Mission: Launch, co-founded by a directly impacted mother-daughter and was built on The Lean Startup methodology, which encourages piloting and pivoting until you find your unique "product market fit."
The organization is proud of our journey and truly believes in our approach to change - financial literacy, inclusive entrepreneurship and community engagement.
Our history includes leading The Rebuilding Reentry Coalition, which brought together directly impacted individuals, corporations, government agencies and non-profits with the civic coding community through hackathons and collaborative workshops. Several open-source tools were established focused on record sealing/expungement and services coordination leading to national attention for DC's reentry community. It was this work that led to an MSNBC television crew attending the Rebuilding Reentry DC Hackathon. Additionally, by way of our business and leadership development accelerator for entrepreneurs living with criminal convictions, LaunchPad, we have provided technical assistance, shared workspace and leadership development training. LaunchPad was seeded by a local philanthropic partner and the U.S. Small Business Administration. LaunchPad has resulted in the formation of worker owned co-operatives, sole proprietorships and limited liability corporations throughout Maryland and Washington, DC.
Our Vision
We envision an America that restores equity and creates sustainable opportunities for fresh starts so that citizens facing barriers due to an arrest and/or conviction record can live out their full potential by rejoining society and contributing in meaningful ways
Our Mission
Our mission is to accelerate self-sufficiency and improve social outcomes for Americans with an arrest and/or conviction record
Our Approach
Leveraging best practices from the collective impact philosophy we believe it will take a series of steps to see change. Mission: Launch is known for building bridges across communities, which enables the formation of an ecosystem. We do not intend to undertake all of the necessary work ourselves but we do envision ourselves as a backbone organization for a growing network.