A new Milwaukee social impact startup is working to close diversity gaps within communications and creative industries.
Colorful Connections, founded last year by Morgan Phelps, specializes in matching companies with diverse talent, such as women, and black, brown and other minority candidates.
Phelps, who long worked in journalism and public relations, said she saw a need for a service like Colorful Connections after navigating the industry herself as a black woman.
“As one of few people of color on the creative side of agencies, working on projects, I had that perspective,” she said.
When putting together Colorful Connections’ approach to diversifying workplaces, Phelps interviewed large companies, like Ketchum and Leo Burnett, as well as human resources professionals, to find out what the challenges were in finding and hiring a diverse team.
Colorful Connections, one of Wisconsin Inno’s 20 Startups to Watch in 2020, places candidates in roles, while also assisting workers in navigating and advancing their careers. The startup focuses on job fulfillment, team development and talent development, Phelps said.
“The more that you focus on a healthy team, the easier it will be to recruit talent,” she said.
So far, most of the startup’s clients are in the Milwaukee area and other Wisconsin cities, as well as Chicago, where Phelps is originally from. But Phelps is envisioning providing her service to companies across the country. Colorful Connections’ service varies in price, depending on the size of a client, Phelps said.
Since launching the startup, Phelps has bootstrapped it. She said she is interested in raising venture capital but has run into challenges similar to the ones she is trying to tackle with her company's mission.
“I’m a woman of color, and a black woman on top of that, so the funding challenges that I’m hearing about—all these statistics about how rare it is for a woman of color to get investor dollars—I think I’m living that right now,” Phelps said.
In 2019, venture capital funding raised by female founders hit an all-time high, though it still only represented 2.8 percent of capital invested across the entire U.S. startup ecosystem. And the percentage of black women founders raising capital remains small. In 2018, Vanity Fair highlighted women of color who raised $1 million or more in venture capital, and there were just 26.
