What We Chose Not to Do This Year — and Why It Matters for What Comes Next

December 19, 2025

Written by Hadiyah Mujhid, HBCUvc CEO

This year at HBCUvc was smaller than many would expect — and smaller at a moment when doing more, faster, and louder often feels like the safer choice.

Our team is the smallest it’s been since 2019. We supported just ten fellows — our smallest cohort in years. From the outside, it might look like contraction. Or caution. Or even stagnation — especially in a moment when the political environment has made work like ours more visible, more scrutinized, and more easily misunderstood.

Naming that reality is uncomfortable, in part because growth has become the dominant shorthand for progress across the nonprofit and venture ecosystems. When funders are watching closely, capital is tightening, and interest in racial equity is both waning and under attack, there is a persistent expectation of visible momentum — more programs, more people served, more activity to signal return.

This year required a different kind of discipline: stepping back to create space for reflection, judgment, and outside perspective, rather than continued expansion. That pause created the opportunity to clarify where our work creates the most leverage — and the direction in which HBCUvc must evolve to operate with durability over the long term.

That choice did not come from scarcity, but from the courage to slow down — a decision that, in hindsight, we believe strengthened our footing.

What We’re Building Toward

Looking ahead to 2026, our focus is not scale for its own sake, but impact that compounds over time. We are working toward an activated capital ecosystem — one that expands who participates in capital formation and treats investing as a shared civic responsibility rather than a niche activity reserved for a few.

At the center of this work is the development of a serious community of angel investors: individuals prepared to write checks with intention, and to understand capital not only as financial input, but as a mechanism for shaping what gets built, who gets to build it, and which stories are resourced to endure.

Alongside this, we are deepening our efforts to prepare the next generation — from undergraduates to graduate students — to see participation in capital markets as both accessible and expected. Whether through professional pathways into venture capital or broader pathways to wealth, the goal is the same: to normalize investing as a practice, not an exception, within our communities.

Angel investing remains one of the most underutilized levers for long-term change, particularly for communities that have historically been excluded from deciding where capital flows. Shifting outcomes ten or twelve years from now requires more than programs or visibility; it requires earlier, more intentional engagement with how capital is formed, deployed, and stewarded.

This work demands infrastructure, trust, and shared conviction — and a willingness to place long-term bets grounded in judgment rather than trends, optics, or performative impact.

Why This Moment Matters

This is why taking a quieter year mattered.

We are now five years removed from the public reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd. In that time, we have witnessed not only a predictable waning of interest in racial equity, but an increasingly hostile environment toward efforts that name and address it directly.

For organizations like HBCUvc, this context matters. Not because our work depends on public sentiment, but because the communities most impacted by economic exclusion do not experience these issues as cycles or trends. They live with the consequences regardless of whether equity is in favor or under attack.

As someone shaped by lived experience, and as HBCUvc approaches its ninth year, it has become clear that this work requires more than responsiveness. It requires permanence.

You cannot build a durable capital ecosystem while chasing moments of attention.

You cannot steward trust while sprinting from one funding cycle to the next.

And you cannot invite people to take long-term economic risk if the institutions doing the inviting are themselves structurally precarious.

The promise of economic equality — particularly efforts aimed at repairing race-based harm in the United States — has always moved in and out of favor. But our communities do not have the luxury of disengagement when interest fades. We are still here. The need is still present. The work still matters.

This is why HBCUvc is focused on becoming a self-standing institution — one designed to endure beyond political climates, philanthropic trends, or shifting narratives. Our responsibility is to lay a foundation sturdy enough to support long-term economic engines, even as allies arrive, depart, or redirect their attention.

The work ahead will be more visible.

It will involve more capital.

And it will require people willing to be early, not simply correct.

But that work is only possible because we gave ourselves permission this year to be intentional rather than impressive — to prioritize durability over optics, and structure over speed.

That choice may not register in a year-end highlight reel. It will register later — in what gets funded, who gets to participate, and whether our communities have a sustained fighting chance to build economic power for themselves.