Cofounder, 100 Urban Entrepreneurs

When Lucas Riggins stresses to young people the importance of creating their own opportunities to rise above their circumstances, he’s speaking from hard-won experience. Born in Harlem and adopted by a family in Queens when he was just 9 months old, Riggins spent his formative years a witness to the often harsh reality of inner-city street life — a daily reminder of the importance of choosing another path.

As a young adult, Riggins, interested in a job in the recording industry, persuaded an executive at Universal Records to hire him as part of the label’s “street” marketing team. Soon, a chance meeting with a budding author spurred a business partnership around a self-published book and, ultimately, the sale of the business to a major publishing company.

Riggins’s desire to provide urban communities with business-and-finance information and education took shape in 2007 with his launch of Rich & Famous, a magazine devoted — through profiles of urban corporate leaders and other industry successes — to inspiring the creation of minority businesses. Having reached out in the meantime to kindred spirit Magnus Greaves, Riggins helped found 100 Urban Entrepreneurs, the nonprofit foundation that will be funding 100 promising entrepreneurs from economically disadvantaged communities nationwide.

Its development has given Riggins, 40, another opportunity to fulfill his ambition. “It’s important for me to provide young people with the tools to help them help themselves,” he says. “They have to understand that nobody is going to give them anything. We have to empower ourselves.”