When Modkins talks about her work as founder of a successful marketing agency, though, it’s clear that it wasn’t just her heart that led her back home to Miami. She was following her passion, too. And that may be just what it takes to be recognized as one of the most powerful and influential African American business leaders in Miami, a distinction awarded to Modkins last month by Legacy Miami magazine.

The honor was a surprise; she didn’t know she had been nominated. “To be honest with you, I don’t know what aspect of what we have touched got their attention,” she says.

It probably started with Hip Rock Star, her integrated marketing and communications firm. Modkins knows how to stand out.

“If I’m in the business of branding your company and making customers want to become evangelists for your products and your services, how better to show a potential client of Hip Rock Star that we can brand you than by having a catchy name of my company,” she says.

“We have to show that every day, that we know how to do what you need done for your brand because we do it for our brand.”

That name, along with the city’s status as a mecca for celebrities, might bring to mind limousines, velvet ropes and South Beach. But that’s not where you’ll find Modkins.

“Anyone who knows about Hip Rock Star knows that we only align the work that we do with brands that are for the good of society,” she says. “I think I spent the first 15 years in this industry making nice money for brands that I don’t think anyone would miss if they stopped doing whatever they were doing.”

Last year, the agency decided to limit its work exclusively to companies that benefit the community. They’ve discovered they can do that and still make money. “Isn’t that great?” Modkins says.

“I’m happy with the decision we made and the passion that goes into our work. It is very gratifying to see the success in the brands that we build.”

Those brands include businesses and a variety of nonprofits, including the Treyvon Martin Foundation; 100 Black Men of South Florida; Florida Memorial University, the city’s historically black university; and the Miami HBCU Alumni Association.

“I have a love and a passion for assisting nonprofit organizations with developing ways and strategies to create fund-raising initiatives,” she says. In a world of Kickstarter campaigns and other new alternatives, she focuses on innovative approaches.

“Changing my clients’ perspective on how to raise money is one of the elements that Hip Rock Star would offer that other full-service integrated marketing and communications agencies wouldn’t.”

That commitment to the community drives more than her professional work. Modkins grew up in Miami in a neighborhood called Richmond Heights. It means a lot to her that it’s a community established in 1949 for black veterans of World War II. That’s something she didn’t know until she was an adult. Now she’s making sure the neighborhood won’t forget those veterans, whom Modkins calls “49ers.”

Modkins and her mother, Patricia Harper Garrett, started by writing a book, “Miami’s Richmond Heights,” for a series on local communities called Images of America. Patricia Garrett grew up in Richmond Heights, too. She’s a retired educator with the Miami–Dade Public Schools (as is Jessica’s dad, Willie Garrett, an Aggie alumnus).

Then they created a nonprofit organization, the Historic Society, to preserve the legacy of those veterans.

“It’s a story that hasn’t been told, and that’s our job,” she says. “We’re feeling very urgent because many of these 49ers are in their late 80s or early 90s. We’re feverishly working to document their stories.”

Modkins will pass those stories on to the next generations of African Americans in Richmond Heights. That work will extend her influence into the future, one more way she stands out, even among her peers on the list of Miami’s most influential.

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