Launch Chattanooga Supports Entrepreneurship in Underserved Communities

In 2011, a group of Chattanooga businessmen started an innovative faith venture, Launch Chattanooga, that provides a 10 week course on entrepreneurship to adults and high schoolers interested in starting a business in their disadvantaged neighborhood.

Participants develop their own business plans and later are partnered with business mentors after graduation.  The whole program is built on the premise that business and job creation provides the best answer to economic development in underserved neighborhoods. Watch this great video to learn more about this business as mission:

Launch from Fancy Rhino on Vimeo.

Pizza Changes Lives in Unique Chicago Area Partnership

Longtime Chicago area restaurant Lou Malnati's Pizza partnered in 1996 with Lawndale Community Church to open a store in a disadvantaged west side neighborhood. This location provides jobs and training to individuals rebuilding lives as well as anchors the slow redevelopment of the neighborhood.

A 2007 Sun-Times article still available on the Lawndale website here explores the many dilemmas of this site where the store provides many tangible benefits to the community yet still has been unable to break even up to this point. 

This undertaking provides an interesting laboratory to the many aspects of inner-city business as ministry.

After 11 years, Lou Malnati's in Lawndale hasn't made a penny hawking gourmet pizza on Chicago's working poor West Side.  In fact, the tiny joint at Ogden and Archer has lost about a million bucks since it opened, and it will probably come up another $100,000 short next year. Still, proprietors say the place is a success story -- even if it is written in red ink.  Born in a partnership between the Chicago area pizza chain and Lawndale Community Church, this Malnati's was never about making money anyway. The business plan calls for spending all the restaurant's profits, if there ever are any, on helping to make crime-ridden Lawndale a better place. And Malnati's created a job- training program for residents of the church's recovery home, Hope House, that helps recovering drug addicts and ex-cons get back in the working world.   Chicago Sun Times, January 2, 2007  Read whole story here.

Opportunity Knocks for Homeless Youth Employment at Purple Door Coffee

Over a year ago, Madison Chandler and Mark Smesrud joined the Belay Enterprises' team to start Purple Door Coffee to employ formerly homeless young adults.

Today, they are about to explode in excitement as Purple Door is weeks away from opening its 30th and Welton location in Five Points. Stay tuned as we announce some grand opening events in April.

This has been quite the journey of God's faithfulness and provision with over $100,000 in start-up funding generously provided by donors in response to Mark and Madison's dream. Without a doubt, God passionately loves homeless kids and is providing resources for unique organizations mirroring that love.

I am also excited because the commencement of this project bring to fruition our vision of partnering with other organizations to create jobs for people rebuilding lives. A few years ago, we became convinced that the only way to meet the incredible needs for transitional jobs was by changing our approach from focusing on our own projects to partnering with other organizations and Christ-following entrepreneurs. In Purple Door's case, we launched this innovative business by joining forces with Madison, Mark and a local homeless outreach ministry, Dry Bones Denver, the inspiration for the project. 

We continue to be convinced that there are individuals in the church who are better at creating businesses to employ people rebuilding lives than us. Belay wants to encourage creative partnerships that advance our job creation goals. We continue to be on the lookout for future partnerships.

Some other exciting developments around Belay:

• Last year, Belay's faith-based employment training start-up businesses employed 80 individuals rebuilding lives from addiction, homelessness and prison. With studies showing that a job is the number one indicator whether someone will avoid returning to prison, these jobs create value for our community through changed lives. 
• We moved our semi-custom cabinet employment training program for  ex-offenders, New Beginnings Custom Woodworks, into the space alongside Bud's Warehouse that formerly housed our Good Neighbor Garage start-up. We are now able to build a line of semi-custom cabinets on-site for Bud's customers, enabling us to expand jobs and training opportunities for ex-offenders.
• We continue to work with a local mattress recycling project that employs people rebuilding lives from the Denver Rescue Mission and other projects. People pay a recycling fee when dropping them off at Bud's Warehouse and then the mattresses are torn-apart with the polyurethane and metals recycled for other purposes. 
• Bud's Warehouse has enjoyed a fantastic winter of sales, the best in years for traditionally slow months. This income enables us to grow more jobs for people rebuilding lives as well as starting other new ventures like New Beginnings and Purple Door. Bud's does have the need for the donation of a used forklift to help us continue to expand.

 As always, we are very thankful for the support from the community as we work to change lives in Denver. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in learning more. And if you would like to partner with us by supporting new faith venture start-ups with a tax-deductible donation, visit our online donation page here.

Faith Venture Lamon Luther Employs Homeless Craftsmen in Furniture Building

Suburban homelessness exploded as a problem in Georgia in 2007 after the collapse of the U.S. economy.

Brian Preston discovered a large number of homeless craftsman living in the woods and decided to open Lamon Luther, a faith venture to provide employment by building high-quality, sustainable furniture.

Enjoy this fantastic video sharing the Lamon Luther story, and if you are in the market for furniture, consider purchasing from them:


The Lamon Luther Story from Lamon Luther on Vimeo.

Grace, Accountability and Personality Type: Six Items to Encourage Positive Outcomes

In my experience, there are two types of people who are drawn into the world of faith ventures: pastorally-gifted leaders with a heart for incarnational city ministry and entrepreneurially-minded business leaders with a desire for a role with more significance.

If I would guess for Meyers-Briggs personality types, the first group would be made up of mostly INFJ's with the second group being ENTJ's. Bonus points would be given to someone who walks the line between an F and a T making them exceptionally well suited for running a faith venture by drawing strengths from both personality types.

When it comes to managing through the tension of grace and accountability in a faith venture, the incarnational pastors are going to struggle with holding people accountable to standards while the ENTJ business leaders will find it difficult to accommodate clients making bad decisions. In my view, the leader who is not either a strong F or a T is better able to gracefully hold people to standards in the chaotic enviroment of faith ventures.

But whatever the personality type, many of the challenges of grace and accountability are overcome by pro-actively dealing with the issue through the following six items:

• Every faith venture needs a well-planned employee policy manual that details the rules and procedures of the organization. Too many organic community start-ups forget this important step. Clients who are rebuilding lives from addiction, homelessness and prison need firm ground rules and expectations. Without them, it's impossible to even be a place about grace.
• Train, train, train. Regularly go over the policy and procedure manuals so that everyone on the team understands them and knows the resulting consequences.
• Rigorously work to develop community throughout the organization. Faith venture employees thrive when they are part of a loving team. As I've shared before, Belay's regular hood-check meetings are the most important part of developing caring community.
• Clients need to understand that you trust them and but that you have systems in place to verify. When a faith venture's systems are poorly equipped to catch dishonesty, dishonesty is going to occur. So carefully develop ways of lovingly encouraging accountability.
• A faith-venture practitioner needs to see his or her role as a coaching leader. And part of that is regular performance reviews that often get forgotten in urban business as mission. But these reviews need to be more than just formal documents. They need to be at a minimum weekly performance meetings with supervisors that are more like a coaching or mentoring session. In my experience, faith venture clients thrive when they understand that you are a partner in their success verses just a traditional boss.
• And finally be a place where gratitude is part of the attitude. When people know how much you appreciate them with both words and actions, accountability rises in a faith venture. Indeed, the positive power of faith ventures comes from its inherent nature of treating people as capable individuals who are able to thrive in the workplace. Regular appreciation roots out the poison of victimhood which helps individuals rebuilding lives to flourish in all aspects of their lives.

Grace and Accountability

One of the hardest parts of directing a faithventure to employ individuals rebuilding lives from addiction, homelessness and prison is balancing grace and accountability.

Often faithventure practitioners find themselves riding a pendulum across these two extremes, struggling with questions of when to give someone another chance and when to be strict with the resulting consequences.

Indeed, in my experience, this very issue is one of the top reasons some leaders give up on faith ventures, a close second to having a business model that is not making money.

The way out of this conundrum is realizing that it is not a conundrum. Grace is not mutually exclusive of consequences. As any parent can attest, grace and consequences are often the same thing.

As I tell aspiring faithventure leaders, the best way they can think of their roles is as one of a father but as a father who points them to the ultimate Father. 

You want program participants to experience love in real and tangible ways. But sometimes the most loving action is saying no to a particular activity in the person's best interest. And that decision doesn't need to be difficult if you are prayerfully seeking the best for participants in your program. God faithfully guides leaders to make right decisions in such matters. 

And even better, as you point program participants towards Jesus, the love of God draws people to become more like him in all aspects of their lives. In one fell swoop, grace and consequences become wrapped up in the perfect love of Jesus. Under those conditions, it's beautiful to watch a life grow and thrive into that originally intended by God. 

Milwaukee's Community Warehouse Opens Computer Recycling and Woodworking Faithventure

In one of Milwaukee's most disadvantaged neighborhoods, Community Warehouse operates a home improvement outlet that employs people rebuilding lives while providing low-cost building materials to area residents remodeling homes.

The faith-based organization has recently opened its newest venture, Milwaukee Working, to create more jobs for hard-to-employ individuals. This enterprise employs people in computer recycling, assembly work, online book sales and cabinet manufacturing. The program was recently profiled in the Journal Sentinel:

In a warehouse on Milwaukee's north side, men with drills and screwdrivers stand at a long table, picking apart the carcasses of old computers and sorting their components into boxes for recycling. 

Across the cavernous room, past a wall of metal shelving, others scan books and CDs, DVDs and video games into computers. They upload their descriptions onto Amazon.ocm and ship them out to online buyers around the world. 

The men are employees of Milwaukee Working, a fledgling faith-based nonprofit aimed at creating jobs in the heart of one of the most impoverished cities in America. (Journal Sentinel, Feb 2, 2013) 

Read the whole story here.