Charity patches a hole. A purchase order builds something.
Since I started this I've met more Black entrepreneurs than I can count. Different products, different cities, same wall every time: nobody will fund them. Not because the business is bad — because the money was never pointed their way.
So we don't pass a hat. We buy from them. A quarter of every Pay It Forward box becomes a purchase order — real inventory, at a real price, that ships in real boxes to real households.
Give somebody $500 and they have $500. Order $500 of product and they have a customer, a production run, and a receipt they can take to a bank. One of those shows up on a balance sheet. The other one doesn't.
In Good Conscience. Harlem, New York.
Jerome Clark started it during the 2020 lockdown, watching people from every community fill the streets for each other. The question he couldn't shake was what happens to all that good intention once everybody goes home.
His answer was to build something that runs every day instead of one weekend. In Good Conscience exists to make daily hygiene a wider gesture of community care — and to turn that into real economic ground under communities that have been kept off it. Soap you use every morning, doing two jobs at once. That's the same bet we're making, which is why we started with him.
This is a purchase, not a donation. You're buying a box. We spend a quarter of it with him. Nobody here is giving anybody anything.
“Where would this good intention go once the marching stopped?”
Jerome Clark · In Good Conscience · Harlem, NY
$7,500 — the next production run
Seven and a half is what it takes to run it at a unit cost that works. Five would do it, but the per-bottle price climbs and nobody wins. This pays for enough body wash to get back on shelves around Harlem, and back into BlacBoxes.
The New Trade Program
IGC works with a program that hires Black high school and college students and teaches them real workplace skills — so they walk in prepared, and walk toward the rooms where decisions get made. A bigger run means more of that work.
Every receipt
Every purchase order we place gets published — the amount, the date, what we bought. No names of households, ever. But the businesses? We want you to know exactly who your money built.
We're not trying to make anybody comfortable. We're trying to make somebody an employer.