Guava, a banking hub for Black entrepreneurs and small business owners founded by entrepreneur Kelly Ifill, is as unique as its name suggests.
Ifill launched Guava in 2021 with a vision of putting small Black businesses on a pathway that would lead to generational wealth and economic change. The company takes inspiration from her family’s entrepreneurial experiences with racial disparities and unequal access to capital in the U.S.
Ifill, 37, grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with her grandmother and mother, who would later become deeply instrumental in pushing her toward a better education and opportunities. Like many in the neighborhood, her people originally hail from Trinidad. Her grandmother was a proud entrepreneur who owned a cleaning business. Ifill said she and her relatives all took cues from her grandmother, seeing her as a role model who normalized the idea of working for oneself early on in their development.
“My mom created a space for me to explore as a child,” said Ifill about her mother’s influence. “Especially as first-generation Americans, a lot of us don’t necessarily have [that] right. We have to be a doctor or lawyer. She obviously had high expectations for me, but I was definitely able to explore different things and try things that sparked the foundation of the creative, allowing me to be an entrepreneur.”
Ifill joked that as a child, even though she had many positive role models who were business owners in her family, she was wary of dealing with the difficulties that came with running a business as a Black woman. “I was like, ‘That looks hard, I want a job,’” she said with a laugh. “But here I am.”
Ifill initially became an educator in the city’s public and charter schools, taking an interest in technology along the way. She went on to earn an MBA at Columbia University. After business school, she worked in the venture capital sector for a few years, in educational tech, helping connect startups and emerging companies with funds.
“Again, it came back to my grandmother, my cousins, my uncles, and knowing that more entrepreneurs looked like them than the folks that were getting millions of dollars,” Ifill said about the disparities she witnessed. She began working on laying the groundwork for Guava as a result. Her ultimate goal was to use her bank and networking system to connect local Black businesses to critical resources that they need to survive and thrive.
The company name reflects her cultural origins. “I love guava specifically, and when we were doing the naming exercise, it started off as a little bit of an inside joke,” she said, explaining how her company came to be named after a tangy tropical fruit. “And the more that we stuck with the name, it really fit what we do and how we do it. I built Guava to serve Black and Brown entrepreneurs and as a fruit, it signified the process of growing together and that sense of community.”
[updated Thurs, May 9]
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member who writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.