By Kimberly Wilson ·Updated March 31, 2026 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… In 2009, Cameka Smith got laid off from Chicago Public Schools and did something most people probably would have talked her out of. She was 29, had a Master’s degree, had been working since she was 12, and going back to find another job was basically a given.
Instead, she gave herself a year to figure it out.
“I’m going to just take a year off and see how I can grow this business and then I’ll go back to work,” she tells me, laughing a little at how simple the plan sounded. She never went back.
Seventeen years later, The BOSS Network has reached more than 200,000 women, invested in over 100 Black female founders, and trained more than 10,000 leaders and entrepreneurs nationwide. Smith, who now holds a doctorate, has become one of the more recognizable names in the Black entrepreneurship space. Back then, none of that existed yet. She was a girl from the west side of Chicago with an event company she’d been running on the side because that was just what her family did. Her mother was a full-time chef who also did hair and sold dinners at church, her grandfather was a pastor, her grandmother was a pastor. “It was just instilled in me to always give back, to serve people,” she says. “And so that was just my heart.”
She was still figuring out her own next move when she started trying to help other women figure out theirs. “In the beginning, it wasn’t really just about entrepreneurship,” she says. “It was really about just Black women and us trying to find our ways to success.” The events she threw that first summer drew two and three hundred people, and women kept emailing her afterward asking how to join, which confused her because there was nothing to join. It was just events. Then a friend suggested she start a Facebook group, pointing out that it wasn’t just for college students anymore, and she realized the community didn’t have to stay in Chicago.
For those unfamiliar, the B.O.S.S. in BOSS Network stands for Bringing Out Successful Sisters. Smith launched the bossonetwork.org about six months after those first events, and there wasn’t much else like it at the time. Blogs were just finding their footing, Twitter was barely off the ground, and she leveraged both to grow the platform from a local event series into a national community. In 2010, Forbes listed the site on two separate lists, one of the top 100 websites for women, and one of the top 10 for women focused on careers and entrepreneurship. “The only other Black woman on the list was Oprah,” she says. “So I was just like, oh damn.”
Smith went on to speak at our very own ESSENCE Festival of Culture (on multiple occasions), as well as working with Black Enterprise and Forbes, speaking at conferences and helping produce events across the country. She also went on tour to five cities just one year into running the business, with no connections in any of those places and essentially no budget, relying entirely on the women in her network to pull it together with donated venues, sponsors and volunteer hours. “I need everything for free,” she remembers telling them, and they came through. They sold out every city.
Over the years she built Boss Business University, a training and coaching program where women work with mentors one-on-one and in groups over the course of a full year. In 2022 she launched the Boss Impact Fund, raising roughly $1.5 million with help from her long-time mentor Beverly Johnson and putting it directly into 100 Black women founders. Partners have included Sage, PepsiCo, JPMorgan Chase and the Divine Nine, where the organization invested $250,000 across four sororities to support about 20 founders.
The landscape she’s operating in now is much harder than it used to be. DEI funding that once supported programs like hers has dried up or been pulled back entirely across major brands. “DEI has pretty much been diminished across brands and a lot of those programs supported communities like mines,” she says. “A lot of that funding has been depleted. It’s been a struggle, not just for the founders that we support, but also for us as a community.” Her response to that moment is Pathways to Success, a pitch competition in partnership with UK-based Sage, which has supported the Boss Network since 2014. Smith had commissioned a qualitative report called Voices of Strength, interviewing 40 Black women founders to understand what they said they actually needed. Funding mattered, but what women kept saying they were missing was people who stayed engaged long after the program ended. So the Pathways program was designed around that, offering a $25,000 prize but also something most pitch competitions skip entirely: a full year scholarship to Boss Business University.
“We have women on the phone crying on Zoom,” she says. “Because our community is one that has always been there for Black women. We are just not here to create a virtual program that you can go online and download.”
Smith doesn’t spend a lot of time second-guessing it. “I’m very proud of what I’ve built,” she says. “I have a community of women that really love and support me and they value what we do. And that means a lot. That’s my legacy.”
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