Greenline Coffee Aims to Grow Jobs in Chicago's Woodlawn Neighborhood

-
This month, Sunshine Gospel Ministries opened Greenline Coffee, a new high-end coffee shop in the disadvantaged Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side.

Sunshine hopes the new coffee shop combined with its business incubator, Sunshine Enterprises, will start growing jobs in the neighborhood with traditionally high rates of unemployment. 

 Greenline hires young adults from the neighborhood who have completed the Sunshine Summer Jobs Training program.

 Sunshine's Executive Director,  Joel Hamernick, explained in an interview in DNAinfo Chicago his thoughts behind the creation of Greenline:

He said two years ago, he and others at the nonprofit were frustrated that five years of teaching kids entrepreneurial skills had not produced a single business in the neighborhood.

He said they switched to asking some of their supporters for investments instead of donations and started thinking about how many jobs a coffee shop would create in the glazed-brick building. 
Greenline Coffee has 12 employees, many of them from Sunshine’s summer jobs program.
“We have another 12 waiting for one of them to screw up so they can have their job,” Paula Hamernick said. 
She said the coffee shop got 200 applications before it opened and receives several requests for applications every day. “People aren’t poor because they want to be, it’s because there are no jobs,” Hamernick said. “Every day we have people coming in begging for a job.” 
In October, Sunshine will open a co-working space next door to the coffee shop to jump-start more businesses in Woodlawn. 
Joel Hamernick said the goal is for Sunshine to be working with 200 businesses within three years, with 45 new businesses and 60 jobs created every year. 
He admitted it was an ambitious pace, but said as soon as the coffee shop is breaking even, they will start on the next business.
Read more here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Accidental Janitorial Company: Freedom Cleaning Services

-
Sometimes opportunity finds you. In 2003, Cherry Hills Community Church called Baby Bud's Director Dianne Sager with a question. The recovery organization that had been cleaning their facility had just closed and Cherry Hills needed a new partner. Would Baby Bud's be interested in cleaning the school at Cherry Hills? Normally a retail baby store would think twice about committing to a job completely unrelated to its core business. But Dianne had 20 years of experience managing a janitorial company prior to Baby Buds. She saw this as a new opportunity to employ more single moms. Within a couple of weeks, Baby Bud's added five single moms for a cleaning crew and Freedom Cleaning Services was born. Within a year, the business had grown to employ ten women with several other churches and commercial businesses as clients. One of the challenges to any business start-up is maintaining the focus on your core business when other opportunities arise. Sometimes it's good to pursue
Read more

Opportunity Knocks at Belay's New Beginnings

-
Image
If an ex-offender finds a job upon exiting prison, research shows that his or her chances of going back to jail are significantly reduced saving the $50,000 a year it costs a state to incarcerate an individual. With that in mind, Belay Enterprises' latest start-up New Beginnings Custom Woodworks employs and job-trains ex-offenders like Patrick Stewart in a faith-based cabinet shop venture t hat was recently profiled on 9News and in the Denver Post . "I got out of jail 9 years ago, but was unable to find a job because of my past offense," Patrick says. "It was only when New Beginnings was willing to take a chance on me was I able to get off welfare and start supporting my family."  Before starting at New Beginnings, Patrick had never built anything before. Now he's become an expert in crafting beautiful custom cabinets. "At one point in my life, I was just empty flesh walking around," he told the Denver Post , "Now, I have
Read more

For a long time there has been a hole in international development and business as mission in the area of sales training.

-
I was excited to be introduced to the Whitten & Roy Partnership recently over lunch by one of its consultants. There are so many great organizations implementing ideas in the developing world that are not realizing their full marketing potential because of a lack of training in sales tactics or a sub-par sales plan. I've had many long conversations with a sales professional friend discussing the need for high-quality help in this area. A well thought out sales approach in developing communities can even be a force for bringing about systematic change in disadvantaged communities: This company is redefining sales tactics for the base of the pyramid SAN FRANCISCO — Scott Roy, co-founder of an international sales consultancy, was doing research for a potential client in Cambodia when he heard about a sales tactic he found appalling. A team tasked with selling toilets to families would roll into villages with a set of latrine components. In order to close th
Read more