Rooted
in History.
Built
for What's
Next.

Two friends entered the advertising industry the way most people do — with ambition, a portfolio, and the belief that the work would speak for itself. What they found was an industry full of creative energy and almost no one who looked like them sitting in the rooms where decisions were made. The talent was everywhere: in their neighborhoods, their networks, their schools. It just wasn't at the table. And no one seemed to be in any particular rush to change that.

Lincoln Stephens and Larry Yarrell weren't waiting. They were too busy noticing the same gap from different corners of the industry — the disconnect between where multicultural talent existed and where it was allowed to go. That shared frustration became a shared conviction: the pipeline wasn't broken because the talent wasn't there. It was broken because no one had built the infrastructure to move it forward. They decided to build it themselves.

It was in that process of building that they discovered a man who had tried to do the same thing forty years earlier. In 1967, William "Bill" Sharp — an advertising pioneer and one of the few Black executives working at the highest levels of the industry — launched what he called the Basic Ad Course. Its purpose was simple and radical: take young people who had the mind for advertising but not the access, and sharpen them into professionals the industry could no longer ignore. He wasn't making a statement. He was solving a problem. He was doing workforce development before the term existed in any corporate lexicon. Bill Sharp understood something that the industry is still slowly learning: the talent has always been there. It just needed a door. Lincoln and Larry recognized that door — and the walls still standing around it. The infrastructure Sharp had tried to build had never been fully realized. And so, in 2007, they set out to finish what he started — this time with the tools, the network, and the ambition to do it at scale.

That framing — workforce development — is important. It is the lens through which everything MGP does should be understood. We are not a diversity initiative. We are not a scholarship fund. We are not a response to a news cycle. We are an infrastructure organization, purpose-built to close the gap between extraordinary talent and the industry that needs it. We train people. We place people. We build careers that compound — for the Fellows, for their employers, and for the industry as a whole. That is what workforce development looks like when it is done with rigor, over time, without flinching.

For nearly twenty years, we moved quietly and built loudly. We expanded our iCR8 programs from a single summer cohort of seven Fellows in Dallas to a national platform operating across more than a dozen cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Miami, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and beyond. We have taken our workshops onto the floors of major sports franchises, into the boardrooms of some of the most recognized brands in the world, and across the Atlantic to Johannesburg, South Africa. We partnered with the CIAA and Divine Nine organizations to bring the iCR8 experience directly to HBCU students competing in real sports marketing briefs. And now we have acquired a permanent home — Gamma House at 2509 MLK Blvd in Dallas — the most significant infrastructure investment in our organization's history. We kept building.

And now, we have acquired a home. Gamma House — at 2509 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd in Dallas — is a creator and maker space that will serve as the permanent physical anchor for everything MGP has been building. A place where emerging talent can work, collaborate, learn, and grow outside of any single cohort or program cycle. It is the most significant investment in our organization's infrastructure since the day Lincoln left his job to build this. We are not just running programs anymore. We are building an institution.

Our alumni — the Fellows who came through our Bootcamp and workshops over the past two decades — are now creative directors, CMOs, agency founders, brand strategists, and media executives at companies like Wieden+Kennedy, Apple, Leo Burnett, Publicis, SpringHill, and General Motors. They come back. They mentor the next cohort. They sit on our board. They recruit from our pipeline. The flywheel turns — not because of goodwill, but because the model works and they remember what it did for them. That network, compounded across nearly twenty years, is one of the most valuable and underleveraged assets in the advertising and marketing industry.

We are aware of the current moment. We have watched carefully as some organizations have revisited their commitments to diverse talent pipelines — retreating from programs, revising language, waiting to see which way the wind blows. We do not begrudge anyone their calculus. What we will say, plainly and without equivocation, is this: the demographics of America have not changed. The purchasing power of multicultural consumers has not diminished. The gap between who makes decisions in this industry and who those decisions are made for has not closed. And the talent — young, prepared, culturally fluent, execution-ready — is still out here waiting for rooms they deserve to be in. The organizations that show up now will have a decisive advantage over the ones that waited.

This is not a values argument. It never was. It is a workforce argument, an economic argument, and a competitive one. Bill Sharp understood it in 1967. MGP has been proving it since 2007. The work does not change based on the weather in any particular year. It continues — because the need continues, the talent continues, and so do we.

We move further. We move faster. We do not stop.