When Business Aims for Miracles
Minneapolis-St. Paul business professionals are some of the inner city's most effective social entrepreneurs
Todd Svanoe | posted 5/21/2001 12:00AM
While some social ministry leaders are tapping government funds, Minnesota evangelicals are blazing a different trail: the business world, which they find richer not only in funds but in skills and leadership. These faith leaders are combining biblical piety, corporate funding, and a "just do it" business manner to produce a civic witness for Christ on a scale beyond what their seminaries prepared them for—all free of government bureaucracy and church-board stalemates.
General Mills, for example, was so compelled by Bethel Seminary graduate Alfred Babington-Johnson's vision for healing a broken African-American community that it offered funding and 100 volunteers to help create an award-winning soul-food manufacturer and packing company in north Minneapolis. Stairstep Initiative's Siyeza Inc. employs 80 people (and expects to hire more than 175 at its peak capacity), 80 percent of them from poor neighborhoods. The $4.3 million investment, created through an alliance of 49 black investors, General Mills, and US Bancorp, produced a $94,000 return at only 10 percent of factory capacity last year.
Based on projections and new contracts, debt will be eliminated in less than five years, after which workers will have an opportunity for a stake in ownership. Siyeza's mission is to demonstrate God's friendship to disfranchised people, Babington-Johnson says.
"God does not just say he loves us, he shows it, and so must we," he says. "Our desire is that the manifestation of God's power in this community-building work translates into What must I do to be saved? But for many that won't happen until they hold stock papers in their hands."
Crack Alley to Thriving Center
"Historically, urban ministries got mad at the rich. Now, we're partnering with them," says veteran youth pastor Art Erickson, who started Urban Ventures Leadership Foundation in 1993 with retired banker Ralph Bruins. Their goal: create a Christian community development corporation as a catalyst for joining faith and business resources to help inner-city kids succeed—an area in which the church had floundered. In only eight years, through alliances with businesses like General Mills, Honeywell, Edina Realty, and ADC Broadband, Urban Ventures has transformed an abandoned city strip in south central Minneapolis formerly known as "Crack Alley" into the thriving center now called "the Opportunity Zone."
The avenue, once pocked with porn shops and crack houses and crawling with prostitutes, now offers youth sports, an Olympic-quality soccer field, computer and family education, a jobs agency, an evangelical church and Bible studies, emergency finances, and an outlet with free food, clothes, and furniture.
Enthusiastic business veterans sit over maps and catered lunches in a boardroom planning their next move: the $16 million Colin Powell Youth Leadership Center. "I've never been involved in anything so good and pure in all my life," says Dave Bigler, former senior vice president of marketing at Principal Financial Group.
Bigler led a committee that hosted a luncheon last summer in which Erickson and Powell appealed to more than 1,000 Minneapolis business leaders to partner with faith leaders to revitalize urban neighborhoods.
Philip Styrlund, vice president of sales at ADC, says of Urban Ventures, "They get things done here. They have a focus."
Urban Ventures' leaders are neither shy nor retiring: corporate funders on a tour of Urban Ventures are immediately shown walls of professionally mounted photos in what could be called a Gallery of Outcomes. They are told exactly what part they could play in Urban Ventures' unfolding strategic plan. Styrlund finds this approach not only businesslike but also Christlike.
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