Pharrell Williams knew he wanted to hit the ground running when he launched his non-profit initiative Black Ambition last December—yes, even despite the challenges of the world around him. “We made those challenges part of our ethos,” Williams tells Vanity Fair.

Founded to pave a pathway to success for Black and Latinx creative entrepreneurs, Black Ambition will sponsor two competitions this summer—the Black Ambition HBCU Prize, which will offer a range of awards and mentorship opportunities to current and former HBCU students as they develop their businesses, and the Black Ambition Prize, which focuses on early-stage companies in the fields of tech, design, health care, and customer focused products and services. The Black Ambition Prize winner will receive up to $1 million in financial support.

Since the beginning Black Ambition has partnered from the beginning with a “beautiful bouquet” of supporters, including Chanel, Adidas, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Now Chanel is taking the next step in their partnership, announcing a new two-part mentorship program focused on the growth and mentorship of emerging talent in the business world. The first step taps a broad range of industry leading business women who have not only built successful businesses themselves, but who are paving the way for those following in their footsteps. In a conversation entitled Women Who Lead, Tracee Ellis Ross, Edith Cooper, Emma Grede and Natalie Massenet will gather to discuss leadership through a woman’s lens. Moderated by Harper’s Bazaar’s Editor-in-Chief, Samira Nasr, the conversation will cover a broad range of topics from determination, drive, resilience and community. The conversation will be streamed for all of the Black Ambition semifinalists. “It’s important to have recognizable faces, and faces that represent brands that they build,” says Williams.

The second pillar of the program focuses on a “comprehensive mentorship program,” which Williams says is one of the biggest challenges for winners of prizes like this one—“you may have a great business idea but that doesn’t mean you know how to run a business.” In the series of interactive mentorship workshops the prize finalists will have unprecedented access to the Chanel leadership community, as well as the brand’s network of experts that will help teach them the essentials of brand building skills for 21st century business. “Even when you have a great business plan you might not find the right operators,” Williams says. “[The mentorship program] teaches you all of those things. Success really does have a lot of authors. Usually when you say ‘success has a lot of authors’ it’s a dig at people who didn’t do something but are taking the credit. In this particular sense when it comes to running a business, success does have a lot of authors—there are a lot of signatures needed to cosign to get a brand new idea off the ground.”

When founding Black Ambition, Williams says, “what became very clear was the lack of visibility, lack of audition and lack of empathy. We realized that there was a common thing that linked all of this together, we don’t really have a voice. We don’t have a voice because we don’t have a big enough share of the pie chart. The pie chart I am referring to is the American pie.”

Through his nonprofit, Williams continues, “We felt like if we could make life in the business world more equitable for African Americans than certainly we will have the voice, and more of an influence on culture.”

Chanel and Williams both understand that this program represents their effort to stand on the right side of history—as Williams puts it, “it’s more moral than corporate.” They both understand that nurturing the next generation of business leaders through mentorship allows them (the next generation of leaders) a chance to garner an unprecedented insight in the success of building a business.

The traditional archetype for success “not only in this country, but around the world looks like a straight, white male face,” Williams says. Black Ambition is prepared to change that. “We’re not into feeding as much as we are into teaching how to fish, and I’m excited about that because there will be a lot more fishermen in our culture.”

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