Careers In The Making

“I am an innovator. Innovation is literally, to me, taking an old problem and solving it through a new lens, say, culture, for instance. If you're thinking about it intellectually without, let's say, a lived experience, you're going to miss the mark. So when you tap into the people, to the culture, that's how you innovate cultural issues, societal issues, business issues.

We are an agency powered by incarcerated and informally incarcerated men and women. And when you think about this perspective, right, no one thinks that folks with criminal history have the ability to be creative. You don't put those two things together. And so you get innovation when you bring these different dynamics of perspective.

Prison, for me, informed my creative process in a way where I stopped looking at myself as a criminal. I started to look at myself as operations, right, or logistics. And so I started looking at the individuals that I was surrounded by differently. Like my co-founder, Joe Nixon was in there for bank robbery, but he's now a strategist.

Relationships to me are more valuable than money and I'm big on relationships, right? One thing I say about me being incarcerated, I felt like I never had real relationships with people. They weren't writing me letters, they weren't coming to visit. And I had to really think about why that was. It gave me the ability to go inward.

I knew ConCreates was going to work from the moment we had our first success from behind prison walls. Once that happened, it was a viral moment. I knew that it was working when the brands started to call us. I didn't know that I was respected by my peers like that.

I didn't realise I had the impact that I have telling the story of ConCreates, how we got started. People are like, oh, no, I already know this story. I know who you are.

I am Vincent Bragg, Co-Founder and CEO of ConCreates.”

Check back tomorrow for the next edition of Careers In The Making.