Funded Partner Spotlight: Rise and Thrive Foundation
When Kay-Kay Smith moved to St. Petersburg from Miami in 1994, she quickly found herself facing a host of challenges. A career in cosmetology offered her a way to provide for her young son and find stability, even through hard times.
Today, she directs the Rise and Thrive Foundation, with a mission of disrupting cycles of life and health disparities by helping families build generational stability. With a grant from the Foundation and Orlando Health Bayfront Hospital, the group recently conducted a series of workshops and hands-on trainings to help South St. Petersburg residents build long-lasting revenue streams through entrepreneurship.
Roughly 80 residents took part in the Beauty of Business Academy. From Smith, they learned hands-on tips to navigate and thrive in the beauty industry, in which Smith has more than three decades of experience. They also learned practical strategies to set up and run a business in longevity, and received instruction in financial literacy, investing, and financial strategy for life and business from Ashley Pittman and Roderick Jefferson of Grow Financial.
“Youth and families learned about how they could turn their natural gifts and talents into a business, and build generational stability,” Smith said. “Entrepreneurship has been in my family for a long time. My great-grandmother owned a grocery store and church. My grandmother owned a sandwich shop and sold silk flowers. Even my father, a longtime educator and counselor in Miami, also entered entrepreneurship through a barbecue business. Entrepreneurship has always held a space in my family.”
With Foundation grant funding, the group hosted two four-hour trainings covering a variety of topics designed to help participants grow and sustain a business. Based on feedback, they pared the trainings back to two hours and offered an additional four sessions. While Smith focused hands-on activities on the beauty industry specifically, much of the subject matter was applicable to a variety of industry areas, she said.
“I’ve been in the space for so long that I’ve seen people start and go out of business,” Smith explained, adding that discipline and having a strategy are key to long-term success. “Even when life kind of fell apart for reasons I didn’t have control over, I had a system to stay in business, and that’s what we taught,
For Smith, entrepreneurship and education go hand-in-hand. Long-term success requires keeping up with trends and industry developments, building skills, and finding ways to stay adaptable and relevant.
“You have to constantly stay abreast of your industry,” said Smith, who holds a bachelor’s degree in mass communications and journalism from the University of South Florida, along with a certificate in human trafficking.
Over her three decades in St. Petersburg, Smith worked her way up from serving as a beauty industry assistant, to renting booths of her own to ultimately owning her own salon, to now directing the Rise and Thrive Foundation.
She entered the nonprofit space in 2018 after her mother passed away from chronic illnesses associated with racial health disparities, creating an organization called Wanda’s Wish in her honor. The group, led by Smith and her sister Aliesha Frazier, started out giving comfort bags to those in treatment for life-changing illnesses in honor of their mother’s wishes. Over time, Wanda’s Wish grew and morphed into the Rise and Thrive Foundation.
“My mother had many health disparities associated with chronic illness and childhood trauma, including cancer and kidney failure, and she always wanted other people to feel loved and comforted on their treatment days. Her disparities had everything to do with her outcomes, not having access to quality healthcare during her life,” Smith explained. “We added entrepreneurship training into our work to help build generational stability because financial stability is a key ingredient to generational stability. We also hold this space in remembrance of my mom to help make lives better because her life could have been better.”
To learn more about the Rise and Thrive Foundation, visit https://www.riseandthrivefoundation.com/.