Citizens Community Champion award, 20 winners from hundreds
Shaynae Clark runs NL Beauty Academy in Detroit, a school built on a simple idea: teach people the craft of beauty and the business of running one at the same time. This month she was named a Citizens Community Champion, one of only 20 recipients selected from hundreds of applicants, and the award came with $10,000.
What she did next is the part worth paying attention to. Instead of treating the money as a reward for work already done, Clark turned it into fuel for the people coming up behind her.
The plan is direct: expand youth and community programming across metro Detroit. That includes a partnership with the City of Detroit's Grow Detroit's Young Talent program, where students spend the summer inside her academy learning social media content creation, business planning, salon operations, and professional development, with Clark mentoring them the whole way through.
"The overlooked don't need saving. They need someone to hand them the keys."
This is the model ANF keeps pointing at. A young founder in Detroit builds something real, gets recognized for it, and immediately uses that recognition to open a door for someone else. It is not charity and it does not end with a photo. It is a pipeline, and pipelines are how talent stays in a city instead of leaving it.
Clark's reach goes beyond the classroom. Through The Grab and Go Effect, a nonprofit born from her own invention of a hair cap for women and children experiencing hair loss from cancer, alopecia, or lupus, she has spent years turning personal experience into community infrastructure. The academy is just the newest version of the same instinct.
The lesson for the next class of Detroit builders is quiet but clear. The point of getting chosen is not the check. It is what you build with it, and who you bring with you when you do. That is the work, and Clark is already doing it.