Earn Your Leisure co-founders Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings on why financial empowerment matters for Black communities

They discuss how financial literacy, entrepreneurship and economic power can help Black communities shape their futures.

Earn Your Leisure co-founders Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings believe financial empowerment can help Black communities build economic stability, create opportunities and gain a greater say in decisions that affect their lives.

Through their financial education platform, the two entrepreneurs have emphasized the importance of investing, entrepreneurship and understanding how economic systems influence political power.

“I feel like at the core of everything, it comes down to economics and financial empowerment. So when one person is empowered, then the community can be empowered, then real political pressure can be put via super PACs and funding campaigns. Then laws can be changed,” Bilal told TheGrio’s Natasha S. Alford and Panama Jackson in an interview.

“The only thing that’s sustainable is money. It’s financial empowerment, it’s economics,” he added.

Millings agreed that economic power matters but emphasized education’s role in helping people understand the systems they are trying to change.

“I think the education part is where it starts, though,” Millings said. “It’s tough to participate in something if you don’t really understand it, whether it’s politics or it’s in socioeconomics or it’s basic levels of financial education.”

He warned that without financial education, Black communities risk falling further behind as technology advances.

“We have to make sure that we’re innovative and we’re creating places and platforms and investing in places and platforms so that we can sustain that economic power,” Millings said.

Financial education is central to Earn Your Leisure’s origins. Millings developed the platform as a summer program while working as a teacher. He noticed the school district’s curriculum lacked financial education and created a program to teach young people about saving, investing, philanthropy, taxes, and credit cards.

Millings and Bilal began recording lessons and sharing them on social media. The project eventually grew into a podcast and other business ventures, bringing financial conversations to a wider audience.

Bilal said the platform also grew out of a gap in conversations about business and finance. He pointed to Black people’s influence in culture, fashion, music, sports and entertainment, arguing that Black people should have a stronger presence in conversations about investing, entrepreneurship and financial empowerment.

His father also shaped his views on financial independence by teaching him about entrepreneurship and the importance of building independence.

“He always taught me, ‘Be your own boss, pay yourself first, independence,'” Bilal said.

Bilal also said financial empowerment can give Black communities more leverage to push for change and influence the institutions that shape their lives.

Earn Your Leisure also highlights entrepreneurs through its “Outsmart the System” series, created in partnership with TextNow. The series features people who have built businesses outside traditional career paths.

Millings described the traditional route as going to school, getting a good job and working toward a conventional version of success. But he said that path did not always deliver the results people expected. Leaving the school district to focus on Earn Your Leisure let him keep teaching while reaching people beyond the classroom.

The series features people such as dance instructors, restaurant owners, and barbers who built their businesses around community needs. Their paths to entrepreneurship often involved trial and error.

“The common theme, in addition to what Rashad said, is that these people have a sense of boldness that the average person doesn’t have,” Millings said, pointing to their “community-oriented mind” as another shared quality.

For Bilal and Millings, financial education is a starting point for building economic power. They argue that understanding money, investing and entrepreneurship can help people create opportunities for themselves and their communities.

“From all the people that we have spoken to at the higher levels, mid-tier, [economic power] is the one issue, the one thing that conversation needs to be rooted in, so we can see some real change,” Millings said.

Watch full interview below: