Addressing Pressing Challenges through Partnership: Freedom Enterprise
As the workforce enterprise initiative continued over the summer, the Miami Valley Life Alliance (MVLA) emerged as the primary partner.1 The MVLA is led by Charlie Carroll, lead pastor of City Church in downtown Dayton. The IACT’s creative methodology and disruptive design, along with MVLA’s focus on poverty and integration into the local community, led to the emergence of Freedom Enterprise, a prototype network of hospitality and service-centered enterprises providing developmental support and opportunity for individuals reentering society from addiction and incarceration. Carroll brought the students to City Church so they could explore their community relationships both within the church and on the ground in Dayton, as well as spend time with the documentation of mission and vision that make MVLA and City Church Dayton’s nonprofit leader in eliminating poverty. Students also had an opportunity to have a meal at and observe the operation of Table 33, one of Dayton’s hospitality leaders in support of alternative vocational employment.
At the proposed nexus of the Freedom Enterprise system would become the Hospitality House, located within the City Church building, where creative learning and application stem from a radically designed educational framework for lifestyle, housing, and skills development. Individuals seeking a resilient and dignified service-forward lifestyle will be educated and trained through an apprenticeship educational framework modeled after the IACT’s applied creativity curriculum. Figure 4.1 diagrams the scaffolding of the Freedom Enterprise, which illustrates multiple connected efforts including partner businesses such as hotels, day cares, restaurants, urban farms, and grocery stores. Established Dayton partners were mapped with prospective city partners to present a vision for the impact of this dynamic new approach to dignity and sustainable work for those in recovery from addiction or incarceration. These approaches were emblematic of Carroll’s wider philosophy that “People with addictions, these are often symptoms of a greater issue .... We have to quit reducing people down to a number or a problem to be solved” (Poturalski, 2019, para. 12).
