How Tunisha Brown founded IMPACT magazine: And developed an international platform.

• Author: Brown, Tunisha

I GREW UP IN TRENTON, NEW JERSEY, and worked for Merrill Lynch there for almost nine years. While with the company, I shifted positions often because they really believed in promoting from within. I was able to be moved around from Human Resources to being the Executive Assistant to the President of Technology.

In my first role, I was an advisor for people who would call in to figure out their health insurance. Then I moved on to the recruiting department, where I learned so much about time management working under five executive recruiters who hired about 10,000 people a week for all of the domestic international Merrill Lynch executives.

From the recruiting department, I transitioned to being an admin for an executive in technology, then an admin for five high-level executives in relationship management. In my last four years before leaving the company, I was a recruiting coordinator for Global Wealth Management, acting as the gateway for people seeking to become financial advisors.

Around this time, I was at a point in my life when I was heavily into church, and so I began a community newsletter that was really well-received. The church members loved the content and graphics, which I created myself. When I left the church, I asked myself, "Now that I'm gone, should I continue the newsletter?"

There was this guy in my neighborhood named Darrin Morris; he had a newspaper called CREAM, and it showed the whole neighborhood, such as the people who graduated, the people having children, the people getting a new job--anything positive happening in the community.

I noticed how people would react every Friday when the new issue came out--everyone would drop what they were doing to get a copy. After I noticed how they responded to seeing themselves in the newspaper, I thought to myself, "That's it. I don't want a newspaper, but I'm going to create a magazine."

I began researching how to put a magazine together and got a publisher. Once I figured out how to design the magazine, I researched John H. Johnson, the founder of Ebony Magazine, and then Susan L. Taylor, the former editor-in-chief of Essence--and the woman who got Essence where it is today. What I learned from John H. Johnson was about going into a market he wasn't familiar with when he started in Chicago. He had to learn key factors about the city and put news out that reflected what he saw.

What I admired about Susan L. Taylor was how she was so adamant about Black women, and she was...