North Lawndale Employment Network & Sweet Beginnings LL

The Sweet Beginnings social enterprise is changing how men and women return from prison, one person at a time. We must elevate our work to reach more people, inspire them to rethink their value, and become more open to second chances and more compassionate towards people who have very hard lives and may have made bad decisions along the way. As civil rights attorney and author of Just Mercy Bryan Stevenson says, "We're all better than our worst mistakes."

We are growing. We are moving all operations under one roof to expand production and to add two new social enterprises, a beelove café and event space. But I have learned as an Elevate Fellow that to have a national breakthrough we must invest in a professional digital marketing and advertising campaign. Through Elevate, we have already adapted Sprout and Canvas and now a need dedicated digital marketing department to build and execute the marketing plan. Our story can go viral but only if we invest in making it happen.

Winning the Elevate Prize will enable us to build our beelove brand, expand our product offerings to include beelove for baby, and to amplify our work to create population-level impact.

I am Founder, President & CEO of the North Lawndale Employment Network and founding social entrepreneur and CEO of Sweet Beginnings. I am a purpose-driven, transformational leader helping the most vulnerable to raise themselves to economic sustainability and reclaim their self-esteem. Today, we help 2,000 people get jobs and Sweet Beginnings has hired its 500th worker.

I have two goals for the future: to employ and find permanent employment for 100 people per year at Sweet Beginnings and reduce the North Lawndale unemployment rate to be on par with the city’s. My vision is to see systemic criminal justice reform and the decriminalization of poverty, so North Lawndale and communities like it no longer need a place like Sweet Beginnings.

Honeybees do not discern between weeds or flowers. They draw good from the plant and transform it into something sweet. We can restore communities and change the world by preserving the lives of the formerly incarcerated. I am resilient, like the honeybee withstanding Colony Collapse Disorder and our harsh Chicago winters, I will persist until we achieve our vision and our workers will not give up in their quest to restore their sense of self-worth. 

Sweet Beginnings is committed to solving the problem of unemployment among Black men and women with criminal backgrounds through reentry services and three-month transitional jobs in our honey and skincare business. Workers build a legal work history and develop skills transferable to jobs in green industries, manufacturing, food and customer service, and more. We have hired over 500 employees. More than 75% of our workers secure unsubsidized jobs and 85% keep them for the long-term. 

The U.S. is the world’s leader in incarceration: 2.2 million people are behind bars. This terrible truth does not touch all equally: 1 in 3 Black men are incarcerated (1 in 17 white men are incarcerated). In tandem with unemployment in our Black communities, this creates a crisis of poverty and a generational cycle of incarceration.

These statistics only tell part of the story. This unconscionably racist system dehumanizes people of color whether a traffic stop or police murder or incarceration. When a person goes to prison, they become a number. When our workers join us, they struggle with the basics such as taking initiative or directives from supervisors and communicating with others. Through empathy, inclusion, empowerment, and equity they restore their value as humans.

Our innovation is:

Transforming urban, low-income individuals with skills into beekeepers who move into sustainable careers. Connecting to nature has a profound impact: caring for bees opens a world that gets workers thinking beyond a job to health and sustainability and allows them to be creative – these are atypical jobs that feel valuable to our workers. Our bees pollinate life in the neighborhood and prepare people with transferable skills.

Creating quality products. Our social mission cannot carry us alone. We must (and do) have a high end, attractive product that stands on its own. beelove® has been sold at Whole Foods, Hudson’s and HMSHost at O’Hare and Midway International airports, local boutiques, and more. Alicia Keys and her husband Swizz Beatz endorsed beelove® in People Magazine in 2018. We continue to innovate quality products, most recently with our subscription boxes.

Unique public support. We are the first urban apiary in an airport. The apiary uses fallow land, left as a buffer zone, to house bees. This is good for the environment and for the bees and gives the business more space for our apiaries. Since we opened at O’Hare Airport, Seattle, Portland OR, and Toronto have followed.

We are restoring humanity for people who have been reduced to a prison number. The impact of employment for citizens returning from incarceration is profound. With stable employment, a person can reunite with and support their family, rejoin their community, restore their sense of self-worth. Less than 4% of Sweet Beginning workers return to prison. And the impact of one job transcends the individual to change the entire ecosystem of a community.

We do this with a market-driven solution. Sweet Beginnings produces beelove®, a line of natural urban honey and honey-infused skincare products. Workers gain experience that transfers to jobs in manufacturing, food service, distribution, warehousing, hospitality, customer service, and more. We have 100 beehives at five Chicagoland locations, including O’Hare Airport. We are the largest operator of urban beehives in Chicago. Products have been featured in Mariano’s stores, Hudson News at O’Hare and Midway Airports, online, and more. We are in discussions with Ulta Beauty.

Sweet Beginnings elevates humanity one jar at a time. Black men and women restore their sense of self-worth, regain family connections, and meaningfully contribute to their communities. And more broadly, customers and supporters learn to value every human being, regardless of a past mistake.

Sweet Beginnings currently employs a total of 40 workers in three-month transitional positions per year and helps them to secure unsubsidized, permanent jobs (with fewer in 2020 due to the pandemic). In one year, we plan to increase that number to 60. Five years down the road, Sweet Beginnings aims to employ, train, and place 100 people per year into unsubsidized jobs. All of these individuals have criminal backgrounds and numerous other barriers to employment. They are unlikely to secure stable employment without Sweet Beginnings or a similar intervention. Eventually, we plan to spread our model across the nation and even internationally through consulting and licensing agreements. Once this is achieved, our model will serve vast numbers of returning citizens. 

The impact of employment for citizens returning from incarceration is profound. One who secures stable employment can reunite with and support family, rejoin community, restore a sense of self-worth, and is significantly less likely to return to prison (less thank 10% of Sweet Beginning workers return!). The impact of one job transcends the individual to change the entire network of relationships within a community.

Greater impact means creating immediate employment opportunities that respect both the formal and street knowledge of people returning from incarceration. Our goal over the next five years is to employ and find permanent employment for another 500 returned citizens. The impact of these jobs is exponential – one job means a sustained family, economic mobility, and addressing income inequalities. Achieving this goal will require an expansion, already underway. Sweet Beginnings’ expanded production facility launches this summer in NLEN’s newly developed 20,000SF neighborhood building, creating a new campus and hive of activity. This begins a phased expansion into “Social Enterprise Ventures,” to include an events space rental venture and pop-up retail space for local entrepreneurs and the Worker Bee Café, a cafe and catering venture. We raised over $11 million, exceeding our campaign goal of $10 million. 

And we will go beyond our neighborhood. Sweet Beginnings can be replicated in any disinvested community and has already been approached by nonprofits across the country and internationally (South Africa and Ethiopia). We will consider franchising for a future phase of expansion and are considering another social enterprise – providing consulting services to nonprofits that want to start their own urban honey social enterprises. 

Sweet Beginnings faces many of the same challenges as other small businesses - product and sales expansion and human capital capacity. Our current focus is sales growth. We must increase sales to hire more people. To increase sales locally, regionally, and eventually nationally, we must increase production and are poised to do so with our new campus. We are in a local market with our largest distributors Mariano’s Groceries, owned by Kroger, and HMS Host and Hudson’s at O’Hare and Midway airports. Bob Mariano opened a new chain grocery, DOMS, creating a new distribution opportunity. We are developing a more robust e-commerce platform and, as an Elevate Fellow, work with marketing experts to develop a social media marketing campaign. We will establish an advisory council with retail brand leadership such as Unilever, Dove, and Sephora. Being a small local brand is both a benefit and a barrier to scaling – we do not want to be the best kept secret in honey and skincare! Rather, we want to be the go-to brand for socially conscious shoppers who care about quality. To scale, customers must trust our products are high quality and love the social purpose, which will depend on our marketing.

The Elevate Prize will help us to reach more people, inspire them to rethink their values in regard to people who have been incarcerated, and become more open to second chances and more compassionate towards people who have hard lives and may have made bad decisions along the way. By working with Elevate experts, we will identify and reach a pool of influencers and a national spokesperson to elevate our work. At Sweet Beginnings, we want to change the way our country re-enters men and women who have served their time. Resources provided by the Elevate Prize will help us to amplify this exemplar, grow our brand, and share our methods with any community that wishes to adopt our model. We will demonstrate how such an investment benefits employers and society – and how to address a social issue through a market-driven solution that can become a sustainable business. 

The Elevate Prize will help Sweet Beginnings to serve as an international example of what’s possible for serving a population needing employment but not viewed by society as viable or valuable. As civil rights attorney and author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson says, we’re all better than our worse mistakes. 

NLEN is a social justice organization that uses innovative employment initiatives to undo the devastating impact of historic disinvestment on Chicago's West Side. As a Black-led and Black-serving organization, diversity, equity, and inclusion is more than racial diversity – it is inclusion of people with criminal backgrounds and nontraditional work experience, ability diversity, and gender diversity. 

NLEN leadership reflects these values and is committed to infusing them throughout the organization. Led by a Black woman, 100% of the Sweet Beginnings and NLEN executive team, 60% of the board of directors, and 90% of all our employees identify as BIPOC. We are intentional in our efforts to provide second chances through employment and have six employees with criminal backgrounds. 

Our values are reflected in our plan for achieving our goals. Given the high rate of poverty resulting from racial and economic wealth disparities, we will serve the unemployed and asset-limited, income-constrained employed population in North Lawndale to help them to secure employment within one year and develop the underlying skills and behaviors that improve their ability to successfully navigate the job market, secure sustained employment, close educational gaps, and/or improve household economic conditions.

Brenda and the NLEN and Sweet Beginnings teams are uniquely positioned to deliver on Sweet Beginnings. 13% of NLEN and 75% of Sweet Beginnings employees have lived experiences behind bars. We are qualified: at NLEN, we provide training and financial literacy services to 2,000 people per year and intense re-entry and job training to about 250 per year; 82% of them either secure jobs or continue their education. Sweet Beginnings has provided 512+ returned citizens with transitional jobs. 

The lived experiences of our employees guide much of how we do our work. For example, early on, Brenda learned of the business skills needed to be a street dealer – inventory, marketing, supervision, and more and realized these are transferable to the legal economy. Our training respects the skills that clients have when they enter training. 

Brenda is resilient. She understands how it feels to be underestimated and unemployed. She has learned to believe in her dreams and is a proven, driven social entrepreneur with 30+ years of experience as a workforce professional and has family and friends impacted by mass incarceration. Together they create a qualified, knowledgeable, and empathic team to deliver on the NLEN and Sweet Beginnings missions. 

While Brenda’s professional history is full of examples of leadership, the Sweet Beginnings origin story best highlights this characteristic. She determined the need, researched the industry, and turned concept to reality. This required foresight and leadership. As a social enterprise, she led her staff, board, and funders on this journey when many thought the idea foolish, before social enterprises were commonly understood in the nonprofit arena and before urban beekeeping gained its popularity. 

Key to success was building social capital. Through strategy, resiliency, and sheer force of will Brenda secured support from Illinois Department of Corrections (funding and referrals), philanthropic donors willing to take a risk because they trusted Brenda, then-Mayor Daley, and the Chicago Department of Aviation to provide land for beehives. Brenda secured media attention and applied for – and won – awards that generated positive publicity. 

Another key to success was acceptance by the neighborhood. People are scared of bees and do not know they are harmless if left alone. They also do not know how important they are as pollinators for our food sources. Brenda’s team initiated a community education campaign and came to be known as the Bee Lady on the West Side of Chicago.

Please see the following video highlights:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXDwz8DUddo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQA2raGCs78 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZji9UewFC30-45LyLSBuFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtL7c5uxpHQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=klSvbnovFOk&feature=emb_logo

The current focus of our growth is moving all our operations – Sweet Beginnings and NLEN – under one roof, expanding our production facilities to increase volume and efficiencies, and adding two new social enterprises and a retail space. We will be settled into our new facility in the next couple of months. 

If selected as an Elevate Prize winner, the new knowledge, connections, and funding will help us to grow locally, regionally, and nationally. The tools gained as a current Elevate Fellow have been astonishing. Brenda has learned how to be a better leader and storyteller. A second year of this opportunity, as we move into our new campus, expand our production facilities, establish a retail space, and launch two to three more social enterprises, would take the business to a new level of success. The changes the business is undergoing will present a new set of challenges and thus respond to new tools that Elevate can provide. 

Sweet Beginnings and NLEN succeed with the help of partners. We partner with the Illinois Beekeeper Association on our beekeeper curriculum. Our honey is Certified Naturally Grown. The Chicago Social Enterprise Alliance partners on business planning. Bain Capital, University of Chicago, DePaul Baumbart Entrepreneurial Center, IFF, and JPMorgan Chase advise on our finances. Lincoln Park Zoo is creating a new urban education program for our neighbors on honeybees and our ecosystem. We partner with the MacArthur Foundation, Chicago Community Trust, and Benefit Chicago on our financing. The City of Chicago and Cook County provide wage subsidies and referrals. 

For programming, community-based providers, government, researchers, and employers extend NLEN’s capacity to deliver quality, comprehensive services. Partner organizations such as I AM ABLE, Sinai Health Services, Lawndale Christian Legal Center, Dress for Success, Stone Temple Baptist Church, and Chicago Food Depository provide recruitment, housing, legal support including restorative justice, life and social skills, and substance use and mental health care. Government partners offer funding, referrals, and collaboration. Employers partner in program design and providing jobs. We have an evaluation partnership with the Social Innovation Fund and University of Illinois at Chicago.