From Girls’ Trips To Global Impact: Nikkia McClain’s Vision Empowers Women Through ‘Support Your Girlfriends’

“I was a young mom. I had two kids by the time I was coming out of high school,” said Support Your Girlfriends founder Nikkia McClain. “I was in a domestic violence relationship. I am not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be here having this conversation with you, so I enjoy knowing ‘God has something bigger in store for me.”

This founder isn’t just talking the talk; she’s walking the walk, spearheading a movement designed to empower women who look like her through Support Your Girlfriends.

When Nikkia McClain first launched Support Your Girlfriends six years ago, she was answering the call from close friends Tamika D. Mallory and Lucinda Cross, who were in dire need of a vacation or break from the reality and sometimes weight that comes with their respective lines of work. After the first event, which included 10 women, it wasn’t long before the number doubled to 20 in the program’s second year.

As the unofficial creator of the “girl’s trips” that many women embark on with their squad these days, McClain understood the assignment from the first trip to Jamaica. Now, in the program’s sixth installment, she is excited to have partnered with the island of Barbados to bring another group of like-minded people together to reset, refocus, and recharge.

“We wanted to create some sort of community impact,” McClain told BLACK ENTERPRISE.

“So we partnered with I Am A Girl, a Barbados NGO. The first year, the impact with these young girls, we did a workshop again, and all of the programming is through us. So one of our glossy sisters, Nadine Ramos, owns Lasio, a professional haircare company, and Blessed Bananas, and came up with the concept of doing a workshop with these girls. It probably was about 50 girls, and then we did a support circle, and oh my goodness, we were friends and thought these girls needed us. No, we needed them. They gave us so much life.”

She aims to do the same this year after donating $10,000 to the organization to continue making an impact.

Through three mantras, “Support Her,” “Celebrate Her,” and “Power Her,” Support Your Girlfriends is much more than an event where beautiful Black women can gather with an island as their backdrop. McClain says that the overall goal is to never place the focus on them but instead on the people and the impact they’re looking to make.

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“’Support Your Girlfriends’ just starts with me,” she explained. “You know how you always have a leader, and they say if the head stinks, the whole body stinks. I think the head is just not stinking. Even so much so that in my own line of business, I’m not telling my team, ‘I’m your boss,’ I’m a team leader. We’re a team together. I always want to lead the people that I hire. I always want them to be better than me.”

Beyond her line of work, McClain has always taken pride in supporting her girlfriends and encouraging those around her to do the same, noting the healing power of sisterhood.

“For me, daily, I’m showing up for my sisters. They’ll tell you I’m probably the most supportive person, and everyone asks, ‘How do you do it? How do you manage your business? Still, at the same time, show up here, hop on a plane, be there for your family?’ It’s just you put the things that matter to you first. People are dealing with so much on their own, like mentally, physically, emotionally, the last thing we need to do as women is to put our issues on anyone we know.”

“I do my best to treat my sisters like my sisters; how are you supposed to treat sisters unconditionally? You get to be you. You get to show up as you, and again, I’m just trying to create as much joy as I can for my people,” said McClain.

Each year includes a standout moment that lets McClain know she is on track with the movement she’s building alongside her sisters, Tamika D. Mallory and Lucinda Cross. Moreover, she revealed that if folks were to go by statistics and the standards of a person’s zip code, McClain would not be able to have this conversation or even push the needle forward to help empower fellow Black women from all walks of life.

“I was a young mom. I had two kids by the time I was coming out of high school,” she shared. “I was in a domestic violence relationship. I am not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be here having this conversation with you, so I enjoy knowing ‘God has something bigger in store for me.”

McClain envisions a world where Support Your Girlfriends will be recognized alongside the AKAs, the Deltas, and other notable Black organizations.

“I want us to be that organization 100 years from now,” she concluded. “I want my great-great-grandchildren to be like, ‘My great-great grandmother, Nikkia McClain, alongside Tamika D. Mallory and Lucinda Cross…we just had a phone call, they called me and said, ‘We need to go away. We need a vacation. We’re working too hard.’ We flipped it and turned it into this amazing organization with over 100,000 members.”

With a membership fee of $97 per year, “Support Your Girlfriends” has since expanded to New York City, with an Atlanta chapter coming in October. Support Your Girlfriends is open to like-minded women who want to advance the conversation.