Kay Boamah is already having a good day when he joins our video call.
Boamah, the co-founder and CRO of Toronto and San Francisco-based Swiirl, has just gotten off a call with NBA legend and former Toronto Raptor Jerome Williams.
“Whenever I have this conversation, it reminds me to be humble, because I couldn’t have dreamed of my life turning out this way,” Boamah said. “I used to cheer in the stands for Jerome Williams as a kid. Now, when I answer the phone, he’s like, ‘Hey, brother, how are you doing?’”
The call with the man known as Junk Yard Dog (or JYD) focuses on a new partnership.
“All the universities are kind of putting their arms around us because they believe in the model.”
Kay Boamah
Swiirl co-founder
Williams and Swiirl are launching a new campaign for Shooting for Peace, a non-profit educational program designed to bring financial literacy and mental health and wellness education to students across Canada and the United States (US).
The partnership with Shooting for Peace is another sign of validation for Boamah and his co-founders, Daniel Mohanrao and Mike Hong. In addition to the Shooting for Peace partnership, Swiirl is being used in marketing campaigns by organizations across North America, including the Peel District School Board and the low-cost American phone carrier Cricket Wireless.
Founded in 2023, Swiirl offers a two-sided marketplace where communities can be creative agencies and brands can invest in campaigns that drive marketing goals and social impact. Brands use Swiirl to engage local communities by commissioning students and youth to create content, from artwork to social media videos, in what founder Kay Boamah calls “purpose-driven creative campaigns.”
On the other side of the marketplace, schools and community organizations use Swiirl as both a fundraising tool and an educational opportunity. Students gain real-world experience by responding to brand briefs, building their portfolios, and, in many cases, getting paid for their work.
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Swiirl uses AI on each side of the platform. Brands are guided through the campaign brief creation process, including peeks at similar campaigns and community groups that may be matches for the project. For students and other young artists, the platform guides them through the brief and helps them come up with ideas, from Instagram Reels to artwork. Swiirl’s AI also flags branding mismatches like brand colours during the submission process.
“The major problem that we’re solving for brands is community engagement,” Boamah said. “There is a huge shift happening where influencer marketing is in a downturn because it is not authentic. There’s a corporate social responsibility angle here too, but the catalyst for brands is authentic engagement with communities.”
Boamah is quick to point out that brands are not just buying placements in these communities.
“Brands don’t just walk into a community and say, ‘Here’s 500 bucks, let’s do this.’ There has to be a real connection. Because it’s hyper-localized, even at the enterprise brand level, what we’re seeing in these connections is authentic alignment. If a community chooses to work with a brand on our platform, it’s because they have shared values,” Boamah said.
Grab the bull by the horns
Last September, AT&T-owned mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Cricket Wireless and its marketing agency used Swiirl to create a campaign to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month.
“They came to us and said they wanted to authentically connect with Hispanic communities in Miami-Dade, New York, and Los Angeles,” Boamah said. “The challenge was they needed to launch in three weeks.”
Boamah reached out to the dean of the New World School of the Arts in Miami, Fla., who helped connect Swiirl with other arts schools across the US, including New Heights Academy in New York City, the University of Southern California, and Skyline High School in Oakland, Calif.
Swiirl then worked with Cricket Wireless and its cultural marketing agency on its ‘Con Ganas De Más’ campaign. It called on students to create self-portraits that show what they hope to achieve in the future.
“It really unlocked Cricket’s thoughts around connecting creative talent in the markets they are targeting,” Boamah said. “By the time the campaign launches in the community, the community is excited about it because their creators are part of it.”
Swiirl also aims to bring brands and schools together by connecting students with educational opportunities.
Boamah met Andrew Witchell, co-founder of Woodstock, ON-based Provenance Farms, at the Collision Conference in Toronto in 2024. Provenance Farms is a regenerative farm that produces and sells sustainable chicken, eggs, and microgreens. Education is a core part of the farm and is provided through school field trips and summer camps, but Witchell said Provenance wanted to expand that into a formal education program.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually get these kids on site and connect them to where their food comes from, and could be a potential solution to climate change,” Witchell said. “The thing we care about the most is giving kids a sense of agency. You’re in control. You have a choice. You can bring solutions.”
In Peel, just over an hour away, the District School Board was looking for ways to provide experiential learning experiences for its students. Its Multi-Year Strategic Plan includes the goal of connecting classroom learning to real-world environmental action.
Boamah said the partnership with Provenance Farms met that goal by showing students how regenerative farming can help improve sustainability and reduce food insecurity.
“After we paired them, we had a briefing with students and they came up with the tagline, ‘We’re all in this together’,” he said. “Provenance Farms hosted a field trip day where students and staff came onto the farm to learn how they’re raising their chicken, taught them about soil health, and walked them through the entire farm.”
The students created a series of videos that have been shared across their community to share what they’ve learned about regenerative farming.
“We just asked them, what does this mean to you to know that you can solve some big problems in the world?” Witchell said. “They came back with a ton of great responses, so many good questions, and lots of energy. I’ve got zero doubt in the ability of these kids to just grab the bull by the horns and make stuff happen.”
An assist from the Junk Yard Dog
One of Boamah’s favourite projects is the previously mentioned Shooting for Peace campaign with Jerome Williams.
“His mission is going into schools to teach about financial literacy, because that was one of the big gaps he saw across communities,” Boamah said. “He built the program using EverFi and gifts it to every school that he visits through his foundation, the JYD Project.”
Williams approached Swiirl with an idea to add a community-powered element to the campaign.
“He has a videographer following him around shooting as he visits school, but said it would be even better if students who were engaging with the program created the face of the campaign. I asked why just one school when we could do an entire district, and that’s where the Toronto and Peel District School Boards come in,” Boamah said.
In addition to students creating campaign content, Boamah and Williams gamified the campaign with the three top schools earning an in-person appearance by JYD himself.
“Swiirl has truly catapulted Shooting For Peace’s vision of expanding across North America,” Williams said. “We are so excited to partner on a platform that engages students, schools, and communities directly in creating content and expanding their education with things not typically offered in school.”
Academic catalyst
While Swiirl’s roots are in community-driven campaigns, its growth has been fuelled in part by connections with post-secondary institutions, especially the University of Toronto.
“U of T has just been a catalyst,” Boamah said. “The doors they’ve opened have been incredible.”
That discovery started at Collision 2022, when Boamah connected with the Black Entrepreneurship Alliance (BEA) at York University.
“I’m a serial entrepreneur, so when I heard about the BEA, I was like, ‘How have I never heard of this?’” Boamah said. “I applied, got in, and from there, everything started to build.”
At the next Collision conference, BEA introduced Boamah to the Black Innovation Zone, a hub for Black-led tech organizations that includes U of T’s Black Founders Network (BFN) and iCube at U of T Mississauga.
“Efosa KC Obano from BFN and I really hit it off,” Boamah said. “He told me, ‘Once you scale a bit more, we want you in our accelerate stream.’”
Swiirl was one of 11 companies selected out of over 200 applicants accepted into the BFN Accelerate program. That support isn’t just mentorship and programming. U of T is also a Swiirl client.
“We’re doing a massive campaign with them right now,” Boamah said. “Five founders from each BFN cohort are being paired with students. Those students are learning about entrepreneurship while also using their technical skills to film a campaign featuring founders and getting those stories out into the community.”
The momentum has expanded beyond U of T. Swiirl is part of York University’s YSpace tech accelerator and works with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Ted Rogers School of Management on capstone projects for creative students.
“All the universities are kind of putting their arms around us because they believe in the model,” Boamah said.
The model is attracting attention beyond Canadian universities.
“We’re having conversations with George Washington University, the University of Southern California, and others,” Boamah said. “They’ve seen the impact and are now saying, ‘Can we introduce you to admissions? Can we use this for recruitment?’ That 360 partnership is rare because we have a rare model where some of our ecosystem can be both customer and beneficiary, which is incredible.”
With 20 brands already using the platform and more than $500,000 in annual recurring revenue, Boamah said Swiirl is proving that purpose-led creativity can deliver both community impact and sustainable growth.
“We are turning communities into creative agencies for brands,” Boamah said.
All images courtesy Swiirl.