WESTVIEW PIZZA CAFE
Contributors
- June 28,2017
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We met Keitra Bates, the owner of the Westview Pizza Cafe, or WVPC, at our first small business workshop. She is an entrepreneur and community leader that just gets it. She started WVPC—an organic pizzaria in a low-income neighborhood that sources organic produce from local urban farmers, educates patrons on healthy food options, hires re-entry workers, and teaches them how to run their own businesses. Her restaurants serves as a community meeting spot for neighborhood organizations and parties. Keitra needed help reaching new customers and raising money for a new oven and a liquor license. Over the course of two months, our core team (which now included Scooter Taylor and Taylor Harris!) and a host of other villagers, connected her to the AUC student community, rebuilt her businesses plan from the executive summary down to the financials, helped her tell her story, and put the plan into action. There was a flood of new customers who were attracted to what she was doing. Thus, she became a vendor at the AUC schools and with companies we'd partnered with in the past. During the time we were working with Keitra we revisited our theory about lending. Since the banks won't lend in "low-moderate income neighborhoods," we thought, ‘What if we could make sure a company was investable, then the commun