Mixing funky music with personal finance tips at North Miami music fest featuring Rick Ross

Music and personal finance typically don’t go together. To be sure, they’re kind of a funky mix.

However, the North Miami’s Community Redevelopment Agency decided to team with Funk Fest Music Tour, featuring Miami rapper Rick Ross and Mary J. Blige who will perform here this weekend at Funk Fest, to provide Miami residents with a free community forum Wednesday to help them improve their economic health.

The half-day Financial Literacy Summit will feature panel discussions on building generational wealth and women in real estate.

Variety Entertainment CEO and Funk Fest Music Tour founder Leo Burnett think it’s important to capitalize on the attention the event has received, due to headliners such as Blige and Ross, by adding an educational forum that can contribute to closing the wealth gap between white and Black residents in Miami.

“I had a vision of trying to create other educational events around entertainment,” Burnett said. “We want to learn to grow in other aspects. Entertainment is good, but we also need to do something with the community that can benefit everyone that wants to attend.”

Florida native Dr. Natasha Hampton is the executive producer of the financial event. Citing a 2019 Miami Herald article about Miami-Dade County’s wealth gap that showed the median net worth of Black households to be $3,700 compared to $107,000 for white households, she said it’s imperative to show Black residents how to build generational wealth.

“That’s an incredible disparity,” she said, talking more about the figures in the article. “It’s likely that the major Black ethnic groups are Haitian American and African American in Miami-Dade. We have some work to do. We definitely understand the need for better employment, but that’s just the start, not the end-all. ... You don’t have to be a six figure earner to build wealth.”

Burnett thinks big events like this weekend’s Funk Fest present a unique opportunity to get information to residents that can greatly benefit from it. Honored at the financial literacy summit at Miami-Dade County Fair & Expo Center for their community accomplishments will be OneUnited Bank CEO Teri Williams, Miami entertainment mogul Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell and Ross, the Miami rapper and entrepreneur, and county Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.

“Let’s change the mindset on what generational wealth is,” Burnett said. “It doesn’t have to be the house you pass down from three generations.”

The financial literary forum will be held from 8 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. at 1600 NE 126th St. in North Miami. Although the Funk Fest website shows the forum is sold out, organizers said nobody who shows up will be turned away.