Faithventure Forum

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 .

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 -- e