Rapper, activist, and entrepreneur Killer Mike is combining financial literacy and entertainment with Greenwood, his digital banking firm, which is developing a new studio to generate financial education video.
Killer Mike says “people want to see content and are interested in being entertained, but people also want their education in a way that is easily absorbed. The people who don’t know get to know, the people who already know, know more, and the people who know-it-all realize how little they really do know and get a chance to be educated as well.”
Greenwood gets its name from the former Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma aka Black Wall Street.
Killer Mike, Ryan Glover, and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young formed Greenwood in late 2020 with the goal of serving Black and Latino communities, entrepreneurs, and small companies.
To begin, Greenwood’s content studio will collaborate with Earn Your Leisure, a popular podcast, to create new content focused at Black and Latino consumers.
It bills itself as “pop culture meets Harvard Business School,” focusing on the business of sports and entertainment.
Greenwood was originally mentioned by hosts Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings during a podcast conversation with Killer Mike, and they see the brand’s expansion into content as a huge opportunity.
Ryan Glover, a former record exec and founder of Bounce TV believes that “In order to thwart racial inequality, financial empowerment has to exist. We want to help people learn how to fish but also teach our community how to prepare the fish.”
It’s not a new concept to combine pop culture and entertainment to improve financial literacy. You have 21 Savage with his “Issa Back 2 School Drive”, and Lebron James’ collaboration with Chase back in 2018. Greenwood is taking a different direction though. “Oftentimes working-class people, people who are newly immigrated, people who grew up poor, are intimidated by finance,” Render says.