Manual’s Business and Entrepreneurship Club was created this year, and has invited many guest speakers throughout the semester. Last week, they brought in a panel to highlight Ladies of Philanthropy, where three women shared their stories and answer questions for club members.
Maggie Harlow, attending on behalf of the Jack Harlow Foundation, owns Signarama in Downtown Louisville, alongside her husband, Brian Harlow. Signarama creates signs and graphics for a variety of businesses.
“There’s a lot of ways to get into business, so some of them could be if you wanted to pursue business education, get an MBA,” Harlow said, “But not everybody goes into business that way.”
She explains others also start out by owning a side business, or doing as she did and buying a franchise.
“If you want to be successful in business, you have to commit yourself to it,” Harlow said.
Starting college, Harlow had settled on studying oil painting, something she had an aptitude for. She hadn’t wanted to be an artist, but she was interested in it. After graduating, she worked for her father’s company.
“I really didn’t want to do that, because I worked for him my whole life, you know, answering phones, washing cars, filing papers, whatever boring work they could teach me,” Harlow said. It wasn’t what she had envisioned for her future.
Over the next 12 to 13 years she worked for him, and during her time there she learned how to run a dealership and sell cars.
By his retirement, he had sold the company. When working under the new owners, Harlow realized she was ready to be a business owner.
“I had really been treated like a business owner running my dad’s company, and so I kind of had all these skill sets and I realized that I really just wanted to be able to do that,” Harlow said.
She finally bought Signarama when her two kids were ages 3 and 6. She found the venture to be frightening, but it turned out to be the best decision of her life.
“We love being a part of the community. This is a great community on the business end and then of course, Jack decided I would be a philanthropist,” Harlow said. “We’ve sort of always been active in community efforts because it always just felt like, well, this is where [as] citizens we should be participating. We should be paddling along with the things we care the most about.”
Harlow professed her biggest accomplishment as employing people, giving people good, stable jobs and supporting their families.
Ina De Mateos Miller is the executive director of the Louisville Youth Philanthropy Council (LYPC).
“I’ve been with the organization for 13 years and I’ve really seen so many tremendous students come through what we do and just grow and flourish and continue to take into their next, you know, eras of life, ” Miller said.
Miller encourages the youth to participate in civic engagement and philanthropy.
Her whole life, Miller had wanted to be a marine biologist, but a year in furthering her education, chemistry seemed to be her biggest obstacle.
She had gotten tutors, worked as closely with her teachers as she could and she soon realized that her brain, “…wasn’t wired for the sciences.” It was something she had wanted to do for the majority of her life, she had felt as if she’d crashed and burned, her next step was to visit her advisor’s office.
There, Miller had reached out and they had shown her all of the possible undergraduate degrees available, non-profit was what caught her attention. It had clicked, during her youth, Miller had always volunteered her time, such as raising money for the Meerkats exhibit in the Louisville Zoo. When she went to Atherton, she held a clothes drive and sent them down to hurricane survivors. Innately, she was a philanthropist and hadn’t even known.
From there she pursued a degree in nonprofit management and a masters in philanthropic studies. She is also the co-owner of I&M Company, an event planning and coordination business.
Mariana Barzun is the Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Planning and Philanthropy, where she’s been since Craig Greenberg took office in 2023. Barzun emphasizes to notice what one’s interests are and to find a way to use it to their advantage in the workforce. That way they are pursuing something they care about.
Barzun’s story is similar to Miller’s, both women started off somewhere that they wouldn’t end up. Barzun started in higher education fundraising, then moved onto broadcast media and pursued that for 10 years until she moved from New York City to a small town in the Hudson Valley. She had talked her way into a philanthropy role at Vassar College. Given her experience talking on camera, she knew she could apply those skills to persuade people to donate to a non-profit.
She worked in philanthropy for 18 years, moving from place to place until she finally settled at the Mayor’s office in Louisville.
She’s proud to be behind someone who, “has a lot of initiatives and one of those is expanding universal creating Universal pre-K or expanding access to quality early learning,” Barzun said.
The three ladies of philanthropy have gone through journeys to get to where they are today, and they encourage the youth of Louisville to go out and do the same as soon as possible.
“It’s actually proven with a whole study recently, that people that start in civic engagement at a young age tend to give back more of their time, money, resources, talent, testimony, all of the Big 5 T’s,” Miller said.
