Faithventure Forum

A recent article in The Spokesman-Review highlights an innovative Spokane faithventure Christ Kitchen that employs women overcoming poverty, domestic violence, addiction, and homelessness. The story notes how the organization's founder one day realized the importance of jobs to accomplishing their ministry's goals: When Jan Martinez founded the Spokane nonprofit Christ Kitchen 15 years ago, she relied on individual or company donations to keep the operation going. Its original goal was to serve as a social and spiritual hub for women in poverty. Before long, however, Martinez, the 57-year-old executive director of Christ Kitchen, realized that helping women find jobs needed to be the organization’s first goal. “Those women would all have said they were essentially unhirable at that point,” said Martinez, noting that the nonprofit, at 2410 N. Monroe St., works with women who have endured domestic violence, chronic poverty, homelessness or addiction. O...

Last week, a group of us from Belay Enterprises attended a meeting with the Denver Jail leadership to discuss organizational issues regarding our potential commercial kitchen training business with a national prison industries consultant. We all came away from the meeting very excited. The consultant, with 30 years of experience in prison industries, commented that this was one of the most innovative and exciting partnerships he has ever seen. He thought that this will be a ground-breaking model for the rest of the country. He agreed that our theory of starting the faith-based employment relationship while behind bars and then transitioning it outside will have a big impact on lowering recidivism rates. With that said, one of the challenges of the project is accommodating federal prison law with regards to prison employment. To successfully do that--which the consultant thinks is not going to be a problem-- we have to satisfy the following: Need legislative authority Pay w...