Big dreams, small biz: Atlanta artist wins $10k prize

ATLANTA -- Small business owners from across the metro Atlanta area gathered at Truist Park on Friday morning for the 2025 MLB All-Star Small Business Luncheon. The event is a collaboration that serves as a space for business owners to network, collaborate and share their expertise in areas that can help elevate Major League Baseball and their respective communities.

After opening remarks by Maverick Palabasan, MLB’s manager of diverse business partners program, and April Brown, senior vice president of social responsibility, the mic was handed off to keynote speaker Rodney Bullard, CEO of The Same House.

“The child born in poverty in Atlanta has such a steep climb out of poverty. That shouldn’t be,” Bullard told the attendees. “But we also know that we want our businesses to be strong. We also know that we want education to be grander. We also know that entrepreneurship is one of the ways out of that area.

“And so for you I ask, 'How strong is your imagination? And what can we collectively imagine to change?'"

Bullard then had the audience stand up and reach across the table to the people sitting across from them until each person in the room was connected, hand in hand.

The point of the exercise was to illustrate that rather than attempting to change the world on a large scale, it’s more effective to focus on making a change and impacting those around you, and letting the ripple effects of that change carry on.

“I want you all to look around,” Bullard said. “Let’s look around. Look at the diversity. Look at the differences, look at the commonality. … What happens here impacts one, impacts us all.”

Once the keynote was finished, the finalists from MLB’s small business contest -- two local businesses from Atlanta -- presented their final pitches to a panel of judges that consisted of Palabasan, Eugene Brooks from the Atlanta Braves, Amber Dawkins from MasterCard and last year’s winner, Jeannette Flores-Katz from La Bodega in a Shark Tank-style setup.

The first finalist was Helen Taffet, owner of Sensational Baskets. Taffet’s business focused on creating gift baskets with local flair, featuring products from businesses relevant to the appropriate region or city. Sensational Baskets was born in Taffet’s Atlanta home 37 years ago as a way to provide a more thoughtful form of gift-giving, “with more than a generic gift card or mass-produced snack box.”

Taffet’s business specializes in corporate clients, law firms, real estate agencies, hotels, event planners and wealth management companies. She even showed an example of a basket that she made for this year’s MLB All-Star Game, with the Midsummer Classic’s logo engraved on the bottom of the wooden basket and Ronald Acuña Jr.’s name in bold across the side.

The other finalist was Dionna Collins, owner of ComfiArt. Collins provides a service that helps artists such as graphic designers, photographers and videographers find stable income through brand partnerships, public art projects, merchandise and paid work.

“I am an artist and also a business owner,” Collins said. “I have first-hand experience of how powerful art can be. It saved me. It gave me identity, it gave me healing, it gave me a pathway to purpose.

I also know the difficulty of trying to pay those bills as artists.”

Within Atlanta, ComfiArt has 30 clients, but Collins said she has around 15,000 artists in her database.

Collins concluded her pitch by outlining exactly how she would potentially utilize the $10,000 prize if she were to win, which included a 12-week cohort for at least 50 artists, pop-ups and brand activations and the launch of an app.

After deliberation, the judges declared Collins the winner of the 2025 Small Business Award.

“You work so hard for certain things, you keep your head down to just do the work,” Collins said. “… It’s just great to know that my work, people see it. People are learning more about the arts and everything.”

In addition to the $10,000 prize money, it was also revealed that she would get another reward: throwing out the first pitch at the All-Star Game on Tuesday.

“I’m gonna have to practice,” Collins said. “So we’ll see, right? I hope I don’t flop in front of everybody.”