Sevetri Wilson’s life changed as a college student at Louisiana State University.
In 2005, she was attending the university on a full scholarship from a global foundation when she was invited to a retreat with other scholars from across the country. “It felt like I was meeting the future leaders of the world,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to give back, but that moment made it clear that it wouldn’t be good enough just to have a career and make money. I needed to help people along the way.”
At 22, Wilson started Solid Ground Innovations, a nonprofit management and consultancy agency—and turned it into a seven-figure enterprise. While building the company, she discovered that many nonprofits could use management assistance, so she launched Resilia, a software as a service (SAAS) technology firm that helps organizations increase capacity and helps funders scale their impact. While funding the New Orleans–based Resilia, Wilson raised 50 million to date in capital. Resilia, which started in 2016, has currently worked with over 20,000 organizations and now has a team of over 60.
It hasn’t always been an easy path.
“I’ve been fortunate to have investors see the vision for Resilia and want to help scale it,” she says. “But it was definitely very challenging early on to raise capital, because not only am I a Black woman, I’m also based in the South.”
Becoming A Mission-Driven Serial Entrepreneur
Wilson, 35, grew up far from the venture capital world. She split time between New Orleans, where her mother’s family lived, and a small town in rural Louisiana, where her grandfather had a farm with a sugar cane field, fig trees, and blackberry bushes.
At age seven, however, her idyllic childhood was marred by tragedy. Her father passed away.
“It taught me at a very young age about loss, and how such an impactful event can shape, transform, or change someone’s entire trajectory,” she says.
Another transformative—and challenging—moment came years later. After Wilson graduated from LSU in 2008, her mother passed away as well—forcing her to rethink her life’s ambitions.
“I had my father, who passed away when I was eight, and my mother, who passed away when I was 21, and I was like, "What am I doing all of this for? What am I working this hard for?” she says. “I started thinking about what my legacy was going to look like. Because as a kid from a low-income family, a lot of my work to that point was simply to provide a better life for my family.”
After working for a year to help lead communications for Sharon Weston Broome, the first Black woman mayor of Baton Rouge, Wilson began intersecting with the non-profit space. Her desire to help communities, anchored by the loss of her parents and spurred by her insights from the foundation that assisted her through college, inspired her to start Solid Ground Innovations LLC (SGI). Consulting for nonprofits and businesses with their management strategies, SGI helped them problem-solve issues and grow, and soon became a seven-figure business—bootstrapped entirely by Wilson from the ground up.
Working with charitable organizations, she had an epiphany. Every day, Wilson spent hours on the back-end work for her company. If she could develop a software program or technology application that assisted with this daily chore, then it could free up time to concentrate on growing SGI—and help more nonprofits.
“Oftentimes, we would go in and work with an organization and it was great,” she says. “But the likelihood of that work continuing once we left was really rare, because we brought the capacity and then we left with the capacity.”
In 2016, to address this challenge, Wilson founded Resilia—a SaaS firm offering nonprofits an easy way to fill out legal documents, track funding, and build capacity, as well as providing funders a better way to connect and deliver technical assistance with grantees and organizations doing work on the ground. It was a game changer for enabling nonprofits to grow.
“Historically, the nonprofit space has been antiquated and adverse to adopting technology,” she says. “When an organization signs up to the Resilia platform, we essentially lay out everything that needs to be done, not only to keep the organization compliant, but for them to operate day to day.”
The software also allows funders to keep tabs on their grantees, making the allocation of money easier to track and the nonprofit results easier to see. Resilia even offers coaching and capacity-building support for those who need it, such as those who have started a nonprofit from scratch or have received an influx of donations after a crisis or natural disaster.
“Down the road after a disaster, there may be criticism of how that money was used,” says Wilson. “Ultimately, it’s because you have an organization that may have never received that type of capital in its entire life and they don’t know the right next steps in terms of compliance and tracking. That’s where Resilia comes in. We think about measuring impact over time, so organizations can deliver their work in a successful and meaningful way.”
At a recent industry conference, Wilson was able to see how her work affects people first-hand. One of Resilia’s clients introduced himself and said his daughter had passed away from an illness. He had set up a nonprofit in her name that helped youth with disabilities, and used Resilia to help manage its growth and accountability—transforming it into a success.
“We get lots of notes like this, but to meet him in person was special,” Wilson says. “It makes the long days worth it, because it’s a reminder of why I started the company and how many individuals and communities we can impact along the way.”
Creating a Lasting Legacy
Today, Resilia is working with some of the largest funding organizations in the United States, who are allocating tens of millions of dollars to other nonprofits working with the platform. Yet despite all the growing good she’s helping to promote, Wilson sees room for improvement.
“I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do and what we should do,” she says. “Business is hard, but if you align the right team and people, it definitely makes it easier to continue growing.”
Resilia has expanded to work with local governments and new entities in the philanthropic space. The company also continues to sign-up large funding organizations, which includes some of the largest philanthropic organizations in the world. In 2019, she also established a scholarship at LSU in her mother’s name, the S.M. Wilson Memorial Scholarship Fund—a full-circle moment for Wilson.
“I feel like I got my entrepreneurial savviness from my father and my big heart from my mom,” she says. “I hope to continue being a good reflection of both of them.”
Whether you are looking to take small steps -- or a leap -- toward reaching your goals, U.S. Bank can help. That’s what U.S. Bank is for.
This article was produced by WIRED Brand Lab on behalf of U.S. Bank.
