Get the best experience and stay connected to your community with our Spectrum News app. Learn More
Continue in Browser
Get hyperlocal forecasts, radar and weather alerts.
Please enter a valid zipcode.
Save
CINCINNATI — A local group is working to assist African women in launching businesses and obtaining scholarships. They’ve already started their work in Cincinnati with a goal of helping to support a billion women.
Tia Rochelle runs her own event planning business in Cincinnati. After the pandemic, she says it wasn’t COVID but cancer that forced her to put everything on hold.
“When I received that diagnosis, I had to stop all business,” said Rochelle.
She says she had nowhere else to turn to pay the bills until she turned to the “Sister Accord Foundation.”
“They helped feed my children for the months I was going through that and when I had to have surgery, and they provided all types of support to make sure that I could still function as a mother and as a woman while I was going through that,” said Rochelle.
Earlier this year, the group’s founder, Sonia Jackson-Myles, told Spectrum News that’s the goal.
“We want to have a billion girls and women learn how to love themselves and love each other,” said Jackson-Myles.
Her group is providing scholarships, survivor-support programs, and business grant funding to help women in Cincinnati and now across the globe.
It’s the reason she and several other group members have been in Africa, helping to start a chapter and expand the group’s programming for women there.
“That’s what we do. We help people understand that individually and collectively, our lives matter,” said Jackson-Myles.
It’s what Rochelle says helped her become a survivor.
“You don’t really understand that until you have a body of sisters who are there to support you,” said Rochelle.
Now cancer-free, she’s back running her business, Jahni Spot Concierge, and taking training courses to make it bigger and better than when she started.
“When I tell you the learning and the lessons and the invaluable network that I have for this now, it is just phenomenal,” said Rochelle.
