Creating community: Networking group connects Black business people in Wichita

When Darryl Kelly moved to Wichita with his family, he knew no one.

“What I would have loved there is a group of folks who would look like me and my family and would come to us and say, ‘Hey, here’s where you go to do this,’” Kelly said.

And that’s why Wichita needs The Gathering, Kelly said.

The Gathering, led by a group of 10 people, hosts events every other month for selected Black business professionals to come together and enjoy community and networking. They aren’t public events — people are invited by the Gathering’s team.

“The first thing that The Gathering is, is creating a welcome mat,” Kelly said. “You have a welcome mat at the front door of your home, and when you see that ... it means ‘come on in.’ And so what we want to do is create that type of environment, that same type of feeling that’s invoked when you go to somebody’s house and see that welcome mat.”

Kelly said there is a presumption that Wichita is not diverse.

“The best way to get out in front of that is to, you know, change the narrative,” Kelly said.

The Gathering has three purposes: to welcome, to connect and to retain.

The Gathering leaders are Kelly, Junetta Everett, Corinthian Kelly, Jacqueline Kelly, Carla Eckels, John Rolfe, Kaye Monk-Morgan, Derek Morgan, Taishma Council and Samuel Eckels. While the events are invite-only, those who are interested in attending one can reach out to any of the members.

“We’ve had people become best friends. … We’ve had people collaborate on different projects, based on them meeting at a gathering, and we’ve had some people get new customers,” Everett, one of The Gathering’s founders, said.

Every Gathering event has 30 to 40 attendees. Everett said that is the perfect number.

“That’s comfortable enough for these people to get around to eat and actually be able to network versus having 100 people because that’s harder to do,” Everett said.

While The Gathering events are free of charge, there is something that attendees are asked to do.

“The ask is to duplicate and replicate this behavior going forward,” Kelly said. “Their homework assignment is to reach out to the people that they met that evening and go have a coffee, go have breakfast with them, go have dinner with them — connect on a different level than they did when walking past someone in the hallway at work and not speaking to them or just saying hi and just keep moving.”

Instead of competition, Kelly said, he wants to see community.

“There’s enough pie for everybody to get a piece, and so we really have to start working together,” he said. “And so we start collaborating together again, and connecting in meaningful ways, we can really start, you know, helping each other out.”