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How Fresh Prince's Karyn Parsons Became The Founder Of A Creative Nonprofit http://ift.tt/2lA3V7A Karyn Parsons is the change she wishes to see in the world. As the founder and Executive Director at Sweet Blackberry, she writes the histories of untold figures in African-American culture and ensures their legacies come to life as children-friendly animations. Since 2005, Parsons' nonprofit has produced three illustrated shorts, The Journey of Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Garrett's Gift and Dancing in the Light: The Janet Collins Story, respectively narrated by Alfre Woodard, Queen Latifah and Chris Rock. And after a successful Kickstarter in 2017, Parsons is now hard at work on her fourth animation, The Bessie Coleman Story, about the first Black woman to receive her pilot's license (debuting in January 2018). Her personal story is also one for the books. If you recognize Parsons' name, you might be familiar with her role as Hillary Banks in 90s TV favorite The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. That's actually how the idea for Sweet Blackberry came to be. When Parsons became a new mother in the early 2000s, she began to search for culturally appropriate films to share with her daughter—and she found herself coming up short. Motivated, passionate and connected to talent through her own acting career, she decided to simply tell these stories herself. In this interview with Karyn Parsons, we explore her 12-year journey as a social entrepreneur at Sweet Blackberry and how storytelling shapes culture, community and children's understandings of themselves. Jane Claire Hervey: Basic, simple question—who are you and what do you do? Karyn Parsons: I’m the President and CEO—it’s so funny to hear that—but yeah, the founder of Sweet Blackberry. It’s a nonprofit, and the mission is to bring little-known stories of African American history to children. We create short, animated films with a single narrator and the way that they’re animated makes it more like a picture book that comes to life. For a young audience, the idea is to bring stories to them where they are and make it really engaging, like a fairy tale. For example, Little Red Riding Hood: wouldn’t it be great if those fairy tales featured real people? We want to show kids that big obstacles are actually opportunities to do big things. It’s important to shed the light on people that we don’t hear about; there are so many stories that are so inspiring and offer so much to all children. For children of color, they offer something really great and fortifying. We don’t have enough of that. Hervey: Sweet Blackberry got its start in 2005—can you provide some initial context to that starting environment? Was there anything that triggered the manifestation of Sweet Blackberry’s vision and goals? Parsons: I came from being an actor, and I didn't know anything about business at all. And actually it makes me kind of laugh looking at it now. I didn’t think practically, and I never have. I’m not a practical person—I just dove into it with passion and not necessarily what it would take to sustain something like this (which is good because if I had known I probably would have thought it was too daunting and not started it). My mother—she was a librarian—she worked at the Black Resource Library when I was on Fresh Prince, and she would tell me these stories that were fascinating. She told me the story of Henry 'Box' Brown who literally mailed himself to freedom in a box, and I thought it was incredible. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard the story, and my friends hadn’t heard it, either. So, when I started, I was just hoping to get these stories out that inspired me, and I was just trying to figure out how to do it. Self-publishing wasn’t as easy then, so I felt I could instead make a film. I started talking to people, and I met an animator and got very exciting about working with her. I then met some illustrators and started working with one and pulled it altogether. I had no idea how to do it; I even had to get a personal loan to help make it happen. I also didn’t have a business plan or a business model; I just dove into the deep end of the pool, and I made a lot of mistakes. As time went on, I started to gain a better idea of what the company was, who responded to it and how. Something that started off as a very modest vision become much larger, because I was living with it. Eventually, I started thinking a lot about becoming a nonprofit, because I had these ideas like, "Oh, I want to do a contest and get older kids to have them involved," and I started realizing that the contests I was developing were actually programs that a nonprofit could have—that we could get sponsors to help fund—and that there were grants out there for the kind of work we do. I realized there were more ways for people to support a business like this. Also, I've got to say, the vision was so modest, I wasn’t going to get an investment, because there wasn’t necessarily going to be a return. Now, I’ve got a lot of ideas I just need to find funding for. As a nonprofit, I’m hoping I can find it. People kept telling me it would be so hard to do a nonprofit, and I just realized I’m not getting investors and I couldn’t, at the time, just artificially come up with some things to satisfy people—it had to be organic and what I wanted to accomplish. I finally went the route of the nonprofit world, and it’s been really great. Everyone is right; it’s hard and it’s constant work, but I know now that you can do both. You can have a for-profit arm, and that’s probably something that will happen soon for us, as well. Hervey: Sweet Blackberry is currently in production on its fourth animation. What has changed since your initial launch? What have you learned? Parsons: One thing I’ve learned is that when you find people you work well with and they understand you and you enjoy working with them, stick with them. I’ve had a lot of people that I’ve worked with in one way or another, and sometimes things seem promising. It seems like you’re talking the same stuff, but when you start working it feels clunky and wrong. You can try to force those things through, but so many times I found the end result is not good. You just weren’t aligned in some way. The flip is that with people who are a pleasure to you, who you feel good talking to, who seem to get you and you get them, that stuff is really important. That’s right at the top of the list. It changes the way I operate. I pay attention to what I feel and what they feel about me, and I don't intellectualize it. What looks good on paper might not be real. I've learned from experience as far as making the films, and I'm not completely flying by the seat of my pants anymore, so that helps knowing more about what I'm doing. I also love the collaborative process; I write the stories, and I usually have them in mind for a really long time, and then I sit down and write it with kinds in mind. Writing Henry 'Box' Brown—writing about an enslaved man—was no joke. You sit and write and you absorb this person and their experiences and try to give it children. And then I hand the script off, and it’s so exciting to have an art director and animator start storyboarding their vision and see it come to life with all of these interesting perspectives that tell the story emotionally, and then to see Gray Christie, our illustrator, bring the art director’s storyboard to life through his imagery—it’s beautiful. He’s got this childlike feeling in his work and it comes across in such sweet, simple characters that are really accessible for kids. It’s so fun to start with who I want to tackle, write the story and then see these really brilliant people put their spin on it and bring life to it. I love the collaborative part of it, and I can't stress it enough: communication, communication, communication. When you think you've crossed every "t" and dotted every "i," nine times out of ten you need to go back and do it all again. Even if you think you’ve laid it all out. Hervey: So how do you determine which stories to tell? I’m sure there are many stories to choose from! Parsons: I did Garret Morgan, the inventor, who invented the traffic signal, which a lot of people are not aware was a contribution by an African American. He also did the gas mask and some other things, but the traffic signal is something right where our audience is living. They’re learning about crossing the street and the traffic signal is right their in their lives. I thought this creative-minded person would be a good character. What was interesting right away in writing the story is that even if someone has a great accomplishment, it's not easy to find the story that's there for children. As I researched, I found out he was from a very large family and how his mind worked. I started to realize that this is a really great story. I think a lot of us know children, especially little boys, whose energy is all over the place and they don’t know how to direct it and then they get into a lot of trouble. I brought that into Garrett’s character more clearly and showed he was creative. But when he started focusing on his inventions he also made a lot of really great things. Business via Forbes - Entrepreneurs http://ift.tt/dTEDZf December 31, 2017 at 03:34PM
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