CHICAGO LOOP CLEANERS

Chicago Loop Cleaners (CLC) is a high-end luxury house-keeping service that not only brings peace and rest to homes in downtown Chicago, but is also doing its part to participate in the economic development of Chicago's marginalized neighborhoods.

Emily Taylor is the founder and owner of Chicago Loop Cleaners. She began her housecleaning career in Colorado when she decided that she needed to look for work that was more meaningful. While working for the Everyday Task Company in Colorado Springs, Emily had the privilege of not only learning to clean, but to run a business, as well. She was involved in the marketing, sales, hiring, and training processes at ETC. When she left to start Chicago Loop Cleaners, she left with the blessing of the owners of ETC. Housecleaning is much more than a job to Emily. Her passion is to see other peoples’ lives improve. Cleaning is a unique way of doing just that, and Emily is most excited about giving people “space” in their lives. Emily finds her work as a cleaner so enjoyable that she often doesn’t even feel like she’s at work!

Emily always knew she wanted to use the business to teach people professional and personal life-skills, but it wasn’t until mid-2016 that she was really able to solidify what that would mean in her company. Now CLC is launching a year-long training program that will enable all employees to identify their vision for their own life and to develop professional and interpersonal skills that will make them highly desirable for future jobs. The first 3 months will teach the team members professionalism and cleaning skills. The next 6 months will focus on personal development. This will include training on self-esteem, life visioning, goal setting, conflict management, nutrition, and financial education. In the final months of the year, team members will be able to identify the direction they want to take their careers by using those skills within the company. While still cleaning, they will have opportunities to become more involved with social media marketing, blog writing, sales, management, employee training, accounting, and other career-building skills

CLC plans to hire 4 new employees this year and put them through a full internship program that not only involves becoming a highly skilled house cleaner, but will also put them on a path of professional and personal development, so that they can take the next step of success in their lives. If our communities are developed, then we all win.

 

GRAY MATTER

Britney Robbins

 

The Gray Matter Experience is a 9-week entrepreneurship exposure experience that gives select students across Chicago the opportunity to build their own business. During the program, students work together learning business concepts from Black entrepreneurs and professionals. They then take that knowledge and in groups, create a business to help impact South and West Side communities. Throughout the program, students also go on several interactive field trips to see hands on applications of entrepreneurship and behind-the-scenes processes of some of Chicago's coolest industries. All participating teams receive a portion of money to fund their businesses and are placed into internships and/or mentorships to start the businesses created during the program. Gray Matter aims to educate, empower and assist students in creating their own businesses, while providing them access to resources and support to ensure students understand that their ideas are valid and vital to the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Britney Robbins is the founder and CEO of The Gray Matter Experience. Britney has worked within Chicago's entrepreneurship and tech community for the past four years with some of Chicago's top venture capital firms and incubators, including Sandbox Industries, Lightbank and 1871. She is a graduate of The University of Illinois where she studied Rhetoric and Creative Writing. She has been recognized as one of Ariel Investment, BMO Harris and WVON's 40 Under 40 Gamechangers, featured on Fox32, Chicago Inno, BlackEntrepreneur.com, DNAInfo Chicago and in the Chicago Tribune for her work with Gray Matter. She was also recently named as one of five investees for Goodcity's Women's Innovation Fund.

Britney is passionate about the intersection of entrepreneurship, education and youth and believes in empowering others to use their passions and strengths to create opportunities for themselves. She recently authored and published her first book and is committed to inspiring youth to reach their full potential.

BRAVE INITIATIVES

Jen Kamins

Brave Initiatives is on a mission to empower young women to view themselves as purposeful, powerful agents of change in the world. As technology becomes a growing industry and a leading topic of discussion, Brave has developed a program that integrates social impact projects, design thinking strategy and web development through coding. Brave believes that all people have the ability to code, but many hold themselves back. To change this, Brave runs a 5-day BraveCamp that gets participants involved in the creative and enthralling process of developing technology using design-thinking tools for social impact.

BraveCamp begins with time for personal reflection and activities that spur self-love and self-discovery. Participants then immerse themselves in relevant community issues of which they feel passionate about and prototype tech-based solutions to those issues using the design process. Participants come away from the camp with fearlessness and self-efficacy towards computer science and their abilities to design solutions using technology that better their communities, and ultimately, the world. The goal of each camp is to challenge girls to step outside of their comfort zones to explore the greater purpose of technology, while guiding them to see themselves as the authors of their own lives. Through hands on learning, games, mentorship and leadership activities, each student will complete the program feeling empowered, supported and purposeful in a new way.

Co-Founder and Director of Business and Corporate Relations, Jen Kamins, previously worked at Motorola Mobility, A Google Company and Abbott Labs as a member of the HR teams. She spent 5 years working in Talent Acquisition as a part of the recruitment process, hiring top tier tech talent. After volunteering for two years with Citizen Schools, Jen grew deeply passionate about working with underserved communities in Chicago and raising young women to be future change makers.

 

Pivotal Impact

Candace Washington

While working as a Learning and Development Professional, Candace Washington realized she wasn’t fully living out her dreams and career aspirations. Instead, she was settling. She was simply talking about what she wanted to be instead of taking action to become who she wanted to be.

Growing up in an underserved community on the west side of Chicago where education is often subpar and opportunity is bleak, Candace was the beneficiary of many personal and professional young adult development programs and organizations that had a pivotal impact in her life and altered her trajectory. As a result, from the age of 19, Candace’s passion has been to be a guide post and catalyst for the personal and professional development of young adults, just as others were for her. Candace passionately wanted to pay it forward in life, leadership and legacy through service to others. She wanted to serve the audience she cared about and related to the most and she wanted to do it in a bigger way. She wanted to reach far beyond what her daily 9 to 5 job provided.

In January 2016, Candace received a consulting request to develop several leadership development workshops for a large university program that targeted young adults. After delivering the first session, she felt alive and on fire and it was clear that they did as well. It was a very different feeling from what she received in her full-time role as a training professional. She felt like she wanted to bask in that moment forever. Following the project, other consulting opportunities came along, until finally Candace made the definitive decision to fully commit to creating the life she wanted … and Pivotal Impact (PI) was born

Candace launched PI eleven months ago and now has a team of three Learning and Development Consultants. PI is a personal leadership, professional growth, and talent development consulting company that empowers emerging leaders and young professionals with knowledge and skills to accelerate success and build legacy in work, life, and leadership.

Candace is the infectious, positive, can-do spirit behind PI. She loves to laugh and always has a big smile on her face. An avid bowler, book worm and leadership geek who enjoys family, traveling and meeting new people, Candace is focused on building lasting relationships and legacy in leadership and communication for herself and the audiences she serves. Words that inspire her? “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?” ~Rabbi Hillel

I Am A Gentleman, Inc.

Jermaine Lawrence Anderson

In 2012, Jermaine Lawrence Anderson founded I Am A Gentleman, Inc. with the goal of developing and rebuilding young men from the inside out in minority communities throughout the United States. I Am A Gentleman, Inc. was born out of Jermaine’s passion to impart to others the lessons and values that shaped and molded his own life while growing up on the west side of Chicago. As a student at Ella Flagg Elementary School in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, Jermaine began learning about entrepreneurship from Brian Jenkins when Brian was just beginning to teach about it. Jermaine later became a successful entrepreneur and businessman. 

The mission of I Am A Gentleman, Inc. is to engage, enrich and empower young men for successful careers, healthy lifestyles, marketable skills and well-balanced relationships.

I Am A Gentleman, Inc. sets out to accomplish its goal through personal development classes and enrichment workshops embracing etiquette and statesmanship for young adult and adult men. They provide guidance through mentoring, health and wellness workshops, career and advanced education leads, volunteer projects and various positive community initiatives throughout the year. They are committed to helping young men improve their personal & professional relationships and overall emotional, physical and spiritual health.

• The White Tablecloth Experience is an afternoon of motivation, demonstration and fine dining that teaches young men the basics of etiquette.
• Polka Dot Socks is a 10-session curriculum offered twice a year that teaches young men ages 14-21 life skills including the importance of having good self-esteem, what it means to have confidence, self-respect and the power of their image.
• Project Gentlemen helps clothe young men graduating high school and men re-entering the workforce.

Jermaine Lawrence Anderson is a true testament to the ideology introduced all those years ago at Ella Flagg Young Elementary. From one of the first students under the tutelage of Brian Jenkins, Jermaine has developed into a successful businessman recognized by Real Times Media Group as Someone You Should Know (Who’s Who in Black Chicago, March 2012) and was recently appointed to NBC5 Chicago’s Community Action Board. 

 

Chicago Fire Furniture

Julius Dorsey

Walk into Darrel and Reesheda Washington’s new L!VE Café for an exceptional cup of coffee and you just might find yourself engaged in inspiring conversation with like-minded community members seated around a rather exceptional piece of art—a beautiful, torched wood table by artist Julius Dorsey of Chicago Fire Furniture.

With family roots in Detroit and an art background in drawing, painting and photography, Julius finds a great deal of enjoyment in creating life from things most other people consider junk. In fact, it was a summer break trip to visit his grandmother in Detroit, while pursuing his education at the Art Institute of Chicago, that Julius was first inspired with the notion that where there is decay, there is growth. He decided then and there that one day he would use that in his art—the idea of building something to stand for unconventional beauty and the dichotomy between growth and destruction.

Four years later, the idea resurrected through an unexpected medium. Fire. Julius decided he would attempt to create something new through a means of destruction ... and Chicago Fire Furniture was born.

Although his inspiration came from Detroit, Julius says his sense of urgency came from his household. “I started this business after being fired from a sales job in my late 20’s. In a month, I went from being on pace to earn 6 figures in my ‘dream’ job, to having no income, with bills on the way and a wife 8-months pregnant with our 4th child. Oh, and I was flat broke and we had no health insurance.”

Rather than taking another job, Julius decided to take a leap of faith and start something on his own. For the next year, he transformed his condo into a woodshop. “I was literally refinishing furniture in my kitchen nook and photographing in my dining room,” Julius says. “Customers would show up to see my ‘showroom’ and encounter my kids running all over the place. I carried a few hundred pieces of furniture up 2 flights of stairs for over a year before getting my own woodshop.”

Today, Julius has a woodshop in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. His one-of-a-kind furniture pieces are physically torched outdoors--usually at night--and stored in the same building that houses the workshop.

Julius draws his inspiration from his surroundings and from the streets. “I’ve always been drawn to the unmanicured corners of the city where the raw truth is out in the open. I like to view life before and after the cameras start rolling with all the imperfections in plain view.”

His advice to others? “Never let fear tell you what you can or can’t do. Don’t be afraid to back yourself into a corner where failure isn’t an option and fight your way out. You’ll make and become something amazing in the process.” Which is just one reason why his table is a perfect fit in L!VE Café.