Not a program. A proven environment. Here is what that means.

This Is Where Your Future Gets Real.

The CDMA Business Model® is where young people stop hearing about careers and start building them. Through real media production, AI storytelling, apprenticeships, and hands-on industry experiences. This is learning that moves.

WHERE ARE YOU?

You belong here. Whether you are into media, music, technology, design, or you just know you want to do something that matters the CDMA Business Model Academy has a pathway for you. Start by entering the CDMA Business Model® Creative Innovation Hub in Washington, DC.

From the Harlem Renaissance to the 21st Century

ShaNette is the founder of CDMA Business Model® Evidence-Based CTE Ecosystem™ and rooted in a powerful New York family legacy and committed to advancing youth workforce development in both New York and Washington, DC.

In 2026, New York honored ShaNette at the NYC Her Future TrailblazHer Awards, through the NYC Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice and the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development. It was a full-circle recognition from the city where the legacy began, honoring the woman continuing to carry it forward.

Her leadership is part of a multigenerational tradition of economic empowerment documented in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. In 1920s Queens, her great-grandmother, Elease, built one of the few Black-owned employment agencies of her era. Her grandmother, Fannetta, carried that mission forward. Today, ShaNette continues that lineage through work centered on opportunity, preparation, and pathways to meaningful careers for young people.

Early Impact across Washington, DC

Students

DC Schools

Empowered Teachers

In 2016, that work was recognized on a live episode of WUSA9 Great Day Washington, where DC middle school students were featured as proof that career readiness can begin as early as age 10. The segment also helped spotlight a major commitment from Staples to support 103 DC teachers, 58 DC schools, and 8,000 students, reinforcing the importance of investing early in education and career development.

That legacy is not only historic, it is active. CDMA Business Model Aacdemy of Greater Washington, Inc. has focused on supporting youth in Ward 7 and communities east of the river, helping bridge the gap between classroom learning and career exposure.

As conversations around youth workforce development continue to grow, CDMA Business Model® Evidence-Based CTE Ecosystem™ stands as part of a longer continuum of work: a reminder that this commitment did not begin with a moment or a trend, but lives on through generations of intentional service in both cities with New York students reaching national and international exposure through syndicated television programming at BET 106 & Park in 2013.

Rooted in Legacy. Committed to Youth.

About The Academy

What Makes This Different

Most programs teach you about industries. The CDMA Business Model Academy puts you inside them. Connecting education-to-industry while turning dreams to reality.

From the moment a young person enters CDMA Business Model Academy, they are not a student waiting to graduate into the real world. They are a creator, a producer, a collaborator doing real work for real audiences with real consequences. That is the foundation of everything we do.

This approach is not accidental. It is the result of over a decade of applied implementation, refined through experience, and grounded in an evidence base that documents what happens when young people are trusted with real responsibility.