GIFT hopes NFL Draft visitors touch down at Saturday’s Black Business Market; nonprofit passes $1M in grants given 

Packed streets for the NFL Draft around Union Station and downtown this week could mean added traffic to Saturday’s Black Business Market on Kansas City’s east side, said Brandon Calloway.

“We’re gonna drive as many people over here so they see the vibrancy that can happen on Prospect, as well as exposing a lot of Black businesses to that potential tourism market that’ll be here,” said Calloway, co-founder and CEO of Kansas City G.I.F.T.

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GIFT co-founder Cornell Gorman is interviewed outside one of the monthly Black Business Market events; photo courtesy of Kansas City GIFT

The monthly Black Business Market — 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the last Saturday of the month at the G.I.F.T Business Center, 5008 Prospect Ave. — just happens to fall within the highly-anticipated football festivities, he added, but the timing presents a unique opportunity for the market’s 60 featured vendors to earn more exposure.

Click here to read more about Equal Minded Cafe, one of the dozens of vendors at the Black Business Market.

G.I.F.T. — or Generating Income For Tomorrow — is a nonprofit organization founded in 2020 that works to close the racial wealth gap in Kansas City by awarding grants to Black-owned businesses in historically redlined and underserved neighborhoods.

Click here to read more about G.I.F.T.

The organization’s co-founders started the Black Business Market in October 2021, Calloway noted, as a way to help businesses beyond those that have received grants.

“We figured we could bring our audience to these businesses and help them grow their sales and help them network and grow their business that way,” he explained of the market’s origins. “We were limited in the amount of money we could give out through grants. And we knew if we were able to do the market and do it well, it could be an additional catalyst to businesses that we’ve supported and businesses that we hadn’t been able to support yet.”

So far, the market has featured 250 different businesses and typically draws between 100 to 200 customers each month, he continued. Collectively, the businesses garner between $6,000 on a slow day to up to $12,000.

“So in a 12-month timeframe, we’re looking at them doing somewhere between $60,000 to $120,000 in sales just at our business market,” he added.

$1.2M in grants awarded

G.I.F.T’s grant-giving recently hit a milestone — surpassing the $1 million mark.

In just three years, the organization has awarded $1.2 million to more than 65 Black-owned businesses in Kansas City, Calloway shared, noting another $200,00 in technical support given to the grant recipients.

Co-founders Cornell Gorman, Christopher “LOKC” Stewart, and Brandon Calloway, Generating Income For Future Generations (G.I.F.T.), cut the ribbon of the nonprofit’s business center on Prospect Avenue in March 2022; photo by Channa Steinmetz, Startland News

In turn, those businesses have created between 90 and 100 new jobs and grown their revenues by more than 200 percent on average since receiving grants and support.

“It feels very rewarding and meaningful to be able to say that we have put $1 million — $1.2 specifically — into the east side of Kansas City to help these businesses grow,” he said. 

While it feels amazing, Calloway continued, it’s painfully clear the work still isn’t enough.

“When we started, our data and numbers pointed out that the west side of Kansas City was 91 percent white with 5 percent poverty and the east side was 75 percent Black with 36 percent poverty,” he explained. “So 100 jobs over three years — roughly 33 jobs a year — that’s not really going to move any huge needles; 40 jobs a year isn’t really going to move a lot of needles. So I am very, very happy that we have been able to grow and reach this point. I am also eager and impatient to get to scale to the point that we really need to scale, so we can make sustainable, impactful, long-term change.”

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While the award total is a big marker for G.I.F.T. — which boasts the motto “If 15,000 People Donated $10 A Month” — Calloway said it’s an even bigger milestone for the people of Kansas City, as they are the ones donating the money for the grants.

“It was exciting to see that many people get behind the idea of collective community support like that,” he noted. “It speaks to the efforts of the people of Kansas City who actually want to make some change. Also, it shows that the program works, and that the impact that we’re trying to have, people want to see in the city. So that makes me very, very, very eager to be able to do what the city really needs us to do, rather than just do what we can.”