The Roadmap to Self-Actualization, as told by Kimberly McGlonn, Ph.D
“I’ve always read the world as it was and I still think I’m reading the world as it is.” - Kimberly McGlonn
Humbly speaking, I graduated college over a decade ago. But when I interviewed Kimberly McGlonn, Ph.D, founder of the sustainable fashion brand, Grant Blvd. alongside her burgeoning venture, Black Ivy, which we’ll get into later, Class was in session! I learned so much about navigating life; if you’re paying close enough attention, you’ll get some nuggets too! This is more than an article. It’s a roadmap. Let’s go!
Acknowledge Your Starting Scene
I sat across the Zoom screen during our chat, just thinking, ‘Yo! She’s dope, like the Phenomenal Woman Maya Angelou referenced in her poem.’ You look into Kimberly’s eyes and see a vision of determination, power, and respect. She is elegant with a bold red lip that dares you to question her existence! Let’s just say, she takes up space, which in many ways is stifled for people of color. To set the scene, she is a fashion designer, an educator, a councilwoman, and an activist. But, politics aside… [chuckles] Yeah right! This is very much a political piece, but more so one of self-actualization!
Hailing from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Kimberly notably states her father’s family, like many black folks in the 1940s, migrated to the North because of The Great Migration. That very highlight sets the tone for her consciousness and what life exposed. Her parents were very active in the community, with her father opening a delicatessen in the neighborhood, “before food deserts were a thing,” she says. Young Kimberly remembers “slicing meat and managing the candy display,” while her mother spent quality time with the women at Taycheedah Correctional Facility, right outside of Milwaukee. She was “a positive presence and those were things I knew about.”
Embrace Your State of Awareness
This consciousness was innate. No one told Kimberly who she had to be. Her parents simply modeled activism through their acts of service and she became intuitively aware of her world. To this point, she highlights a pivotal encounter with race in the first grade while on a school bus with her “very first best friend [who] happened to be a white girl.” To drive the point even further, she states, “Milwaukee is the most racially segregated city in America; second maybe to Chicago. MLK called it the Selma of the North.” Still, they have been friends since preschool and remain in touch. Kimberly says her childhood friend would recount this story when asked about how Kimberly was when she was little:
I remember that we were on a field trip and there was a black man and a white man and they were walking on separate sides of the street. I remember being on that hard, green vinyl seat, sharing that observation with Kimberly. And Kimberly saying to me, “He’s black and he’s white and you’re white and I’m black and that’s just the way it is.”
“I’ve always read the world as it was and I still think I’m reading the world as it is”, says Kimberly.
Own Who You Are
Continuing on in her journey of consciousness, she recalls attending the school for the performing arts in middle school and being “really good” at Forensics, which are dramatic readings of poetry, monologues, or speeches. “I was really interested in amplifying Harriet Tubman. The only black girl. I went onto state competitions performing Harriet Tubman and the speech about her being Moses, going down [to the South] demanding that her people be free. It’s just been a space I’ve always felt I was comfortable doing. No one asked me to perform that poem. No one taught me to memorize it. It’s just how I wanted to be.“
Walk in Your Light
Kimberly would go on to teach in the public school system, which she loved, for twenty years, with most of her time as an English instructor between the 9th and 11th grades. She is now on the faculty at Drexel University and has taught Retail Operations, which is the Business of Fashion, and Designing In an E-commerce Space, post-Covid. “When I finished my Ph.D., I thought maybe I’d go into academia and as it were I got offered a great job doing exactly what my dissertation focused on.”
However, the connection between her early consciousness as a child and the transition into starting a fashion line is important to note:
Looking back on it, on all of the choices I didn’t make, because they were made for me, like being black and a being woman… Not that I would choose anything else. And the choices I did make were to study: “How do we approach curriculum design from a theoretical perspective, and how do we work with kids who are academically gifted? Then, how do I apply that to a predominately white classroom space in teaching about disenfranchisement in the American story and colonialism internationally?
I think I’ve always chosen a life where the thread I wanted to weave in the larger fabric of my life has always been centered on raising consciousness in ways that feel like an invitation and not an indictment. And so, Grant Blvd became ultimately another way in figuring out how could I step into a direction where I knew there was darkness and aspire to use my time and talent to be a light.
Be Open to The Call
Kimberly founded Grant Blvd in 2017, had the first pop-up in 2018, and she’s been sitting with the idea of it since 2016. “So in some ways, it feels more like [Grant Blvd’s been] forward-facing alive for five years and internally with me for probably about seven.” Since its inception, she’s been watering it and “trying to figure out how to put it in good soil; getting the potting right. That’s all about what’s the design journey and understanding customer needs. How are we figuring out how to talk about sustainability and building capacity through radical inclusive hiring?”
Kimberly is creating a space where everyone has equal access to dignity:
There are people on the team and we don’t know how they arrived at their pronouns and they have equal access to dignity. There are people on our team who we’re really excited to welcome, and we don’t know if they have convictions and we’re really excited to offer them equal access and dignity. So, yeah, I think that’s probably stuff I was playing with even as a classroom teacher for twenty years: How to create cultural spaces where there’s room for art, authenticity, and for things that feel ultimately, quietly, and in unnamed ways, sacred.
Filter Goddesses
As of October 2022, Kimberly was ranked as one of the largest black employers in Philadelphia. To make this plain, she explains the stats:
Philadelphia is about 43% black
Less than 3% of businesses are owned by black people
95% of those businesses are solo entrepreneurs
“So to have a team at that point of eight, I was already one of the largest black employers of Philadelphia. And [by] hiring more than three people on Payroll, I was already in the Top Five percent of the largest black employers. This is wild.” She brought this case to one of the members that represent the University of Pennsylvania, who just so happened to be at her table, while at a conference in Detroit in October 2022. His response was “I’ll see what I can do.”
Long story short, they revisited the idea, and Grant Blvd, formerly located at 3605 Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia, will move onto Penn’s campus in March of this year!
But Kimberly is not giving up Grant Blvd’s former home, as she lives by the motto:
Make Yourself Available for the Download
“I’ve learned that the journey really gets accelerated when you surrender to be used. When you make yourself available, you start hearing and seeing things that you would have otherwise missed just because you didn’t have the capacity to pay attention. Because you weren’t committed to paying attention.”
She heeded the voice that told her: “Don’t give up that commercial space. There’s another story you can tell in it that’s tied to the fashion of the Civil Rights Movement.”
Que in Black Ivy:
The larger story of Black Ivy is that Kimberly was in an emotionally challenging space in February of 2022, having gone through a devastating breakup. In figuring out how to find peace, she ends up watching a documentary about the famous jazz musician, Lee Morgan who was fond of and a participant in the Black Ivy Style. “I didn’t Google it or anything. But for me, in watching that documentary, the student of fashion just put a little pin. I didn’t do anything with it. The Universe… I heard it. I was paying attention.”
Fast forward to another conference she attends in LA in October 2022, Kimberly runs into a friend who mentions he’s going to Arcana, a bookstore in Culver City, California. It is not too far from Pasta Sisters, a restaurant the keynote speaker inspires her to try. As fate would have it, the bookstore is right across from the restaurant. She visits Arcana quickly and eight minutes later, she is face-to-face with the book, Black Ivy. At that point, she knows innately “this is why I’m here. I remember intuitively when I heard of Black Ivy, I was watching a documentary about Lee Morgan. I grab the book.”
After debriefing with her Director of Impact on the flight back, Kimberly casually pulls out the book, as it was in her carry-on bag. “That’s when I know that I’m supposed to be focused on something around this moment in fashion,” she says. Although the Black Ivy moment is centered on male fashion, she wants to open it up to align it with her own timeline and compass of her mentors:
We’re going to start with ‘54, the year that Brown vs. Board of Education happened and we’re going to take it through ‘72, when Shirley Chisholm runs for president. In two parts because I’m still an elected official in Montgomery County. I’m a councilwoman, so the idea of thinking about activism through political disruption is very much so part of my life. It gets me into the moment where I can honor Angela Davis, who, by ‘70/‘71 is really coming into her own identity through fashion. I want to be able to capture that: The Black Panthers, Medgar Evers, Martin, Malcolm, Nina, Roberta, James, Lorraine - the whole gamut.
Thus, Black Ivy was born and will be open to the public on February 10th, 2023.