Jonathan Quarles is a Flint, MI small business owner who received a $10,000 grant from LISC and Verizon to help weather the pandemic's economic crisis. His business is a story worth telling: Quarles’ company, Quartz, is a hub for “second line” clean water solutions and is committed to "empowering the city that raised me" in the bargain.
As a native son of Flint, MI, Jonathan Quarles knows the hardest, and the greatest, truths about his city.
At the age of 12, he saw his best friend get killed, a casualty of violent crime that has plagued Flint since deindustrialization and disinvestment overcame the city in the 1980s. His father was a mortician, which provided further education about the toll of poverty-born crime on Quarles's community. In high school, he founded a group called "Students Against Violence Everywhere" that worked to tackle the social, emotional and financial fallout of violence—the kids even raised money to pay for funerals. “I’ve always been a problem solver,” said Quarles. “When I see a problem, I activate.”
That trait has fueled what he calls “serial entrepreneurship,” which began when he was eight years old and picked up his first job—a paper route for the Flint Journal. He went on to operate a T-shirt business, a color-printing firm, and a vending machine company by the time he graduated from high school. After college (applying for scholarships was another line of work, he jokes), he worked for talk show host and author, Tavis Smiley, and in a slew of corporate positions.
When the Flint water crisis came to light in 2015, Quarles knew he had to do something. The upshot was Quartz Water, an enterprise serving as a hub for "second line" clean water solutions that supplement, instead of replace, the municipal water supply. In addition, Quarles views the company as part of his personal mission to “eradicate poverty through entrepreneurship.”
“It dawned on me that this right here might be my life mission,” says Quarles. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
Here, in his words, is how Quartz Water evolved, and how a $10,000 grant from the LISC-Verizon small business relief fund will help.
“The journey started in my hometown of Flint, MI, which was decimated by a water crisis, starting in 2014; in 2018, four years in, the city still hadn’t turned the page on the crisis and I grew increasingly tired of sitting on the sidelines as the city cycled through one “Band-Aid” solution after another. Most of the efforts were about the bottom line. A lot of people were trying to make money off the community and the crisis. I had a first-hand view since my dad was at the helm of the grassroots water efforts at First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church, known for its partnership with Jaden Smith.
My frustration led me to activate my problem solving.
When Quartz first started, we wanted to bottle sustainably generated water, donating a percentage of our proceeds back to water-related challenges in marginalized communities through a donor-advised fund administered by the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. Then the COVID pandemic emerged and stopped everyone in its tracks. But COVID also spotlighted the true importance of water – short of a vaccine, the best weapon we have against the virus is personal hygiene. Personal hygiene is a luxury for those that don’t have access to clean water.
As stories of water shut-offs in cities started to appear, our team evolved its thinking and decided that, instead of focusing on bottled water, we could be providing empowering water generation and filtration technology to municipalities and the institutions in them. And while Quartz’ creation will always be inspired by Flint, its impact had to be bigger. Today, Quartz is like a water “insurance policy.”
We feel indebted to the time, space, and necessity that COVID gave our team to align with the company’s core mission; so instead of a pivot, I’ll call this more of an alignment.
The $10,000 grant will crucial – the repositioning has come with a much-needed rebrand across the board – website, marketing collateral, social, media, you name it – because our end clients are now totally different. Quality content creation that does justice to our mission and to the potential of our solution definitely takes resources and we are happy that we now have this additional money.
This grant means a lot to me professionally because I view Quartz as an embodiment of my entire journey and a culmination of all the professional experiences in it. Water is linked to so much – it’s linked to health; it’s linked to hygiene; it’s linked to self-confidence and the list goes on.
So if I can help Quartz put even a small dent in the global clean water supply, then I’ll feel a small step closer to my goal of uplifting and empowering communities, first and foremost in my hometown.