By David Palmer
Early this summer, Paul Chapman, a former Alltel executive and now pastor at Little Rock’s Fellowship Bible Church, launched the “First Principles of Entrepreneurship” class for prison inmates at the inner city’s Scott Ford Center for Entrepeurship at Arkansas Baptist College. The program addresses on a local level the national problem of housing the nation’s more than three million prison inmates in an expensive, life wasting and predominantly bureaucratic system with a staggering recidivism rate. Up to 80 percent of inmates who serve their terms end up back in prison within three years. Most of the time drugs are involved, and jobs are hard to find.
So what’s the answer? One answer is to take the entrepreneurial skills of drug dealers, pimps and other criminals and channel them into legal enterprises. It makes sense, and it has been tried successfully in the Cleveland prison in Texas. The program at Arkansas Baptist is a significant step. Dr. Fitz Hill, a dynamic and devout former football coach, is president of the college which is located in an historically tough inner city neighborhood.
For financial support, Chapman turned to his friend and member of FBC, Scott Ford, a one-time president and CEO of Alltel and a founder of Little Rock based Westrock Capital Partners. Westrock’s goal “is to support entrepreneurs who are dedicated to building solid business plans for underserved communities. “We’re going to work to develop the next generation of business leaders who share our commitment to for-profit enterprises that give back to their communities.” Ford donated $2.5 million to Arkansas Baptist College in 2011 for the new “entrepreneurial center” which was completed in 2012.
Dr. Hill said the Center “will be the hub of the college’s efforts to develop entrepreneurs who want to build for-profit companies while serving the community.” Chapman, a businessman turned pastor eight years ago, had his epiphany while on a business trip for Alltel in the middle east’s Dubai, a bustling business center and exotic tourist stop in the United Arab Emirates.
As a new Christian, Chapman was later persuaded by Robert Lewis to become a pastor himself. Lewis was a co-founder with Bill Wellons and Bill Parkinson of Fellowship Bible Church in 1977 and the church’s dynamic church planting initiative. Lewis was also a founder of the international Men’s Fraternity in 1985. Chapman’s First Principals of Entrepreneurship program has roots going back six years when a group of us visited a prison in Cleveland, Texas near Houston to see its Prison Entrepreneurial Program, “PEP” in action. PEP has an interesting history. A decade ago former Wall Street professional Catherine Rohr founded the program following a tour and study of the prison’s operations.
The PEP program’s bottom line, as its literature suggests, is that “prison is a storehouse of untapped potential. Many inmates come to prison as seasoned entrepreneurs who happened to run illegitimate businesses. Once equipped with education and life skills training, the Return on Investment (ROI) potential for the truly reformed prisoner, his family and his community, is limitless.” During our visit six years ago I thought some of their business plans rivaled what I saw as a student at the Harvard Business School in the early 1950’s and what I later experienced as the owner and publisher of several newspapers.
Chapman’s basic text for the course at Arkansas Baptist is “Who owns the ice house? Eight life lessons from an unlikely entrepreneur” by Gary Schoeniger and Clifton Talbert. “Uncle Cleve,” the entrepreneur of the title, was born black and poor in the segregated deep south, but he did own a small business—an ice house. He knew that everyone needed ice, and he knew new how to sell it beginning with treating everyone with respect and delivering the goods. Uncle Cleve’s nephew, Clifton, watched his uncle very carefully, and the lessons he learned ultimately propelled him into entrepreneurship himself. Clifton became part of an investment group that started a successful bank in Tulsa, and he was profiled by Time magazine as an outstanding emerging entrepreneur. Each chapter of the book begins with a quote from uncle Cleve, and they are the basis of Chapman’s curriculum.
1. “Choice: The mark you make today will show up tomorrow.”
2. “Opportunity: Remember, daylight always follows nighttime.”
3. “Action: Yes siree if you ain’t got nothing planted, ain’t nothin’ gonna show up”
4. “Knowledge: Mix ‘em up, boy. Hard work and book learnin’”
5. “Wealth: Boy, some folks spend ever’ penny they git and’ll borrow to spend more. You cain’t live like that.”
6. “Brand: You gotta do what you tell folks you gonna do”
7. “Community: You need friends, all us do, but picking good ones is up to you.”
8. “Persistence: As long as I kin wake up, I’m gonna git up.”
Students in the Arkansas Baptist program are housed in the Hidden Creek Opportunity Center, a former motel and now “a faith based transitional facility.”
Jennifer Hawthorne, a woman of deep faith and compassion, was made director of Hidden Creek last summer and has 22 residents to look after—15 men and 7 women. Ultimately, the facility can handle up to 60. As the facility grows in number, there is one aspect of its population the administration should aggressively address. Every one of its 13 participants has abused alcohol and/or other drugs, and at least one, probably more, has had a “slip.” For nearly eighty years, Twelve Step programs (which are “faith based’’) have been remarkably successful since the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 and Hidden Creek should include them in its recovery program.
As for the ceremonies at Arkansas Baptist College in mid November, all of the graduates had something to say about the program and what it had meant to them. Here’s a sample:
Pamela Jo said:
I chose, at the age of 36, after seventeen years of sobriety, to engage in a relationship with a man who introduced me to meth. Within five years, I had lost everything, including him (which was not loss!). That was the point where God put a stop sign in my life. I was arrested and by God’s grace offered a drug court. Drug court saved my life, and through this amazing opportunity my long held beliefs and assumptions have changed. By focusing on the things I am able to change–my behaviors, beliefs, and actions–I know now I can rise above my circumstances by responding positively to adverse situations. I can step out of my comfort zone and not be afraid to fail. I now believe, through Jesus Christ who strengthens me, I am capable of moving mountains.
Then there was Amber who said:
Before going to prison, I was out on the street, battling with my addiction to opiates and methamphetamines, leaving my children with family, abandoning them for days at a time and fighting the chaos and demons I had created for myself. Last February, God opened my eyes in a surprising way. I discovered that I had delivered meth to someone who turned out to be an informer. I was arrested, went through the court process, faced a judge and then had to face my punishment, a 24-month sentence at Arkansas Community Correction. At ACC I took the amazing Embracing Purpose class led by Linda Slaton at Fellowship Bible Church (FBC). At one of our classes we were asked if anyone would be interested in taking a new Entrepreneurship and Discipleship course being offered.
Amber applied and was accepted. Concerning what she learned, she said, “Because of the class, I have gained an awareness of the entrepreneurial mindset, identified opportunities and built and developed wonderful relationships, especially with God.”
Robert, the educational coordinator of the new class, was convicted of forgery and possession of a controlled substance and sentenced to serve six years in the Arkansas Department of Correction system. He served a year and a half in two Arkansas prisons and was transferred in July to Hidden Creek. Robert, who has legal training as a Paralegal and Managing Director of a criminal defense law firm in Fayetteville, is on the missions team at Fellowship Bible Church. His goal, he says, is to bring public attention and political support to the rethinking of prison as rehabilitation, not punishment.
The Harvard Business School has this to say about the entrepreneurial process. The entrepreneur “identifies an opportunity, creates an organization, marshals resources to pursue it and bears the risk.” If you are looking for more detail, buy Harvard’s “Entrepreneur’s tool kit. Tools and techniques.”
A hundred years ago, Tammany Hall politician George Washington Plunkitt, an entrepreneur, put it more directly, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em”
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