Camelback Ventures

McKayla Warwick — full story

Mckayla Warwick came to Philadelphia at 18 as a first-generation, low-income college student. She spent her weekends running freedom schools for middle schoolers and building relationships across the city. In 2020, she and co-founders Kwaku Owusu and Hyungtae Kim won a university seed grant, but when the pandemic and a racial reckoning hit, the young people they had been working with pushed them toward a different path. “While I was scared to death to make a pivot,” Warwick recalls, “I realized this was the only thing that actually felt truthful.” Collective Climb became a Black feminist organization empowering youth and communities through restorative justice.

The organization runs two interconnected programs. Its restorative justice diversion program receives referrals from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office for youth arrested for up to felony-level offenses, providing individualized support that results in case closure and record expungement. On the other side, the Restorative Community Project is a paid fellowship training young people as community healers and organizers. Youth from both pathways now serve as co-facilitators in diversion sessions. Since 2021, Collective Climb has worked with 94 youth and families through the diversion program and maintains a less than 10% rearrest rate.

Damon, a participant from West Philadelphia, captures the impact plainly: “This is going to sound crazy to say, but they’re the reason I’m not locked up.” He had planned to drop out of high school before Collective Climb; he is now pursuing mechanical engineering.

Warwick was 22 when she became executive director, carrying what she describes as a “deficit mindset” about her capacity to lead. The Camelback Fellowship changed that. “It helped me build the confidence to fully accept that this is my role, that I am capable,” she says. She credits her coach Jose, whom she met every Tuesday at 8 a.m., and the way Camelback matched his background in theater and nonprofit leadership to her own interests. “The coaching being as meaningful as it really was to the experience was a surprise.”

Today, after four years of meeting youth across the city without a permanent home, Collective Climb has its own space. Co-founder Kwaku Owusu describes the reaction: “They’re like, wow, this space is cool. I thought it was going to have a metal detector.” Warwick’s vision is for Collective Climb’s conflict resolution work to become so known in Philadelphia that communities call on them directly, without a district attorney’s referral. “We want people power.”

Melanie Richardson — full story

When Melanie Richardson and co-founder Christine Neely opened the We PLAY Center in 2017, they made one commitment: the doors would not close. In post-Katrina New Orleans, “we had a community of people who were just really skeptical of programs,” Richardson recalls. “You come in, you do your funding. Once your funding or your research is over, you leave.” They started on the second floor of a community center, rent-free, for 17 months, both working two or three part-time jobs to operate the We PLAY Center two days a week.

The We PLAY Center is, as Richardson describes it, “a learning lab for parents disguised as a play center.” Families with children birth to three and a half enter a no-tech zone where child-led play drives all learning. In 2022, the team created the We CONNECT Family Resource HUB next door so family navigators could walk with families through referrals, applications, and enrollment without pulling them away from the play-based model. Training Grounds serves all families: “We have families that may be in homeless shelters, but we also serve families that make six figures, seven figures.”

Nearly a decade in, Training Grounds has grown to nearly 20 full-time staff with health benefits, approximately 1,850 new members in 2026, roughly 5,918 individuals served, and over 54,395 touchpoints. Parents in the city still recognize Richardson and yell, “We are a We PLAY family! Do you remember us?” even though their children, now nine or ten, started coming at two.

The Camelback investment was a turning point, allowing Richardson and Neely to move into a paid space and pay themselves for the first time. “We received funding from Camelback, which made it possible for me to finally earn a salary. It was also the same year my son left for college,” she remembers.

Training Grounds has also become a launchpad: Andre Apparicio, a father who first came to the We PLAY Center after losing a premature daughter at eight days old, now runs Dad-A-Port and hosts PLAYdates with Dads at the We PLAY Center, drawing nearly 30 dads and 40 children. When staff member Shay’s company, Mommy Fluent, outgrew her staff role, Richardson had the difficult conversation that it was time for her to leave Training Grounds and focus on her company, then wrote her Camelback recommendation.

Training Grounds now operates two We PLAY Center locations and a third administrative office, with programming underway in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and conversations about replication outside the state. Ashley Butler, Senior Director of Operations and a former We Play parent, envisions We Play Centers “in or near libraries” across the country. Almost ten years later, the doors remain open.

David Henderson — full story

David Henderson has spent his entire career in the social sector focused on poverty and financial inclusion. As chief technology officer of a national nonprofit in Oakland, California, he and his team built a system distributing about a quarter billion dollars in direct cash aid. He noticed recipients frequently lent those dollars to others in their networks, informal banking behavior no institution was documenting. The pattern resonated personally: his mother, an immigrant from Panama, borrowed from her network while he was growing up and sent money back as well. In 2022, a fellowship at Princeton led him to formally research what he calls community finance, “the ways people who are financially excluded in low to moderate income communities bank on each other effectively.” Giving Credit grew out of that work.

Giving Credit is the credit reporting agency for community financial data, building records of lending and borrowing between friends and family and forging partnerships with financial institutions to recognize that activity. An estimated 45 million Americans are credit invisible; payday lenders extract $9.1 billion a year from communities of color, and Black and Latino individuals are twice as likely to face financial exclusion. Yet 90% of low-to-moderate income individuals lend and borrow with people they know, and U.S. consumers collectively owe about $200 billion to people in their networks. The people on Giving Credit’s platform “know that they’re credit worthy,” Henderson says. “And they know that the credit system sees them as not credit worthy.”

The platform currently has over 1,800 users and has tracked just over $875,000 in transactions. In August, it released the ability to upload Venmo or Cash App statements, with algorithms to identify informal lending. Users responded quickly: one person’s data revealed 25 loans made with friends and family; another showed 19. “People are hungry to have their credit worthiness seen,” Henderson says. Giving Credit also partners with a New Orleans organization, a large employer of in-home healthcare workers, to offer zero-interest loans to staff in lieu of payday lenders.

Giving Credit entered the Camelback Ventures Fellowship as a nonprofit. Camelback mentors pushed back: “You’re wrong to make it a non-profit. It should be a for-profit.” After months of working through the question, Henderson came to agree: “I saw that they were totally right.”

The critical insight was that the model could be non-extractive: fee-free to end users always, with revenue from institutional partners. With a $1.1 million pre-seed raise nearly complete, Henderson is shifting from fundraising to execution: growing users and building the data set that makes community creditworthiness visible. In a moment of institutional dismantling, his direction is clear: “It’s really in this moment to trust in community when we can’t necessarily trust in government.”