Hey, welcome to you had me at Black. I'm Martina Abraham's Alunga.

So you are probably aware that we are in the middle of a fundraising push,

and I wanted to just talk candidly about why we're fundraising and what it means.

So for those of you who are newer to the You Had Mea Black Family, you know that we're a

storytelling podcast and we're also a kickback event series for people who just love being black.

And our mission is to reclaim the black narrative by passing the mic to regular people

to share their true life stories in their own words.

And for us, this isn't just about Black Excellence.

I think that's something that, you know, is really popular right now and you see it through different publications and

it's a very popular hashtag and I think that we definitely need to celebrate all that and everything that is excellent about being black and the black

experience in black culture but our show is also about just black reality and

the beautiful heartbreaking and joyous moments of everyday black

life, the mundane moments, the non-excelain moments, the really human moments.

And we've been doing this show for about three years now,

and in that time we've published over 70 stories,

and last year we went on tour with our kickbacks and hosted them in five

different cities and our community has really grown. Last month we hit half a

million downloads and streams which is crazy when you consider that in our first year we only received

50,000 downloads. So between years one and three, we multiplied that dramatically and what most people don't know about

our show or that they're surprised to learn about our show is that we're a

100% volunteer run and we're mostly self-funded.

So what that means is everyone who works in our team pays their bills through

...