Troy

It's minutes before 6:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, and the dark streets of downtown Troy are nearly radio silent, save for a few car engines rumbling to a stop and the subsequent echoes of car doors closing. People exiting their cars open the door to the Psychedelicatessen, and are greeted with a jingling bell, wafts of coffee and toasted bagels, and a group of roughly 30 people seated on couches and chairs in a colorful room inside the cafe.

"Do you think it's hard to balance a career with the person you're in a relationship with if they have a different work timeline?" Roberta Singleton asked the group. "Do you think you have to have a balance of how much you work in order to work with someone?"

"I guess for me just finding that work-relationship balance is challenging because I don't work normal set hours," one man responded.

"You're so passionate about your work and your job, but also want to transition to finding the person, and I think that's super tough and tricky," Jessica Cole said.

This is the scene at various Troy establishments every Tuesday morning, as a group called the Power Breakfast Club gets together to discuss topics ranging from Bitcoin and grant writing, to balancing love lives or fitness with your career.

"Power Breakfast is a community, really," said Jamel Mosely, one of the founders of the Power Breakfast Club, and creative director and founder of Mel eMedia. "It's an amazing group of people, and we get together and discuss a different theme every week."

The group, of which the majority of members are young people of color, gets a turnout of 30 to 40 people each week, and has nearly 450 followers on their Facebook page. Many of the members have what the founders call multidimensional identities — a sixth grade math teacher who is also a fitness trainer, a social worker and yoga instructor, a financial planner and DJ.

"My thing is providing a space for people to come together and grow together, and I felt like Power Breakfast is a perfect space for them to do so," said Singleton, another founder of the club and an office administrator at Troy's 1st Playable Productions.

"Structure, accountability, community is exactly what it is," added Cole, another founder of the club and a PhD candidate in University at Albany's Fellow, Educational Psychology and Methodology program. "I want to provide people a catalyst to follow their wildest dreams."

And follow their wildest dreams they do. The founders said there are attendees of the Power Breakfast Club who have switched career paths, launched new podcasts and written books — and have attributed their success and inspiration to the Power Breakfast Club.

Tabetha Wilson is one of those people. An employee with the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, Wilson wanted to launch a podcast for her capstone project with the New Leaders Council, and started a podcast, The Radius, in July 2017.

"I started that around the same time as I started attending Power Breakfast, and they were so supportive," Wilson said. "I got inspired by my peers that have actual businesses and have done the startup process, and I knew I could take this to whatever level I wanted to take it."

By setting goals and intentions in a motivated, supportive and nonjudgmental environment, Wilson said the Power Breakfast Club has only been a positive impact on her and her peers.

Hirah Mir, who is in the same PhD program as Cole and works for the New York State Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, attended one of the first Power Breakfast meetings.

"I like knowing that if I ever need professional development in a certain area or want to work on an initiative in my community, I don't have to do it by myself," Mir said. "We can collaborate and bridge each other's missions."

One of the major draws to the Power Breakfast Club for Mir, though, was the diversity of the group.

"Being a minority in Albany and also being in academia, after the (2016 presidential election) I felt like I didn't have a community to turn to," she said. "I thought maybe I need to find spaces in the community where I feel comfortable and safer, and less isolated."

The founders of the Power Breakfast Club were aware of the need to create a space and resources for communities of color when they started the group.

"The toughest part about this area is there's not the mass amount of people of color in successful positions that we can find in a big city," Mosely said. "There's no hub. But when you come to Power Breakfast, you can find that."

Having this hub for people of color is particularly crucial in order to empower the community, Cole said.

"A lot of times there are similar groups we're a part of, but we're infringing on somebody else's base," she said. "We don't want to have to leave our culture at the door to be successful, we want to be able to sustain our culture without worrying about (equating) ourselves with negative narratives."

Changing that negative narrative is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the Power Breakfast Club — it is normalizing the success of people of color.

"It's time for people to not be so surprised when black and brown people are doing stuff," Singleton said. "I am tired of having surprised reactions when I tell people I'm a manager or have had this education."

Cole echoed Singleton's sentiments.

"It's important we continue to change the narrative and not be diverted from our work," Cole added. "It's not our responsibility to explain to people we are doing great stuff, but it's our responsibility to do great stuff. If you're watching, awesome. If you're not watching, fine. We're still going to be doing what we're doing."