DONATE TODAY to our #OpenTheDoor #ViviansDoor campaign
As Vivian's Door celebrates the amazing journey of 2025 that began with Janice Malone receiving AARP's Purpose Prize, our team continues to focus on the entrepreneurs with whom we collaborate across the marketplace. We work together to lower the systemic barriers and challenges that impede their success:
Stubborn facts:
● Black businesses still account for only 11% percent of all small businesses
in the USA.
● In the history of Fortune 500, there have been only 16 black CEOs.
● Black businesses have been shortchanged out of the materials needed to be
successful in building their economic wealth.
Vivian's Door emerges from a set of profound family legacies rooted in black business community commerce. In honor of these traditions, we want to provide innovative resources and create the places and spaces that empower new generations of entrepreneurs to connect with their community and other supporters to change the narrative and invest back in their communities.
Vivian’s Door is an economic justice nonprofit, founded in historic Mobile, Alabama, with a mission to help black owned businesses build wealth for themselves and residents in their communities which are marginalized, face systemic poverty, and experience low levels of venture capital.
The name Vivian's Door references the civil rights activism of Vivian Malone Jones, who in 1963 defied Alabama Governor George Wallace's attempts to deny her an education. With state troopers at her side, she marched through the doors of the University of Alabama's School of Commerce and Business Administration. Two years later, she became the first black graduate of the University of Alabama. It is inspiration and courage like this that drives minority entrepreneurs to open new doors in their communities every day.