Chapter 78
Joseph started his business at twenty-three: a community logistics cooperative that served small businesses and community organizations in Kingston with transport and supply chain services, run on cooperative principles where drivers and staff held ownership stakes.
He had worked for Leroy for six years, learning everything he could, and had come to Marcus and Nia and Leroy with the business plan at twenty-two.
It was good. Not perfect there were structural vulnerabilities that Marcus could see and that Leroy identified more precisely but fundamentally good, built on a real observation about a real need and a real commitment to serving that need in a way that distributed the benefit rather than concentrating it.
They helped him revise it. Leroy provided the seed capital an investment, not a gift, with clear terms that Joseph insisted on.
'I don't want charity,' Joseph said.
'I'm not giving you charity,' Leroy said. 'I'm investing in something that will be profitable. You'll pay it back.'
'I will.'
'I know.'
The cooperative launched in Joseph's twenty-third year and grew steadily. By the time he was twenty-eight it was supporting fifteen families through driver ownership. By thirty it was profitable enough to support expansion into two parishes.
Marcus watched his son run a business with total commitment and the particular quality of care for the people working within it that had been Joseph's signature since he was seven years old asking why some children had things and some didn't.
'He solved for it,' Leroy told Marcus. 'In his own way, from his own angle. He found his version of the answer.'
'Like we all have,' Marcus said.
Leroy raised his glass.
'Like we all have,' he agreed.