Chanel Nicole Photography
While on public assistance twenty years ago, VaShaun Mosby vowed to improve her circumstances and help others do the same. Her new app will do both.
Written by Rocko Jerome
VaShaun Mosby is a woman who doesn’t shy away from a challenge. A Lexington native who overcame a young adulthood spent on public assistance to become a successful technology business owner and “serial entrepreneur,” she is a determined, focused dreamer who saw hard work as her way out. “I make no qualms about it: I was a good girl gone bad… gone good,” says VaShaun. “My mother was a preacher and my father is a lieutenant in the Marine Corps. In my late teens, I found myself getting into things. I got involved with the wrong crowd. And when I was 19, I faced 25 years in prison. I was literally in the wrong place at the wrong time and the police came and arrested me at work. I was completely petrified.”
VaShaun went through the court system for about two years. “As a Black woman, everybody looked at me like I was guilty,” she says. “But I ended up not facing time in prison. Instead, I was put on unsupervised probation for two years and had two felonies on my record for seven years.” The felonies remained on her record until she was 26. “I would get a job, then they would find out about my record and I would lose the job,” she says. At 20, she had her first child, a son, and lived with her mother. At 22, she had a daughter and moved in with the father whom she married. During that time, she had dozens of jobs and was waiting to be selected for Section 8 housing. “I thought, ‘Okay, I am going to get on Section 8 and it’s going to be great,’ but it doesn’t work like that,” she says. “It’s a lottery. I signed up at twenty-two and waited for seven years. They finally picked me when I was 29.” Coincidentally, she was selected at about the same time that her husband walked into their apartment and announced that she needed to move out.
“God works in mysterious ways,” says VeShaun. “But I had to move fast. I was told that I needed to find a house in two weeks or I would have to move into the projects. So, I’m freshly divorced, with two small children, I have never had so much as my own apartment and I have two weeks to find a landlord who accepts Section 8. And if you don’t find a place, you’re back in the lottery.”
“My goal is to revolutionize all of the tech used for every single social service. I don’t want anyone else to go through what I went through.”
VaShaun was fortunate that she had the support of her family who gave her money for first and last month’s rent and she found a landlord who would give her a chance. “So after seven years of waiting, I got my first house on Section 8,” says VaShaun. “And I started keeping a binder about how to support people going through this process. Because trying to figure out Section 8 as a two-time felon with no money and two children was traumatic.”
By then, with the felonies expunged, VaShaun had also gained a foothold in a Fortune 500 company in Lexington. “I decided early on that I needed to work in the corporate world,” she says. “I had no real experience or exposure to it, but I came up with that idea because I saw that people who had corporate jobs had stability and I wanted that.” She started as a receptionist, but once she got that door open, she kept opening more. “I wanted to be an executive assistant, so I worked harder than anybody else. I created systems. I was running circles around other people. I was assisting one vice president, one principal and twenty-five engineers and by the time I was 30, I became the executive assistant to the Vice President of Global Services and Operations,” she says. “It was all my work ethic.”
When the company announced it would be moving its operations out of the country, VaShaun used her corporate know-how to launch her own technology and professional development firm: Vauntech. Eventually, she began using the notes she once took in a binder to develop an app that provides information and clear pathways t2o acquiring all federal social services – housing, food, healthcare. Launched just last month, her Allies for Allyance app is poised to become an essential tool for social services workers across the country and the people they serve. “I want to make sure that all poverty-stricken individuals have access to welfare and a pathway out of poverty,” she says. “Navigating the welfare system was deeply traumatic. But that journey took me from being a welfare participant to being a serial entrepreneur with a deep social mission of transforming lives.”
While VaShaun has had ups and downs throughout the process of building her small but mighty tech empire, she now employs XX people including her own father as her Chief Experience Officer. VaShaun never finished a college degree, but she has a C-suite composed of people with master’s and advanced degrees. As a Black woman in tech without a college degree, she is truly an anomaly: Women are a minority in technology, making up approximately 27% of the workforce in that industry; Black women represent a mere 3%, according to the Department of Labor. “I didn’t think about the challenges because I have been challenged before and survived,” she explains. While VaShaun has thrived, so have her children. Her son is a Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps. Her daughter is college bound and VaShaun hopes she will one day run the charitable foundation she hopes to start– after she sells her company for the high price tag that she believes it deserves.
“My goal is to revolutionize all of the tech used for every single social service,” she says. “I don’t want anyone else to go through what I went through.” Her clear vision and persistence have paid off and she is now enjoying her success. “I’ve spent ten years as a serial entrepreneur and this June, I moved into a 3,500 square-foot home in Locust Creek,” VaShaun says. “I had no handouts, no big names behind me, but I worked hard and I was able to create a pathway out of poverty because I believed I could.”
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If you want to learn more:
Go to VauntechSolutions.com for more information about their services, the new app or about VaShaun’s two books, Behind Her Eyes and 365 Days of Attacks, but God.
