All Posts

The smell of freshly brewed coffee awakened Lucretia Marsh each morning when she was a child. Her hard-working mother, a devoted coffee enthusiast, brewed a fresh cup every day. By age seven, Marsh shared her mother’s love for coffee. Tempted by the lingering smell of roasted beans, she would sneak downstairs to finish the coffee left at the bottom of her mother’s cup. In 2017, Marsh’s mother passed away unexpectedly. As she struggled to process her grief, Marsh found comfort

As a teenager, Amie Dworecki was a health and fitness enthusiast, serving as a personal trainer and fitness instructor and finding joy in accelerating others’ wellness journeys. When navigating adulthood, Dworecki explored several time-intensive corporate roles across the tech, business and media industries. After her father passed away, she was determined to “look back at life as having been an adventure instead of a grind,” and returned to wellness as a focus of her profess

Jannyell Hines has served South Bend’s elderly and disabled communities as a professional caretaker since she was 19. Over the two decades she worked in the field, she noticed a persistent problem in local home care. While caretaking is a profession that requires personable and communicative service providers, caregivers hired to perform these tasks often do not strive to meet these basic standards of the profession. “Many times, clients won’t even know the name of their agen

Adell Badgett's Entrepreneurial Journey After he was laid off by his employer during the COVID-19 pandemic, Adell Badgett realized that many individuals were not taking advantage of the economic slowdown to pursue their delayed dreams. Instead of seeing his situation as a setback, he turned it into an opportunity to chase his entrepreneurial ambitions. While curiously tinkering with his son’s virtual-reality (VR) headset, Badgett decided to experiment with VR by incorporating

Alejandro Saucedo is a proud descendant of migrant field workers. As a child, his identity was shaped by his family’s perseverance and aspirations as they navigated seasonal farm labor. After receiving professional development opportunities as custodial workers, his grandparents and mother transitioned out of manual labor, taking their strong work ethic with them. As a teenager, Saucedo suffered from addiction and was incarcerated. He did not allow incarceration to restrict h

Laquisha Jackson’s Entrepreneurial Journey in South Bend While most children her age were learning to paint or draw, Laquisha Jackson  found her creative passion in cooking. At just seven years old, she began helping her grandmother prepare family dinners — an experience that ignited a lifelong love for food. By the age of nine, her grandmother’s kitchen had become her personal playground. Over the next 19 years, Jackson built a career in the hospitality industry, working as