Spin for April 12 2021

 

A wife and mother of two young boys who’s living in a fixer-upper in the 46805 area, Kristin Giant is an entrepreneur who lost her consulting firm, HyperLocalImpact, during the pandemic. Yet, she used her skills to put $800,000 into the community in its first year of existence, with $700,000 of that associated with the Family & Friends Fund for Southeast Fort Wayne hosted by the Community Foundation of Fort Wayne, a fund she co-created and one she happily says killed her business. She’s a pro bono consultant for it. An attorney by trade and a past rock band singer, she also leads grant administration for the McMillen Foundation and is the chief growth officer for a new tech startup, Pond.

 

With so much under her belt, Giant would be speaking about all her successes, right? Not so.

 

“By all practical measurements, I’m here to talk about the one-year anniversary of my failed business,” she said. But it’s important to her because “if we want innovation and growth in Fort Wayne we have to make room for people to publicly fail.” 

It’s why she called her talk, “It Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard.” Failure is not an indictment of who you are. Showing up the next day and trying again is who you are.

 

A 5-year resident of Fort Wayne, Giant quit her job at private equity firm Ambassador Enterprises and started her consulting firm April 1, 2020, with backing from Ambassador, money that later started the Friends & Family Fund. She planned to teach high net-worth families to be more efficient with their philanthropy and investments, aid nonprofits in the design of innovative products to connect to donors and investors, and work with foundations to make their grant-making more equitable, efficient and innovative. Then the COVID-19 pandemic occurred and one by one her leads dried up and she couldn’t ask for $250 an hour to do things that couldn’t even be done.

 

Her clinical depression and anxiety ratcheted up as she sought ways to connect to her community at a time “where our needs are higher than ever, our resources are lower than ever and our ability to connect and solve people’s problems is almost nonexistent?”

 

A full-blooded Millennial, she took to social media and rallied people online to help businesses: a gift card challenge that raised $6,000 for small businesses the first month, a partnership with a small businesses, two nonprofits and a program that raised $4,500 in two days instead the months she believed it would take.

 

Then came the national stories of Black men and women killed: Ahmaud Arbery while he was out for a run in Georgia, Breonna Taylor by Louisville Police, and George Floyd asphyxiated while a Minneapolis Police office knelt on his neck.

After the protests in downtown Fort Wayne following Floyd’s death, Giant felt called to act and use her area of expertise in equitable philanthropy.

 

“I was afraid that all these while people that had all of this energy for justice would throw a lot of money away carelessly, on causes that not only weren’t getting to the underlying issues of economic justice, but are actually feeding systems that are perpetuating some of the oppression that creates economic injustice,” she said. Those include the nonprofit, philanthropic and business sectors as well as herself.

 

So she posted June 20 that she would raise $1 million by July 4 and give complete control of the money over to Black leaders for use in the southeast side of town. She didn’t meet the goal. “I really thought I could do it,” she said.

 

However, it prompted others to try and raise a little here and there. After 200 volunteers offered to raise $1,000 or $10,000 each, they raised $50,000 in the first two weeks. By the end of the second month the amount had grown to $250,000, with $25,000 coming from bake sales.

 

Her project partner, Ty Simmons, founder of the Utopian Community Grocery to bring healthy food options to the southeast quadrant, came up a list of 40 companies that could benefit. 3Rivers Federal offered them $25,000.

 

The southeast leaders looked at ways to give the money away as quickly as possible: $100,000 in each of September 2020 and last February. It went to Black, Asian immigrant, Latinx and indigenous entrepreneurs.

 

“A part of white culture is holding onto resources,” Giant said. “We talk about sustainability, we talk about how can we get this invested on the market so that it can grow.”

 

The Family and Friends Fund killed her business. “And I’ve never ever been more grateful for anything than that failure.”

 

One way that businesses can help is to buy corporate memberships to the Black-owned Utopian Community Grocery so their employees will get a percentage off of their purchases, which also benefit Black farmers. Family & Friends Fund could use website designers, contractors, sign painters and other skills, not just money, she said. Contact her at kristin@hyperlocalimpact.com, though she says her response time may be about six weeks.