The Aux: Transforming Community Support into Real-World Impact

By Casey Profile | BuyBlack.org

The woman had driven from Indiana with soiled clothes and a sick daughter in a hospital she didn't know. She typed "laundry" into her phone and ended up on a block in Evanston, Illinois, walking into a place called The Laundry Cafe. She didn't know yet that while she waited, she would take a yoga class next door, that a stranger would finish folding her clothes, or that she would leave feeling, in her own words, cared for.

Tosha Wilson tells that story not as a marketing pitch but as proof. Proof that what she built was real, that it worked the way she always believed it could.

A Facebook Group With a Bigger Idea Inside It

Wilson is a sergeant with the Evanston Police Department. In 2020, during a year when the country was forcing itself to reckon with what it owed Black communities, she started a Facebook group. She called it Boosting Black Business. It was a simple idea: connect Evanston's Black entrepreneurs with the people who wanted to support them.

But Wilson had always seen something larger inside that simple idea. The Facebook group, she would later say, was just the beginning. What she was really building in her mind was a physical place — somewhere people could walk into, not just scroll through.

The first idea the group got behind was her own: The Laundry Cafe, a laundromat built around the belief that waiting for your clothes shouldn't feel like wasted time. The community raised $20,000 to back it. That act of collective investment became the first proof of concept for everything that followed.

Eight Million Dollars and Somebody's Basement

The space that would become The Aux cost $10 million. Wilson and her collaborators raised $8 million of that themselves, through community fundraising and outreach that took them from basement presentations to meetings in downtown Chicago. Wilson describes that period without any romance about how hard it was. They went wherever someone would listen.

"I don't care if we were going to people's basements and doing presentations all the way to having meetings downtown Chicago," she said. "We were everywhere saying this is good for the community."

The model drew inspiration from Sherman Phoenix in Milwaukee, a similar hub that brought Black- and women-owned businesses together under one roof. Wilson was deliberate about how The Aux would operate differently from a traditional commercial space. She didn't want to hand business owners leases they couldn't sustain. The goal was to give people a foundation, not a trap.

What Lives Inside The Aux Now

Today, The Aux houses several Black- and women-owned businesses, each one selected with care. The Laundry Cafe anchors the space. Beside it is The Aux Wellness Collective, led by Tiffini Holmes, a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach and author of Balancing The Scale: What I Gained While Losing. Holmes built The Wellness Collective to increase access to culturally competent wellness services, create a platform for wellness practitioners of color, and provide retail space for artisans selling handcrafted wellness products.

Holmes had carried the idea of a wellness center for years before The Aux made it real. She had already made peace with the possibility that it would never happen.

"A wellness center was a dream I had when I started my own wellness journey that I thought would never be actualized, and I was okay with that," Holmes said. "Then, when Tosha had the dream about The Laundry Cafe, I was cheerleading and trying to help where I could — and then I got the opportunity to open The Wellness Collective as well."

That dynamic, one person's dream making room for another person's, runs through the entire story of The Aux. Wilson built something that multiplies.

A Gala the Day After Juneteenth

On June 20, The Aux will host its first gala — the day after Juneteenth. There will be food, raffles, dancing, and drumming. The building will open to the community. Wilson chose the timing deliberately. The event is both a celebration and an invitation, a chance for people who have never walked through the doors to understand what's there.

When Wilson talks about the gala, she reaches past the logistics and says something quieter.

"This is not necessarily something our ancestors could have envisioned this way and made happen," she said. "So it's a proud moment, just historically in the community."

What It Means to Feel Cared For

Wilson doesn't describe The Aux in the language of economic development, even though that's exactly what it is. She describes it in the language of human experience — what it feels like to walk into a building where someone knows what you need before you ask, where a yoga class is next door to a laundromat because stress and dirty clothes sometimes arrive together.

She raised $8 million in basements and boardrooms to build a place where a woman from Indiana, on one of the harder days of her life, could wash her daughter's clothes and walk out feeling refreshed. That's the Facebook group brought to life. That's what Tosha Wilson meant all along.