with Jonathan Chaka Mahone

The intersection of art, entrepreneurship, and advocacy has always been a powerful space. It’s where revolutionary individuals combine their creative work, innovative processes, and passion for justice to effect long-lasting change in our community.

Jonathan ‘Chaka’ Mahone has been building and thriving at that intersection in Austin for more than a decade. He shares how his music, visual art, clothing line, and advocacy work is providing many kinds of support to Black creatives and community front-liners in our city. 

His work started on the stage, alongside his wife Ghislaine ‘Qi Dada’ Jean in the dynamic hip-hop duo Riders Against the Storm. Mahone and Jean formed Riders Against the Storm in 2004 and moved to Austin in 2009. Since then, they have won ‘Band of the Year’ by the Austin Music Awards three times, performed at ACL, toured across the globe, and used their platform as musicians to educate, uplift, and give back to the community. While Mahone describes music as his “main thing,” Riders Against the Storm was also the entry point for other creative and activism endeavors.

Visual art and clothing have always been a big part of his self-expression, and that seeped onto the stage, when he would wear and display his artistic work while performing. Mahone and Jean’s fans would approach them after their shows and ask about their fashion, which were primarily self-made pieces. Through these encounters, Mahone recognized that people had a need for fashion that resonated and helped them express themselves in a way that wasn’t currently available.

“Most things that I do come from recognizing that there’s a need. I don’t really want to do something that somebody is already doing,” Mahone explains. Once a need is revealed in his community, Mahone then works to meet it with solutions. 

NefrFreshr

To answer this need for compelling, meaningful fashion, Mahone started the clothing line NefrFreshr in 2017, turning some of his visual art pieces from a successful gallery exhibition into apparel. Pronounced “Never Fresher,” the name of the brand exemplifies its goals. ‘Nefr’ is a nod to Nefertiti, queen of Egypt, which is where ancient wisdom is derived, while ‘Freshr’ refers to being in the now.

“We’re in the moment, but we have to understand that we’re reflections of the past. We never forget that, so we don’t leave the past behind. The past is in the present and the present is in the future,” Mahone explains. “NefrFreshr is about being fresh, but also remembering where you’ve come from.” 

NefrFreshr’s success is a testament to the community’s desire to have a way of expressing deep truths, accessing ancestral wisdom, and paying homage to the past while staying relevant, present, and looking towards the future. Since launching in 2017, NefrFreshr has been met with incredible success, and continues to develop and scale their brand – just this year, NefrFreshr was selected for a highly competitive Macy’s incubator program.

“It’s not that other people aren’t designing clothes,” Mahone explains, “but if there’s a certain angle, a certain voice or a certain thing that [I] have that [I] can offer that nobody else has – if I see that, then that attracts me to [the opportunity] and it makes me want to pursue the exploration of it.” 

Black Live Music Fund

Offering a specific voice and perspective to another facet of his community, Mahone founded the Black Live Music Fund in 2020. Serving as Vice Chair (2020) and Chair (2021) of Austin’s Music Commission, Mahone has been an integral part of Austin’s music scene for more than 10 years.

Austin coined itself as the “Live Music Capital of the World” in 1991. “Since then, the Black population in the city has gone down incrementally,” Mahone says. “But every bar you go into, what music are they playing? Black. It’s Black culture that [Austinites] are experiencing. You have a city here that’s benefiting off of music, largely generated from Black stories and Black culture… and yet you have a Black population that is going down.” 

Mahone explains that since he moved here 12 years ago, he’s realized the extent of the racism and the segregation that exists in Austin in a way that it doesn’t in other cities, which contributes to this declining Black population here. He shares that these systemic issues are manifested in the support that Austin musicians receive, and Black musicians are disregarded and marginalized despite the fact that they are the backbone of the live music culture that makes Austin so unique. 

“The inability of the Austin music industry to really address the needs of Black music and Black creators caused me to create the Black Live Music Fund… so we can fund our own projects and not necessarily look to anyone else for that support.”

The fund’s name was based on the Live Music Fund, which is funded by the city. As Chair and Vice Chair of the Music Commission, Mahone advocated for Black musicians, noticing that it wasn’t until white musicians started to struggle with affordability issues that the City started to recognize issues and recommend changes. 

“All of these people were sitting in these rooms talking about how hard it is to be a musician in Austin, how difficult it was to make a living. But nobody was talking about the realities of Black musicians in Austin and Black people in Austin,” Mahone says. “As soon as it became hard for privileged people to live in the city, then it became an issue that we needed to talk about. When it was Black people that couldn’t afford to live here and had to move, it wasn’t headline news. So, there’s a bias there.” 

The Black Live Music Fund seeks to address this need in the Austin music industry, providing explicit support for Black musicians to make up for the gaps in support from the city. They’ve raised more than $20,000 in private donations, and plan to support Austin’s cultural foundation, delivering micro-grants to local Black musicians and music industry workers.

In addition to this support and starting the conversation about systemic racism in Austin and Austin’s music industry, the Black Live Music Fund intends to create education and economic initiatives to help artists sustain their music careers, develop a platform to promote Black music in Austin, and establish an environment and music venue that helps Black artists in Austin flourish. Fundraising was initiated at the end of 2020, but the official launch is slated for the Fall of 2022.

DAWA

Another way that Mahone combines artistry, advocacy, and entrepreneurship to support our community is through DAWA (Diversity Awareness and Wellness in Action). Mahone founded DAWA in 2019 to support creatives and community frontliners of color such as social workers, teachers, and activists. Dawa is the Swahili word for “medicine,” and the healing the fund provides comes in the form of immediate, practical, accessible support for people in crisis. 

While there are governmental resources available to people in crisis, the barrier to entry for these funds can be high, rendering them useless to someone who has immediate need. Through his own creative journey, Mahone recognized that creatives and community frontliners are often doing important work, but that this passion and progress did not always come with commensurate financial security.

Without financial security, the important work that people of color in those categories are doing can be impeded, which ultimately harms our community. DAWA seeks to fill those gaps in financial need so that the work that community frontliners and creatives of color are doing is not impeded, and they have a support system and financial safety net in times of crisis. 

DAWA’s fundraising and outreach efforts take place in the context of community events and parties, providing support to the community in that regard as well. Currently working on establishing their 501(c)3 status, DAWA recently closed round three of funding. They’ve distributed over $153,000 of direct financial assistance over the last 2 years, and plan to continue their services to Austin after honing their infrastructure and programming. 

Search & Convert’s Black Businesses Matter

These are not Mahone’s only artistic, entrepreneurial, or advocacy ventures, but they are the businesses that were enrolled in Austin-based marketing agency Search and Convert Black Businesses Matter Program. 

“All I did was build the website(s),” PJ Christie laughs, sharing that he is grateful to play a small role in helping Mahone provide solutions to these systemic problems pervading Austin. While the Search & Convert team assisted with different aspects of NefrFreshr’s site, Christie recalls how enjoyable it was to build the site for Mahone’s Black Live Music Fund.

“I could tell that something really great had to happen, and it was going to require a catalyst to make it happen,” Christie says. “So me and my designer, Casey, we just got right to work. When you do websites for a living, it doesn’t take that long. We got the whole thing done in five hours, and it does everything that Chaka needed it to. So I’m proud of our contributions.”

When it came to building up NefrFreshr’s SEO and website, Christie explains that it was his first time working with Shopify, and his team had to get acquainted with the new tool. This made the experience as edifying for Search & Convert as it was for NefrFreshr. Christie cites this work with Mahone as an example of how quickly Search & Convert can build a website and provide services when it comes to creative projects they’re excited about. 

Beyond the SEO piece of the work, Christie explains that working with Mahone was his own way of helping to amend systemic issues in our community. “My challenge was exactly what Chaka was saying – getting involved in the community,” Christie recalls. “The challenge of Black Businesses Matter is how are we, as tech workers and as entrepreneurs, going to grow [these efforts], be a part of it, and help our brothers?” 

It takes community involvement from all of us to overcome these insidious issues. Mahone explains that support for DAWA and the Black Live Music Fund peaked after George Floyd’s murder, but then it tapered off quickly. Support for Black creatives and community members cannot be something that is contingent on a viral tragedy. Beyond that issue, Mahone also shares that there is a disconnect between the burgeoning tech community and everybody else in Austin. 

“Wealth tends to be consolidated and not shared,” Mahone explains. “Folks that work here are not really involved in supporting the communities that they’re moving into. They just kind of move here and they don’t really get involved. They don’t really look around and see what’s needed out here. There’s a real disconnect.”

Many people move to Austin for a tech opportunity but aren’t connected to anything that’s going on, often living in a bubble between their apartments and offices without recognizing or investing in the community. This creates a disconnect and drives people out of Austin. More involvement from new Austinites and integration into the community would help blend the community instead of pushing out and marginalizing people – often people of color. 

The number one advice that Mahone and Christie have for entrepreneurs and Austinites, new and established, is to get involved in your community. Understand the problems that exist and explore how you can provide solutions to them, like Mahone and Christie work to do in their respective industries. Mahone also encourages entrepreneurs to create a solution for an identified need in your community even if you don’t have the money. 

“If you don’t have access to capital, look around and see what capital you do have, because there are things that you may be privileged to have around you,” Mahone says. “You can galvanize that until you can find the capital.”

While he acknowledges that money is essential to success at some point, he explains that bootstrapping until you find that investment is going to make the investor all the more ready and willing to support your endeavor. Beyond this advice, Christie encourages people to start pursuing their passions young, and “get their bread right.” 

If you’re inspired to support your community, you can start by considering a donation to DAWA or the Black Live Music Fund and enjoy the art Mahone creates at NefrFreshr and with Riders Against the Storm. And beyond making these connections, Christie encourages entrepreneurs in Austin to consider whether their business has the resources to create their own Black Businesses Matter initiative – to recognize a need in our community, and become part of the solution. 

Find NefrFreshr. 

Find Riders Against the Storm. 

Find DAWA. 
Find The Black Live Music Fund. 
Find Search and Convert.