Sometimes it’s hard to make money if you don’t have serious bank already.
This goes for low-income entrepreneurs especially. Businesses can take months, if not years, to turn a profit. But what if you need that profit now, to provide a roof over your head?
Habitat for Humanity knows a thing or two about putting roofs over people’s heads. Acknowledging the conundrum of start-ups, the national institution has launched an innovative program to provide people with homes and business space at the same time.
Starting with a pilot program in Flint, Mich., Habitat for Humanity will build live/work spaces for aspiring low-income entrepreneurs. The goal is to help the recipients establish a business while stabilizing blighted neighborhoods. The effort is a collaboration among Habitat, the University of Michigan and MasterCard, which chipped in a $400,000 grant.
The first recipients: Scott Hempel, 24, and Tyler Bienlein, 22. They plan to launch Great Escape Gaming on the bottom level and live in an apartment above in the Grand Traverse District Neighborhood on Court Street, a main route that leads to downtown Flint. The store will sell board games and serve as a community space where customers can gather and play.
“By giving gamers the opportunity to come in and play the game and try it out, that prompts them to want to buy the game,” Hempel told Nicole Weddington of MLive. “Also, having people in the store, you will sell things like drinks, snacks, food.”
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Teachers in the University of Michigan-Flint, including the school’s entrepreneur-in-residence Michael Witt, will mentor Hempel and Bienlein through the business startup process.
Sue Henderson, vice president of the U.S. and Canada for Habitat for Humanity International, told Weddington that in order to revitalize places like Flint, “First, you bring neighborhoods back. You get people living in houses, you take down blighted structures. And then the next step is, how do you bring business back?”
Or in Flint’s case, maybe you accomplish everything all at once with a single building.
Tag: the Midwest
Savvy Mechanics Help Disabled Veterans Hit the Open Road
Nine surgeries. A knee replacement. Thyroid cancer.
Justin Madore’s doctors said he should forget about riding his beloved motorcycles ever again, after the Kalamazoo soldier was badly injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. His artificial knee would make him topple. He had lost stability.
He sold his bike.
But a Michigan nonprofit had a different idea.
Madore’s buddy, retired Army Sgt. Brad VandenBerg, couldn’t accept that verdict.
VandenBerg started the nonprofit Two Wheels for Warriors in 2012 with the goal of raising funds to create specially designed motorcycles for injured veterans.
After fundraising for two years, VandenBerg worked with Dirty Boyz Motorcycles in Plainwell, Mich., to take a $6,000 “salvage bike” and redesign it for Madore.
The design accommodates his injuries, and includes a sidecar for his service dog Cody, a Labrador retriever and poodle mix that helps him cope with PTSD. The sidecar also stabilizes the bike.
Two Wheels for Warriors is also working with Bob Body, who lost a leg in Iraq. Soon he should be out on the open road just like Madore, who is feeling better about everything now that he has a custom motorcycle.
The new ride “is helping my PTSD tremendously because it’s so relaxing,” Madore says. “When I had a stressful day I’d just hop on the bike and go for a ride and now I can do that again.”
“I got Cody on the side, I look down and he had a smile on his face,” Madore says. “I’m back on a bike again, couldn’t be happier.”
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These High Schoolers Solved a Foodie Problem With a 3-D Printer
If you’ve ever had the unpleasant experience of squeezing out watery ketchup all over your hotdog, two high school students in Liberty, Missouri, have come up with just the invention you need.
Condiment experts Tyler Richards and Jonathan Thompson, both seniors studying in the Project Lead the Way Program (PLTW) at North Liberty High School, were challenged by their teacher, Brett Kisker, to come up with a solution to a problem that was relevant to them. “We always start with the phrase, ‘it really bugs me when,'” Kisker told Lindsey Foat of the Hale Center for Journalism at KCPT. (PLTW is a nonprofit that provides instruction and training in science and technology to students from kindergarten to high school, in the form of after-school programs and in-class lessons for teachers.)
What could be more relevant to a teenager than the perfect ketchup experience?
Kisker challenged their idea initially. “I said that they could just shake the bottle and that there is a free solution,” Kisker told Foat. “But they did a lot of research and they had me convinced that this problem really does exist.” The two teens found that many people would be willing to pay a little extra to have the watery ketchup problem solved. Additionally, a ketchup dispenser that doesn’t need to be shaken could help seniors and people with disabilities alike.
The students began their project by researching what patents had already been issued for ketchup inventions. “There are a surprising amount of ketchup-related patents out there,” Richards told Foat. “There was one — it’s kind of hard to explain — but basically it’s a way to inject ketchup into a french fry. It was a bit extreme.”
Next the students brainstormed, coming up with 60 possible solutions. The one they settled on is shaped like a mushroom and inserted into the underside of the ketchup cap. “It is based on the Pythagorean cup idea,” Thompson told Foat. “It’s also the same principle that toilets work off of.” They built their prototype using a 3-D printer and showed it at an exhibition of PLTW experiments in Kansas City.
The two don’t have any immediate plans to turn their ketchup idea into a business, however. Thompson has enlisted in the Army, and Richards will start at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in August. But whatever they do, their time spent as inventors probably means that they’ll never look at a bottle of ketchup the same way again.
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Meet the Kid Who Turned a Health Scare Into Inspiration (Again, and Again)
A type 1 diabetes diagnosis didn’t stop 11-year-old Anja Busse of Antigo, Wis. It inspired her.
Rocked by the diagnosis six months ago, Busse knew what would make her feel better: an American Girl doll going through the same experience.
But there wasn’t one.
So Busse created an online petition urging the company to create accessories that a type 1 diabetic like herself might use. So far, Busse has garnered over 3,000 signatures.
“I feel so different now and my whole life has been turned around,” she writes. “I just want everyone to feel good about themselves no matter if they have something ‘wrong with them’.”
Among her wants: a glucose meter, an insulin pump, and “pick-me-ups”— snacks that diabetics keep on hand to control their blood sugar.
“There are thousands of girls with diabetes and it’s really hard for some of them getting diagnosed,” she told Lisa Haefs of the Antigo Daily Journal. “It’s easier with a doll that looks just like you. You have someone to take care of.”
According to the American Diabetes Association, about 1 in 400 people under the age of 20 in America have type 1 diabetes.
Busse isn’t the first child to ask American Girl Doll for more diversity.
Last year, Melissa Shang, 10, who suffers from a form of muscular dystrophy, started a petition to feature a disabled girl as a “Girl of the Year” doll. She’s gained over 142,000 signatures.
Mattel, which manufactures American Girl Dolls, responded with a letter that read in part, “We receive hundreds of passionate requests to create a variety of dolls and books based on a wide range of circumstances, and we are always considering new ways to enhance our product lines.”
The uber-popular American Girl line already offers such accessories as glasses, hearing aids, wheelchairs, and an allergy-free lunch — so Busse’s request isn’t too far-fetched.
And it’s not the pint-sized activist’s only project. Busse and her parents started the nonprofit Boxed for Joy, sending care packages to kids newly diagnosed with diabetes. And the pre-teen is recruiting for the local Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund’s Walk to Cure Diabetes. She has a national sponsor, Shwings, a company that manufactures little wings to lace onto sneakers.
It’s an apt metaphor for a kid with potentially debilitating disease who keeps finding more ways to help others.
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For the Good of the Community and the Environment, This Kansas Startup Looks to Make Hitchhiking Popular Again
If you live in an urban area, chances are, you probably use mass transit and don’t even give it a second thought. But 45 percent of Americans don’t have the option of hopping on a train or bus to get somewhere since they have no access to public transportation, Jennifer O’Brien writes for Shareable.
The concepts of the citizen-taxi apps Lyft and Uber and the carpooling app Carma appealed to O’Brien, but since she lives in Lawrence, which is located rural northeast Kansas (instead of downtown San Francisco, where public transit options abound), there are not enough participants to make these services run smoothly. So she decided to create her own system — founding the nonprofit Lawrence OnBoard.
Inspired by a podcast she heard about how hitchhiking isn’t as dangerous as its reputation would have it, and that in many countries it’s the primary mode of transportation, she decided to give the concept a contemporary update. Using Lawrence OnBoard, people can sign up to be drivers (at no cost) or as riders for a monthly membership fee.
Each person receives a background check, a photo ID, and a dry erase board on which they write their destination to display while they stand by the road waiting for a fellow Lawrence OnBoard member or any other driver to give them a lift. Once the rider has been picked up, he or she logs the trip by texting the driver’s member number or license plate to Lawrence OnBoard; O’Brien believes this kind of tracking will help ensure safety. (Although she does caution people against using the ride-sharing service at night or when traveling with young children.)
Last year, O’Brien began field-testing her idea. She sent 23 volunteers out on 121 test rides and found that 95 percent of the time, they scored a lift in less than 30 minutes. Now, Lawrence OnBoard is working to find the best locations for ride-seekers to stand, ensuring that all ethnicities, ages, and genders have equal ease of finding a ride.
And so far, the local government approves of O’Brien’s plan. In fact, city commissioners approved changes to the traffic code this month to allow Lawrence OnBoard to continue legally.
O’Brien writes, “I personally used my dry erase board to commute to town for most of the summer and I found that it was safe, easy, and reliable and saved a lot of gas. But even better, I met more of my neighbors, learned what was happening in the neighborhood and even made a couple of business deals. Building community like this is the big strength of the sharing economy and it’s something we are sadly missing when we all drive alone.”
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This Unique Program Tackles Poverty Two Generations at a Time
Poverty often results in a myriad of problems for families that a single intervention is unable to fix. That’s why in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Career Advance Program (CAP) is tackling the effects of poverty in two generations at the same time: Working to help low-income mothers attain training for nursing and other medical-industry careers while ensuring their kids receive high-quality childcare through the local Head Start program.
CAP includes a required monthly seminar class for the mothers on career skills — such as interviewing and resume building — and meetings with life coaches to help participants learn time management skills, how to deal with stress, and ways to overcome troubles (ranging from dead cars to kitchen fires, for example). CAP pays for the mothers’ tuition and childcare. Plus, the program offers $200 bonuses (in the form of gasoline cards or expense reimbursements) for good grades.
Steven Dow, the executive director of CAP Tulsa, told Eric Westervelt of NPR, “The paradox of our early childhood work is that we are so focused on young children. And yet, many of the outcomes we want for young children are dependent on being able to also make progress with their parents and the adults. So this interplay is a tough nut to crack.”
CAP is producing positive results: When the kids see their mothers studying, they’re more motivated to study, too. And when the families increase their income and move off public assistance, the kids’ academic futures become brighter.
It’s a tough road for a low-income parent to earn an RN degree, but CAP is finding that even those who drop out before reaching the end still earn other medical certifications and are able to move up to better jobs than they had before. The career coaches make the difference for many of the participants who are able to stick it out and succeed. “They’ve become almost like second mothers,” program participant Shartara Wallace told Westervelt. “Because they really stay on you, they push you. And then, at the same time, they are there to hold your hand. But just like a parent where it’s like, ‘OK, I need you to walk on your own and handle this, but I still got your back.'”
Consuela Houessou, who immigrated from Benin, is studying to be a registered nurse through CAP Tulsa. She said, “[My kids] want me to do well. We compare grades. ‘I get A today, what did you get?'” With two-generation assistance programs already in place across the country in places including Iowa, Boston, and San Antonio, these mothers and many others may finally be able to break the cycle of poverty.
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What Do Kid Rock, John Mellencamp and Mitch Albom Have in Common?
Despite their divergent musical styles of classic rockers John Mellencamp and Z.Z. Top, rap-rocker Kid Rock, and country star Kix Brooks, they’ve come together in the fight to prevent homelessness among veterans.
These well-known Americans are giving their time and money to Toledo, Ohio-based Veterans Matter, a nonprofit working to unite the efforts of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Department of Housing and Development to identify veterans at risk for falling into homelessness and those already on the streets — connecting them with the resources they need to find an affordable place to live.
Best-selling author Mitch Albom is involved with the nonprofit too, serving as the honorary chairman of Veterans Matter’s Michigan chapter, fundraising and speaking to groups to raise awareness of the problem. “Our veterans — those men and women who have sacrificed so much to ensure our freedom—deserve better than a home on the streets,” Albom told Veterans Matter.
Ken Leslie, founder of Veterans Matter who once was homeless himself, explained to Lissa Guyton of ABC13 how the program works: “The VA finds the vets and gets them ready for the housing. HUD finds the section 8 housing long term and we provide the deposit money which is often the last barrier preventing them from getting over the threshold.”
Veterans Matter recently celebrated housing its 200th veteran in six states: Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Indiana, Washington, Tennessee, and Massachusetts.
Leslie told Guyton, “Helping people is probably the most powerful thing there is. There are more than 57,000 vets on the streets of our nation, and many of them are abandoned and forgotten. Some of them are beaten, robbed and even killed on the streets. If that happened behind enemy lines, Americans would be outraged. Veterans Matter is our outrage.”
With more vets helped every year, Veterans Matter will continue to demonstrate the power of transforming that outrage into compassion.
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How ‘The Golden Girls’ Can Help Solve a Problem Facing Senior Women
“The Golden Girls” went off the air in 1992, but many of us still remember the show about four senior women sharing a home in Miami, in part because there hasn’t been anything else like it on T.V.
It turns out “The Golden Girls” was ahead of its time in more ways than one, and that its model of communal living—with some good-natured bickering thrown in—might provide a solution to a problem facing millions of Baby Boomer women as they reach retirement age. One third of Baby Boomer women live alone, and 50.8 percent of the 78.2 million Boomers in America are women. Many of these single women are divorced, a situation that often leaves their finances in disarray as they head into retirement.
According to the PBS NewsHour, the median income of senior women in Minneapolis was $11,000 less than that for men, which gave Connie Skillingstad an idea. She runs Golden Girl Homes, Inc., which helps match older women in the Twin Cities with others who’d like to reduce loneliness and split expenses by sharing a home. She told Spencer Michels of the NewsHour that each of the women who band together as roommates offers some asset that can help the others. “For example, there are women who have no money, but they have a house. They have space and they can share it with somebody, and it will help them to survive,” she said.
Karen Bush, Louise Machinist, and Jean McQuillan are longtime friends in their 60s, each of them divorced, who now share houses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sarasota, Florida. The women reach agreements about cooking, cleaning, finances, and what to do should any of them fall ill. They have legal documents in place stipulating what would happen if any of them are no longer able to take care of themselves. Together, they’re renovating their Florida condo to allow them to age in place. Bush told Michels, “The whole setup that we have here is going to help me be independent for a long time. And at the point at which I can no longer be independent, I will have additional resources to pay for what I need.”
Half a million women over the age of 50 in America live with roommates who are not romantic partners. Now this sounds like a case of smart women banding together to solve their own problems. Could a sitcom be next?
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Can Riding Tricycles Help These Injured Vets?
Who would have guessed that what some veterans need most is a tricycle? Portage, Mich.-based nonprofit Lest We Forget Our Vets did, and they have been providing disabled veterans with specially designed tricycles to increase their mobility and provide them with a form of exercise that accommodates their physical needs. AMBUCS, a national nonprofit that works to enhance independence in people with disabilities, initially developed the AmTryke as a therapeutic vehicle for children with disabilities, and since has expanded to adult models. The tricycle provides stability that a two-wheeled bike can’t, and each AmTryke can be pedaled either with the feet or hands.
T.W. Lane, director of Lest We Forget Our Vets, told Alex Jokich of NewsChannel 3 that the AmTrykes build strength, increase mobility, and improve self-esteem in veterans who may not have been able to get around much without them. The nonprofit provides AmTrykes to veterans suffering from physical disabilities, PTSD or the after effects of a traumatic brain injury.
Recently Lest We Forget Our Vets brought an AmTryke to Victor Van Fleet, a 95-year-old World War II Veteran, who crashed his two-wheeled bike last year and thought his cycling days were behind him. Van Fleet has been enjoying pedaling in his Kalamazoo community. “It allows you to do things you couldn’t do before,” he told Jokich. “You can observe the sky above and the sunshine and the birds and the trees. You see things that you’ve never seen before on a two-wheeler.”
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In a Bold Move, Chicago Gives DREAMers a Shot at Summer Jobs
Who knows how long congress will continue to drag its feet on immigration reform, but luckily for immigrants across the country, local and state governments have decided they can’t wait.
From coast to coast, Americans are implementing their own reforms, including offering in-state tuition to immigrants, making it easier for them to get a bank account, or even passing their own (non-enforceable) immigration laws. The latest effort in this grassroots immigration reform effort comes from Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced on April 11 that 23,000 city positions will be open to immigrants who were brought here as children.
These immigrants, known as DREAMers for the long-delayed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act that would provide them with a path to citizenship and access to higher education if it ever passes, can now apply for 30 mayor’s office fellowships, 500 city internships, and 22,000 jobs in the city’s summer jobs program: One Summer Chicago. To qualify, applicants must have been brought to the United States as children, have lived here for five years, and kept out of trouble with the law. The city will publicize the opportunities in neighborhoods with high percentages of immigrants.
“Chicago is a city that was built by immigrants, and I am committed to ensuring that DREAMers have the same opportunities offered by the city to all of Chicago’s youth,” Emanuel said, according to Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business. “We will open doors to support talented young people.”
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