“My business started with making basketball plant pots. Now I work with the NBA to empower young women in sports”

Growing up, I was obsessed with sports. Basketball, soccer, volleyball and track taught me so many lessons and helped me become a confident adult. I decided to pursue a career in kinesiology because of how important sports were to me growing up. As I did, I discovered a passion for helping kids experiencing the same growth I had. I hadn’t had many mentors or coaches who looked like me, and I wanted to be that person for someone else.

During my studies, I started working at McMaster’s Sport Fitness School, a sports camp for youth that hosted over 500 attendees per day. I ran camps full time during the summer and then helped out with a weekly after-school run club for youth during the school year.

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When it came time to apply for my master’s, I learned that a hiring freeze meant I would have to wait a year. I was impatient to start helping people, so when a friend told me about a post-graduate program in cardiac sonography at Mohawk College, I went for it. That turned into a full time job at St. Michael’s Hospital, where I began working in 2015.

Two years later, I heard that MLSE LaunchPad, a kids’ sports facility in Regent Park, was opening just down the street from the hospital. The place was huge and connected to a social housing building that hundreds of people lived in. The idea was to facilitate free, accessible programming for at-risk youth in the area, providing sports programming, community support and career guidance. I still wanted to work with girls in sports, so I knew I had to be part of it.

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I applied just as they were opening and became one of the first coaches to get hired. I was able to help build the framework of their sports programming using my experience from McMaster. I coached a multi-sport program that introduced youth to a new sport every week. I also did a lot of their soccer, basketball and open gym programming. It was rewarding to collaborate with the kids and to learn what they liked about the facility and what they were hoping to get from it. It made it easy to build a community.

Over this time, I realized I didn’t have to do a master’s in order to help girls through sports. Instead of spending two years doing theoretical research, I was implementing the skills I’d learned in undergrad right there in Regent Park. For the next five years, I watched kids who grew up in that building come into MLSE LaunchPad, make friends, and go on to become mentors and even coaches themselves.

When Covid hit in 2020, I was looking for things to keep myself occupied. I had some old basketballs in my closet, and I’d seen a craft online where people turned them into plant pots. I cut mine, spray-painted them and filled them with little plants, then posted them on my social media—just to show my friends. To my surprise, a lot of friends and family began to reach out and ask if I could make one for them. I thought it could be a fun side hustle and a way for me to take my mind off of the daily stress of working at the hospital, so I started selling them for about $40.

Since the sports centre was closed, I wondered how I could involve the girls I’d been coaching in this little project. I came up with the name The Give and Grow. It’s a pun on the basketball play “give and go,” where one player passes the ball to a teammate and then gets open to receive the ball back. It combines the spirit of teamwork with my goal to give back to the community and help grow the next generation of youth.

I started using the money from the basketball planters to fund free workshops where girls could customize their own. We would partner with community organizations like Mack House, a sneaker customization studio, which offered us free use of their space and their art supplies.

At the time, I focused mostly on equipping girls with the agency to make something and express their creativity, but while I had them in this space, we’d also talk about the lessons you can learn from sports—and plants—for everyday life. With sports, there’s a lot to learn about confidence, leadership and teamwork. Plants, meanwhile, offer a lot of great metaphors for contemplating personal growth, staying grounded, putting down roots and planting intentions. We’d talk about how we can grow as humans into the people we want to be.

In March of 2021, I was still working at the hospital when someone gifted one of my planters to a friend of theirs who had just gotten a job with the Toronto Raptors. The team was playing their regular season in Tampa Bay because of ongoing border restrictions due to Covid. When that gift recipient saw the planters, he thought they would make a nice present for the players who were missing home—and ordered one for every member of the team.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d been a long-time fan of the Raptors—in elementary school, I wore number 15 whenever I played basketball, like my favourite Raptor, Vince Carter. I got to work right away. Everyone on the team at the time—Kyle Lowry, Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam—was given a basketball planter customized with the Raptors logo and their name. The team filmed the players receiving them and even did an interview with me and some of the girls from my The Give and Grow workshops. It was a surreal feeling, but it didn’t really hit until they posted the video to social media about a month later. That’s when everything blew up.

The day that the post went live, I was at my hospital job. I looked at my phone to see thousands of notifications, many of them messages from people trying to order their own planters. I showed my fellow hospital staff the video, and they were shocked.

Almost immediately, I started getting requests for meetings with other NBA teams, and all these big brands—Nike, Adidas, Foot Locker—reached out about ordering planters in bulk or hosting one of our workshops. I’d have to cover up my scrubs with a sweater, lock myself in a room and take their meetings over my lunch break at the hospital. None of my co-workers really knew the extent of it. I felt like I was living a double life.

As months went on, I shifted my focus to hosting more workshops, and I reduced my hospital hours to part time in August of 2021. Alongside our in-house ones, which we continued to host in community spaces, we started doing workshops in major retail spaces. The first was at Foot Locker’s Yonge and Dundas store, where we hosted over 60 girls. From there, I started working with the brand to host events in the US. In New York, we collaborated with Adidas to host a workshop for 30 kids in Washington Heights. I made booklets called “the playbook,” which outline the lessons people can take from sports and apply to their everyday lives. They include prompts for the girls to engage with one another, think about community-building and break out of their comfort zones.

In November of 2021, I officially left the hospital to focus on The Give and Grow full time. Though anyone can make planters like ours, I knew I was building something with a bigger purpose. The planters were just a physical vessel for the message I wanted to share. The following year, I stopped running programming at MLSE LaunchPad too. I’m still affiliated with them, but now I host my own events.

In the four years since leading The Give and Grow full time, I’ve hosted over 103 workshops in 16 cities, with over 3,000 participants. I’ve worked with several NBA teams including the Chicago Bulls, the Golden State Warriors, the Brooklyn Nets, the Dallas Mavs, the Sacramento Kings and the LA Clippers. This March, I have events coming up with the LA Lakers and the Washington Wizards. Each time, I get to explore a new city and see how their team operates. When Vince Carter retired last year, I collaborated with the Raptors for an exclusive planter celebrating his anniversary with the team.

This year, I partnered with Toronto’s inaugural WNBA team, the Toronto Tempo, to execute our first WNBA collaboration. I knew franchise president Teresa Resch while she was working with the Raptors, and when she joined the Tempo, we were a natural fit. We released a line of merch featuring custom basketball planters and pillows.

Women’s sports are finally trending, and there’s an opportunity to change the discriminatory narratives that have long surrounded these athletes. Being a part of the launch of this Toronto team is another way for me to help young girls find role models and mentors. And it’s important that it’s happening alongside my work with the NBA, showing that there can be allyship between athletes of all genders.

I just launched our community ambassador program, where 25 women from all over North America will be advocates of The Give and Grow within their communities. They’ll host workshops, and I’ll amplify their voices and stories through the Give and Grow platform. Soon I’ll also be expanding my programming to different sports, including soccer, football and volleyball, using them as more vessels for positive social impact.

I’ve been working with girls in sports for the past 15 years, but we’re only now—finally—in a moment where people are seeing the value of investing in women’s sports. I’m excited to take advantage of this moment and push the momentum forward, along with fellow athletes, sponsors and viewers, so we can all grow together.