Fortune & Forks, a private social collective for women of color, made its mark on Indianapolis during the 2025 WNBA All-Star Weekend.
Founded by Naomi Wright and Krystal Vega, Fortune & Forks invited Black women entrepreneurs from across the country to celebrate their personal wins alongside women’s sports. The Catering to Champions Dinner, which saw the likes of Christina “Ms. Basketball” Ros-Gold Onwude, Ty Young, Monique Billings, Maya Reese, Lexi Mickens and Brittney Elena, took place at Bottleworks Hotel on July 17, and took a moment to celebrate the personal wins of women in sports.
“Fortune & Forks is really about building premium experiences and creating luxury experiences for women of color, because we deserve it, and we deserve to experience those things,” Vega said. “But at the same time, just giving everybody an opportunity to connect and create organic relationships, because that’s the best way to do it.”
Best friends Wright and Vega, a co-executive producer at Uninterrupted and an on-air TV host and content creator respectively, began hosting dinners among their peers to create safe spaces for women to network seven years ago. Vega said men generally have an easier time building relationships to help them navigate through their professional lives post-secondary education. However, when it comes to women, especially women of color, opportunities to network aren’t as accessible.
That’s where Wright and Vega came in.
“They’re (men) creating relationships on the golf course, and for us, it was important to be organic,” Vega said. “So, we figured doing it over some cocktails and dinner was more of our style.”
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The dinners were so successful that Vega and Wright were asked to host them more often, with the possibility of turning it into a membership-related club to keep people connected, rather than one-off events. Fortune & Forks was born soon after as a safe space for Black women and women of color to “let our hair down to celebrate ourselves and others’ next win and accomplishment,” Wright said.
The private social collective is currently active in four U.S. cities — Atlanta, New York, Miami and Los Angeles — with high-end experiences designed to remind women to take a break, step back and celebrate themselves.
The Catering to Champions dinner series was started more than a year ago for the influx of Fortune & Forks members who were in the sports industry, especially after the monumental season women’s sports has been having, Wright said. Hosting an activation in Indianapolis during the WNBA All-Star was a privilege and presented its members with a unique opportunity to support and honor the hard work, dedication and victories of female athletes.
“I think bringing something specifically to The WNBA All-Star felt really important to us, just to acknowledge all the wins of women, both in and outside of our community in the past couple years,” Wright said. “A lot of them were sort of fighting for women’s sports to get the dollars behind it and the viewership before it was even such a big thing and culture as we know it now. The city of Indy really welcomed us in an exciting way, and it felt like everyone who was there really cared about women’s sports and wanted to be in town for this specific event … because they care about equity in women’s sports.”
Wright and Vega also do quite a bit of work behind the scenes. When they’re not hosting elaborate luxury dinners, Wright and Vega are putting together educational opportunities through their talkbacks series, yearly international retreats, developing online portals for members to find and share new, exclusive job opportunities, creating a virtual resume book and launching a Slack Channel to keep members updated in real time, Wright said.
However, while the dinners “are beautiful and exciting,” Vega said Fortune & Forks caters to women of color overall as a whole, not just professionally. Sometimes this looks like encouraging women to practice self-care and build lasting friendships.
“We’ve continued to try to figure out how we can build power and create access so that these rooms are not just a moment, but really sort of translate into a movement that lives on beyond the individual events,” Wright said. “We have the privilege of getting to connect with all of the women who come to these environments and stay connected with them. So yeah, I consider this work that’s really rooted in joy.”
However, Wright also said it is also a privilege to be able to build something like Fortune & Forks alongside her best friend.
“I think the joy is really in hearing how women continue to connect outside of that one event that we put together,” Vega added. “Just hearing the feedback from women in terms of how much they enjoyed the experience at Fortune & Forks, I think that, to Naomi’s point, is rewarding in itself.”
Fortune & Forks accepts membership applications through its website. Applications are reviewed quarterly by a membership review board. Although Fortune & Forks is active in four cities, members from other states are encouraged to join in person or virtually when applicable.
For more information, visit fortuneandforks.com/home.
Contact Arts & Culture Reporter Chloe McGowan at 317-762-7848. Follow her on X @chloe_mcgowanxx.
Chloe McGowan is the Arts & Culture Reporter for the Indianapolis Recorder Newspaper. Originally from Columbus, OH, Chloe has a bachelor's in journalism from The Ohio State University. She is a former IndyStar Pulliam Fellow, and has previously worked for Indy Maven, The Lantern, and CityScene Media Group. In her free time, Chloe enjoys live theatre, reading, baking and keeping her plants alive.
