Dr. Niama L. Williams, Founder, Blowing Up Barriers Enterprises
The fierce are rarely accoladed first because they are known for dissent and its frequent companion, brilliance. Michelle Roberts is one of the fiercest, most brilliant women I know.
After 20 years plus in academia, I had to look outside of the ivory tower for the woman who has the solution for African America. Michelle Roberts has the insight and the tenacity to rightly claim that we bought the White House for Barack Obama $80 at a time, an old-fashioned Internet rent party she calls it, and she doesn't see why we can't do that nationwide and run our own communities.
Michelle Roberts' vision is simple and magnificent: The local Boys and Girls Club needs basketballs, we buy them. The local school needs to keep its best teachers, we cover their salaries. The local community bank needs a new roof, they come to us: the Pillars of the Bridge.
We will have the capital, we will have the organizational finesse, we will have a history of working together as entrepreneurs of African descent for whom the collective was always more important than the individual.
Michelle Roberts shepherds this vision, how else but fiercely, every Monday night at 9 p.m. for one hour. The cutting edge of her ministry, for it is a ministry, not just a vision, has called this Ph.D. in from the cold, and tempered her Aries determination to always do it her way and listen to no one else.
When Blowing Up Barriers Enterprises needs business advice, I call Michelle Roberts. If you want to become a part of the vision of what entrepreneurship can really do for the Black community, you will too. August 20, 2009
On The Dotted Line 
