In the beginning, Jrue Holiday just needed a reason to go play basketball while the world was on fire. It was summer 2020 at peak COVID-19. Everything was on lockdown. Cops had just killed George Floyd. Protesters filled the nation’s cities’ streets. President Trump hid in the White House basement while fences went around it, guarded by soldiers carrying assault rifles and dressed for war. In the midst of all this, the NBA was bringing teams to Orlando to finish the season in the bubble.
This gave Holiday some complicated feelings. On top of all that, his wife, retired soccer star Lauren Cheney Holiday, was pregnant. “Being with my family was really, really important,” Jrue says. “Having to leave them for that long—I needed motivation.”
As a guard for the Pelicans at the time—he’s with the Bucks now—basketball felt pointless. “We were thinking … maybe I would sit out,” he says. “I was struggling to go to the bubble and play. Socially, there was a lot going on.”
One night while they were talking it through, Lauren asked, “Why don’t you just donate your salary?”
At first Jrue thought she meant his entire salary from the 2019–20 season, some $27 million. “It threw me off,” he says.
He was down, though. “We were gonna be good. I’d played long enough. We’d saved enough money.”
No, Lauren said—the salary from the bubble.
“It was perfect,” Jrue says.
He went to the bubble, averaged 15 points and five assists per game, and made $5.3 million in that time.
“How far can that take us?” Lauren asks. “How many people can we impact?”
Jrue and Lauren used the money to form the Jrue and Lauren Holiday Social Impact Fund. Their vision was to support Black-owned businesses, which became disproportionately harmed by the ongoing pandemic, as well as Black-owned nonprofit organizations. “Black-owned businesses get less than 2% of bank funding,” Lauren says. “They may have an idea and get everything set up, but for them to actually get a loan or be able to get the funding they need is extremely challenging and, I would say, unfair. Jrue and I were like,
They also wanted to provide resources to help them succeed once they did get money. To that end, they teamed up with crowdfunding experts and business coaches to create a network for their class of recipients, namely organizations such as The Kinship Advisors, Fund Black Founders and Crowdfund Better. They found themselves creating a community of people who want to help others in the same way.
“That’s just how we live,” Jrue says. “We always have people around us, literally all the time.”
As we spoke, their house was bustling with various friends and family. “For me and Lauren to have alone time to ourselves, we literally have to leave and go somewhere else,” Jrue says, laughing. “We don’t have alone time in our home because we feel like we built this community and this village, not only for our kids and family but friends we’ve invited in and other people who have become friends. We’re always having people over. It’s just our lives. So when it came to these businesses, it was kind of the same thing. We want them to have the support of community, because we’re the same way.”
