For greater than 50 years, OneUnited Financial institution has operated on the idea that monetary empowerment in Black communities requires greater than services—it requires confronting the methods that preserve wealth out of attain. Now, the nation’s largest Black-owned financial institution is extending that mission into addressing easy methods to shut the racial wealth hole.
On Could 5, OneUnited launches Who’s Your Ma Honey?, a 10-episode podcast and video collection that the Boston-based financial institution frames as each a cultural reckoning and a direct extension of its neighborhood improvement work. The present streams on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Audible, and invitations high-profile visitors to floor buried experiences of disgrace—then reframe them because the origin story of their resilience and success.
The idea lands with explicit weight coming from OneUnited. The financial institution, a chosen Group Growth Monetary Establishment (CDFI), has financed practically $1 billion in loans—the bulk in low-to-moderate revenue communities like South Central, Compton, Liberty Metropolis, and Roxbury. Its mission has at all times been specific: shut the racial wealth hole, one transaction at a time. Who’s Your Ma Honey? argues that closing it additionally means addressing what occurs in folks’s heads earlier than they ever stroll right into a financial institution.
“Undeserved disgrace is the silent barrier that impedes private progress and monetary empowerment,” the financial institution mentioned in saying the present, a framing that ties the psychological on to the financial.
The present is co-hosted by Teri Williams, OneUnited’s President and COO, and Suzan McDowell, President and CEO of Circle of One Advertising, a Miami-based multicultural company. Williams’ story is the present’s central proof of idea, and it’s one she first shared publicly with Fortune. She grew up in Indiantown, Florida, earlier than incomes a full scholarship to Brown College and later for a Harvard MBA, and in navigating that distance, she slowly buried the reminiscence of her great-grandmother, Annie Coachman, generally known as Ma Honey.
“The response to the story was overwhelming,” Williams instructed Fortune. There have been folks from Indiantown who remembered “Miss Honey,” however others associated to members from their very own previous. “My ‘ah ha’ second for deciding to create a present got here after I shared the story with a gaggle of ladies leaders on the Subsequent Narrative Summit in 2025 they usually all had an ‘ah ha’ second after which shared their highly effective Ma Honey tales.” She mentioned individuals are used to answering the query of who impressed you, however this query of “Who’s your Ma Honey?” made them mirror, with their solutions shocking even themselves.
Ma Honey was an entrepreneur: she owned a penny sweet retailer, a juke joint, a BBQ pit, and rental properties within the segregated South, generations earlier than these alternatives had been speculated to be obtainable to ladies who appeared like her. When Williams opened as much as Fortune about that buried chapter of her life, it marked the primary time she had spoken about Ma Honey publicly, a disclosure that finally grew to become the seed of the present itself.
Williams mentioned that when she started in monetary companies within the early 80’s, it was one of many least various industries. Her resolution to accumulate 4 Black-owned banks—all began within the Nineteen Sixties when segregation prevented Black folks from accessing different banks—and rolling them into one, altering the title to OneUnited Financial institution, displays what she known as “the neighborhood builder in me, which was vastly influenced by Ma Honey.”
Season One’s visitor lineup underscores the present’s ambitions. It consists of Sybrina Fulton, mom of Trayvon Martin; Marc Morial, President of the Nationwide City League; Congresswoman Frederica Wilson; Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava; Sheena Meade, CEO of The Clear Slate Initiative; and Felicia Hatcher, CEO of Pharrell Williams’ Black Ambition Prize, amongst others.
“Disgrace can utterly derail folks from reaching monetary success,” Williams mentioned, as a result of it may cease them from asking inquiries to change into extra financially savvy, or it may cut back their expectations of what they will accomplish. “They really feel they don’t need to succeed. I hope we are able to make the sensation of disgrace taboo.”
For OneUnited, the present is a guess that the trail to generational wealth runs not simply by means of monetary literacy, however by means of the tales folks have been taught to be ashamed of. Ma Honey—a Black girl constructing enterprise fairness within the Jim Crow South—was at all times the blueprint. The financial institution desires her descendants to cease forgetting it.
Who’s Your Ma Honey? premieres Could 5, 2026, at www.oneunited.com/honey.
