Black female entrepreneurs and is funded by JPMorgan through Ray’s Congress Heights organization. Seven local entrepreneurs are sharing the brick-and-mortar space with their own shelves, Ray said, including Rhodes.
Rhodes’s journey to being able to sell her handmade soaps — through her business, Mane Rhodes — was years in the making. She went prison in the 1990s after killing the man she described as her domestic abuser. When she got out, she said, she had trouble finding a good job with a felony record. She had bipolar disorder, depression and post-traumatic stress — but she had her soaps.
She started making them, at first, as a skin treatment for her son, who has eczema. His skin boils were sometimes so severe he had to seek medical attention. But Rhodes thought back to her grandmother’s soap recipe, and started giving it a try. She turned to natural herbs and ingredients like aloe and turmeric. “And it worked — it soothed his skin,” she said. She noticed it soothed her, too, and it hit her: Maybe the soaps could bring others the same kind of peace too, for their own struggles.
“People don’t talk about those things, especially in our community — we don’t talk about mental health,” Rhodes said. “We don’t talk about what it looks like. I get to be the evidence of what it looks like, and what healing looks like.”
Next door, at WeFitDC, owner Joe Houston was bringing a similar philosophy. Incarcerated at 16, his mentor encouraged him to turn his love of personal training into a service, which he launched in the pandemic. Now, at 29, he was trying to make a dent in the disproportionate levels of health issues such as diabetes, physical disabilities and heart issues that he saw contributed to the higher rates of death of covid-19 in his predominantly African American Ward 8 community.
“I just don’t want people to come here and think, ‘Oh, it’s just a gym. I’m just going to work out.’” Houston said. “I want an environment that it’s a wellness hub, that we’re here to educate as well.”
A few doors down, Jovan Davis, owner of LoveMore, who works as a violence interrupter and with formerly incarcerated youths, launched a clothing brand intended to foster self-love and positive thinking. “When we broke it down, the youth couldn’t have hope if they didn’t express love,” he said of what he learned from mentoring troubled kids, explaining the impetus behind his brand.
Now, Batchler, the owner of Paradyce, said he hoped kids in the neighborhood could look to Sycamore & Oak — and at the business owners from their own community — and feel motivated to build something too. He hoped to even bring in some interns from Anacostia or Ballou high schools. “It’s beautiful,” he said of the space. “I think that that means a lot to the kids because it’s like, this is an inspiring place. It’s not a hole in the wall. It’s just culturally motivating to see this is in this area.”
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