The C Is for Community

A Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., a Pride fundraiser, a bottle of tequila, and the people doing the work.

By Duke DeAndre Richardson
H1927LLC IP Library

Thomas was there to greet Beverly and me when we walked into HER Diner.

It was Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., and we had come for a Capital Pride fundraiser and Commanders watch party. Thomas led us to a table in the front window, and almost immediately the afternoon settled into that easy rhythm that happens when you are among people who know one another, or are about to.

Beverly, Thomas and I started catching up while the football game played behind us. I began introducing Beverly to some of the other women around the room, and at one point I laughed and told them I was acting as her agent.

Everybody laughed, including me.

But somewhere underneath the joke, I knew exactly what I was doing.

Beverly has spent years building Ooh La La Skin Care, and here we were surrounded by other women building things of their own. Businesses. Organizations. Careers. Community. Sometimes opportunity does not arrive with a conference badge or a scheduled networking hour. Sometimes it is simply a chair at a table, someone you did not know an hour earlier, and another person saying, You two should meet.

Then Thomas asked Samantha Johnson to tell us about the tequila.

That was how Vascano entered my afternoon.

Samantha did not begin with a business pitch.

She began with her friends.

She told us she had always wanted a brewery. One of her best friends liked bourbons and darker liquors. Vernon liked just about everything. But when the friends got together, tequila seemed to be the thing they could all agree on.

“Tequila was, like, that common ground for us,” she said.

Thomas, apparently deciding that hearing the story without tasting the tequila would be incomplete, ordered shots for the table.

The glasses arrived.

We tasted it.

Smooth.

Tasty.

And there was something about sitting there drinking the finished product while Samantha explained where it came from that made me listen differently. This was no longer an idea somebody hoped to build one day. The bottle was already sitting in front of us.

The story behind it had taken years.

Four Years in a Glass

Vascano today is built around longtime Washington friends Vernon Leftwich, Adanna Mbanugo and Samantha Johnson. Vernon brings the business side, Adanna works in content and events, and Samantha leads marketing and creative. The brand identifies itself as Black-owned, women-owned and LGBTQ-owned.

But before there was Vascano, there was already community.

The friends had worked together through Cultural Crawl, connecting people with Black-owned businesses, restaurants, bars, art and culture. Then 2020 arrived, and like so many people connected to hospitality, they were forced to think differently about what came next.

Tequila returned to the conversation.

They researched the industry. They tried crowdfunding.

It was not enough.

That part stayed with me.

We have a habit of meeting entrepreneurs after the difficult years have been cleaned out of the story. We see the launch. We see the photographs. We see someone holding the finished product. We rarely see how many times the answer was not yet, not enough, or not this way.

Vascano eventually entered a pre-accelerator operated by Distill Ventures with funding from Diageo, a program created to help founders from historically underrepresented communities gain access to capital and business development support. Samantha told us Vascano received two investments through that relationship.

Then came Mexico.

She talked about traveling back and forth while the team learned an industry that was new to them, worked through production and importation, and figured out how an idea between friends becomes something that can legally and commercially sit behind a bar in Washington, D.C.

They began the journey in 2020.

They launched in 2024.

Four years.

I looked at the tequila sitting in front of me differently after that.

We had taken the shot in a few seconds.

The bottle had taken years to reach our table.

And that is the part that can disappear when we reduce a business to labels. Black-owned, women-owned and LGBTQ-owned all matter because ownership matters, but sitting across from Samantha I was thinking just as much about the work underneath those words. The research, the travel, the investment, the distribution, the marketing, the conversations with bars and restaurants, and the persistence it takes to keep introducing a bottle most people have never heard of before.

Samantha was sitting across from me doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, the Room Kept Moving

While we were talking, the afternoon kept growing around us.

Three more energetic people joined the table, bringing plenty of personality and fashion with them. Another woman, Lisa, arrived, and before long Beverly and Lisa had fallen into their own conversation. Food was being ordered. Drinks were arriving. The football game continued in the background, occasionally taking over the entire room when a good play caused somebody to shout.

Then everyone would go right back to talking.

That was part of what I liked about the afternoon.

Nothing felt forced.

Nobody stood up and announced that it was time to network. People simply met one another.

At some point, the room quieted for an announcement. Anna Jinkerson, who had served as chair of the Capital Pride Alliance Board of Directors for the previous 10 months, was preparing to leave the board effective September 30, 2026. This was one of the final fundraisers of her tenure, and there was a moment of thanks for her service, along with recognition of newer board members who were stepping into the work.

Thomas and Samantha were among those newer members.

That moment changed the feeling of the afternoon for me.

It was September.

Pride Month had passed.

There was no parade outside, no giant stage, no crowd gathered for a once-a-year celebration.

But Pride was still happening.

It was happening in a queer-owned restaurant where people were buying lunch and drinks. It was happening through a fundraiser, through people agreeing to serve on a board, through Thomas inviting us, through Samantha sharing what she and her friends had built, and through women meeting other women who understood something about the work of building a business.

The celebration may happen in June.

The work does not.

And maybe that is why the setting mattered as much as the tequila.

HER Diner itself is queer-owned. Beverly was there as a woman who had built her own company. Samantha was talking about another business created through Black, women and LGBTQ ownership. Capital Pride was raising funds. Thomas was connecting people.

Nobody had arranged the afternoon to teach a lesson about community economics.

It was simply happening around us.

One person knew another person.

One business supported another.

Someone bought lunch.

Someone ordered a drink.

Someone introduced a friend.

Later, Samantha talked about another nearby lesbian-owned queer business that supports Vascano.

“They always sell out with us,” she said.

I kept thinking about that sentence because it said almost everything it needed to say.

A queer-owned business made room for another LGBTQ-owned brand, and people bought it.

Sometimes community support is that simple.

During the conversation, people started informally counting how many queer women-owned businesses they could think of around Washington. Somebody suggested the number might be around six.

I am not turning that into a statistic. Friends counting businesses around a table is not a census.

But I understood what they were really saying.

The room can still feel small.

And when the room is small, knowing who else is doing the work matters.

Then I Learned About the C

Later, as I began researching what Samantha had told us, I learned more about the Vascano name.

V for Vernon.

A for Adanna.

S for Samantha.

And the C is for community.

That is how Vernon has explained it. The company’s visual identity also carries four linked hearts, three representing the friends and a fourth representing community.

When I read that, I smiled.

My mind went back to that table in the front window.

Beverly talking with Lisa.

Thomas moving between conversations.

Samantha telling us how something shared among friends had become a business.

Food on the table.

Football playing in the background.

A shout from across the room when something happened in the game.

And the tequila they had spent four years bringing into the world sitting right there between us.

I realized I had spent the entire afternoon watching the C without knowing what it meant.

Thomas had invited me.

I brought Beverly.

He introduced us to Samantha.

Samantha introduced us to Vascano.

Other people joined the table.

Women met women.

HER Diner served the room.

Capital Pride raised money.

An outgoing leader was thanked.

Newer board members were recognized.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, we shared a shot of tequila.

Nothing about the afternoon felt extraordinary while it was happening.

Maybe that is exactly why it stayed with me.

We sometimes look for community in grand gestures when much of it is built through smaller ones: a friend making an introduction, a restaurant giving a young brand space behind the bar, a business owner showing up for another business owner, someone attending a fundraiser after Pride Month is over, or simply making room for one more person at the table.

I could have written this as a story about tequila.

But that is not how I found it.

I found it through people.

And when I later learned that the C in Vascano stands for community, I understood why the story had followed me home.

Samantha had told me tequila was their common ground.

By then, I understood that the tequila was only where the story began.

The C is for community.