An Ohio Startup Rebuilds Lives One Piece of Fried Chicken at a Time

I’m very glad to see this article reach the homepage of Hacker News.

I met Joe DeLoss while I was studying at Ohio State and he was working at Lutheran Social Services (mentioned in the article). He is the real deal as a social entrepreneur.

He has been studying and working on the problem of employing the homeless and those with criminal records for well over a decade now. This was not an overnight success but took many years of tweaking his approach and optimizing between all his goals (a viable business model that could provide employment for the disenfranchised).

With Hot Chicken Takeover, he finally found the right business that had a product that had a wide appeal and could be provided by those he wanted to help. His career has been inspiring to follow and made him a hit in the Columbus, OH community.

San Francisco has a place like that, but upscale: Delancy Street Restaurant, in South Beach.[1] It's a retraining facility for ex-cons, operating since 1991. It's also an excellent restaurant. I recommend the chicken.

[1] http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/enterrestaurant.php

Wow. When I worked for a couple of months in Columbus, Hot Chicken Takeover was the most popular restaurant in town (that's not an exaggeration). They sold out of their chicken every single day. I had no idea it also had this social component. Great stuff.

how is this a start-up?