25 hour day!

Photo by Brandon Fields

Tayyib Smith, Little Giant Creative

Little Giant Creative, a project Tayyib co-founded 10 years ago, specializes in cultural competency for brands, institutions, and nonprofits. Work with their main client, Heinekin USA, for whom they develop messaging to speak to multicultural audiences, gives the firm agency and ability to do social justice work. Collaborating with clients in cultural competency, they create websites, host events series, and help clients frame their brands to diverse audiences.

Tayyib used to be in the music business and, through music, learned how to create platforms for speaking with diverse audiences. Ten years ago, it was rare for brands to have any understanding or intellectual framework for how to speak to audiences of people of color, or audiences of women. Since then, the firm has developed programming for City Hall Presents, an underutilized space, which included 36 concerts in public space with contemporary ballet, poetry events, and drumming groups. The firm created the first multicultural tourism campaign for the City of Philadelphia, called Philly 360. For the Sharp Insight Campaign, which won the Knight News Challenge, they organized a series of events in barbershops to talk to African-American men, from a nonpartisan perspective, about civic engagement.

Other projects include the Dare to Imagine capital campaign for the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

Over time, they’ve learned that, without empathy, you can’t have conversations that go anywhere. They encourage clients to have conversations with audiences, not speak directly to them, which is what hierarchical organizations and institutions usually do.

Little Giant Creative worked on an initiative, TruthToPower, as part of a cohort for the DNC campaign last year that included 100 artists who did artwork that spoke to social justice issues. Tayyib related an indicator of TruthToPower’s effectiveness. They got 250-million social media impressions in three days, and were successful in drawing 10,000 people into a 20,000 square-foot space. The DNC got 35-million social media impressions from their campaign.

In 2011 they moved out of a space they had been in for several years, and pitched to a developer friend( David Grasso)  an idea for a co-working space, which had starting taking off as a concept in 2010. The friend thought the idea wouldn’t work. In 2013, in Chicago, (We Work)they built out a 100,00 square-foot co-working space. Soon after, they began demolition for what became their Pipeline co-working space in Philadelphia. The Knight Foundation, which had been sharing space with the City of Philadelphia, broke their lease to become Pipeline’s first tenant.

Tayyib noted that, according to a recent study by Pew Charitable Trusts, four out of five businesses in Philadelphia are owned by white people. Paradoxically, at one time, the city was called the New Jerusalem because of the history of free blacks living there, and more businesses in Philadelphia were owned by blacks than anywhere else in the Western hemisphere. Creative Cities Lab, under development, will be a series of events to educate communities that have benefitted from social-engineering policies, such as redlining, and for economically impoverished communities that may not have the skills to articulate what they’re experiencing. (https://www.adreamdeferredphl.org/)

The recent Little Giant Creative platform he’s most proud of is the Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship, for which they won a Knight Cities Challenge grant in 2016. Because of his experience in the music world, Tayyib has many colleagues through Hip Hop, who are not in the Hip Hop business. One, a friend who is the creative director for Spotify, who is also a venture capitalist, discovered Lady Gaga when he was a producer, after he started out as a street teamer distributing leaflets. For many of these colleagues, across a wide range of industries around the world, their first business experience was Hip Hop, which gave them an independent road map to a career. The Institute of Hip Hop Entrepreneurship works with 24 students over nine months—including a young woman who wants to teach fiscal literacy to children and another who wants to create accessible vegan foods http://beansandbrains.com/ —to inspire them to use Hip Hop thinking to create their own business.