How To Raise $30 Million For Communities Everyone Else Ignores Ft Simone Hardiman-Jones

Simone Hardeman-Jones flew into ATL to break down how she's reimagining what philanthropy actually looks like. As executive director of Green Light Fund Twin Cities, she walks into rooms full of wealthy people and convinces them to invest in the communities everybody else overlooks.

We get into the Minnesota paradox. It's ranked number one in quality of life and dead last in the income gap between Black and white residents.

Same state. Two completely different realities depending on who you are.

Simone shares how Green Light Fund finds high-impact programs that don't exist yet in a community, brings them in, and backs them with $600K in seed funding over four years. We talk about the maternal health crisis where 95% of Black maternal deaths were preventable, the food logistics problem hiding behind 9 million food shelf visits, and why she stopped selling her community as a problem to fix.

She also gets into what it means to be a Black woman asking for money in rooms that weren't built to welcome her, the difference between deciding for a community versus with it, and the fifth-grade letter-writing campaign that started it all. Learn more about Green Light Fund at Subscribe for more conversations on the business of culture.

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