In 2009, Cameka Smith was 29 years old, held a master’s degree, and had just been laid off from Chicago Public Schools. The obvious next step for most people would have been to dust off a résumé and move on. Smith chose a different path entirely.
She gave herself one year to figure it out.
It was a quiet, personal bet not a business plan, not a pitch deck, just a window of time and a willingness to see what could grow inside it. She never went back to a traditional job. What grew instead became the BOSS Network, one of the most recognized platforms for Black women in business in the country.
Seventeen years later, the organization has reached more than 200,000 women, supported over 100 Black female founders with direct investment, and trained more than 10,000 leaders and entrepreneurs across the nation. Smith, who has since earned her doctorate, has become a well-known and respected voice in the Black entrepreneurship space. But back in 2009, none of that existed. She was a girl from the west side of Chicago running a side event company something that came naturally given her upbringing. Her mother worked full-time as a chef, also did hair, and sold dinners at church. Her grandparents on both sides were pastors. Service, in the Smith household, was simply a way of life.
Building community before it was a strategy
In those first months after her layoff, Smith wasn’t laser-focused on entrepreneurship. She was thinking about Black women more broadly how they navigate ambition, access, and success in spaces that weren’t always designed with them in mind. The events she organized that first summer drew two and three hundred attendees, and the emails that followed left her genuinely puzzled. Women were asking how to join something that didn’t officially exist yet. It was just events.
A friend pointed out that Facebook was no longer just a college network and suggested Smith create a group. That small nudge helped her realize the community she was quietly building didn’t have to stay in Chicago.
The B.O.S.S. in BOSS Network stands for Bringing Out Successful Sisters. Smith launched the official platform about six months after those first events, entering a digital landscape where blogs were still finding their footing and Twitter had barely launched. She used both strategically, growing her local event series into a national presence. By 2010, Forbes had recognized the site on two separate lists one of the top 100 websites for women overall, and another of the top 10 for women focused on careers and entrepreneurship. Smith was one of only two Black women featured, alongside Oprah Winfrey.
From events to investment and education
The years that followed brought speaking appearances at the ESSENCE Festival of Culture, partnerships with Black Enterprise and Forbes, and a national tour to five cities just one year into running the business. She had no established connections in those cities and virtually no budget, relying entirely on the women in her network who showed up with donated venues, sponsors and volunteer hours.
Over time, Smith built Boss Business University, a year-long coaching and training program pairing women with mentors in both one-on-one and group settings. In 2022 she launched the Boss Impact Fund, raising approximately $1.5 million with support from her longtime mentor Beverly Johnson and directing those dollars to 100 Black women founders. Corporate partners have included Sage, PepsiCo, JPMorgan Chase and members of the Divine Nine through which the organization invested $250,000 across four historically Black sororities to support roughly 20 founders.
Responding to a harder landscape
The environment Smith is operating in today is considerably more difficult than the one she started in. DEI funding that once flowed toward programs like hers has been sharply reduced or eliminated across major brands, leaving a gap that affects not only the founders she supports but the organization itself.
Her response was Pathways to Success, a pitch competition developed in partnership with UK-based Sage, which has backed the BOSS Network since 2014. Before designing the program, Smith commissioned a qualitative research report called Voices of Strength, gathering insights from 40 Black women founders about what they actually needed. Funding ranked high, but so did something most pitch competitions ignore entirely: sustained engagement after the program ends.
Pathways to Success was built around that finding. It offers a $25,000 prize and, perhaps more meaningfully, a full year scholarship to Boss Business University ensuring that winners don’t simply walk away with a check and a handshake, but with a full year of continued support, mentorship and community.
For Smith, the work has always come back to legacy not headlines or accolades, but the sustained trust of the women she serves and the lasting structures she’s put in place for them to grow.
