DALLAS, March 9, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- BBVA Compass
clients and Dallas community
leaders gathered downtown Thursday night at Café Momentum, where
the former juvenile offenders who power the restaurant prepared and
served attendees a haute-cuisine meal and gave them a firsthand
look at social entrepreneur Chad
Houser's ambitious venture to rehabilitate the youth and
help them reenter society.
The evening had multiple purposes — to come together and
celebrate Houser's first-place prize of $50,000 in the bank's BBVA Momentum
accelerator program for social entrepreneurs, and to kick off
Café Momentum's fundraising effort for the planned
4,500-square-foot Café Momentum Community Services Center in the
tunnel space beneath Thanks-Giving Square, which is adjacent to the
restaurant.
"To read about Café Momentum is moving in and of itself, but to
be here and experience it reaches into your heart in a more
profound way," said BBVA Compass Dallas CEO Key Coker, who welcomed the guests Thursday
night. "We knew when we launched BBVA Momentum that we were going
to meet amazing people who'd dedicated their lives to creating
opportunities. That's Chad, and we're so proud of him. What we
didn't anticipate was meeting these young people who are teaching
us so much about the power of hope and pure determination."
(Watch video on Café Momentum
at bbva.info/cmvid.)
Café Momentum provides paid internships to former juvenile
offenders. They receive intensive culinary, job and life-skills
training as well as continued mentoring and support, all of which
is designed to foster their successful reentry into the
community.
"I want every one of these young people to be able walk out of
these doors and be able to say, 'I believe in me. I can do this,'"
said Chad Houser, Café Momentum's
founder, CEO and executive chef. "They show up every day, amidst
all of the odds that are stacked against them, and they commit. And
the commitment that they're making is to themselves. It's not to
me, it's not to the restaurant, it's not to the guests. It's to
themselves."
To further the bank's commitment to the restaurant, BBVA Compass
Director of Corporate Responsibility & Reputation Reymundo
Ocañas announced at the event that the BBVA Compass Foundation
would be giving an additional $4,000
to sponsor a table and chairs at Café Momentum.
Opened in 2015
Café Momentum's first brick-and-mortar restaurant and classroom
space opened in January 2015 in
downtown Dallas, and it was
promptly named Eater Dallas' 2015 "Restaurant of the Year." It
serves dinner Thursday through Saturday beginning at 5:30 p.m.
In Texas, Houser said, 48.3
percent of youths who have committed a crime will re-offend within
12 months. At Café Momentum, that rate is 15.2 percent.
"There's a taxpayer savings to that," he said. "In Texas, we pay
$127,000 to incarcerate a child. So
just looking at the reduction of recidivism from 48.3 percent to
15.2 percent, we've already saved taxpayers over $19.8 million since we started."
Before starting Café Momentum, Houser had been a chef for nearly
20 years — he received multiple nominations from D Magazine for
Best Up-And-Coming Chef and Best Chef, and received the Edible
Dallas/Fort Worth Local Hero-Chef award.
Top prize at BBVA Momentum
Houser won the top prize of $50,000 in December at BBVA Momentum. The BBVA
Momentum program has been operating since 2011 in other countries
throughout the global footprint of BBVA, the Madrid-based bank, but 2017 marked its first
foray into the U.S.
"The monies and support from BBVA Momentum mean so much to our
day-to-day efforts and beyond," Houser said. "Vital funding such as
this ensures our entire team is able to not only maximize our
ecosystem of support to help all of our interns but it also allows
us to expand our efforts with new innovations such as the Café
Momentum Community Services Center."
BBVA Momentum's goal is to help social entrepreneurs — those who
are hoping to change the world through their work — scale up and
make a positive impact on the lives of more people. Over several
months, participants were given access to online and in-person
training, strategic support, networking opportunities and
visibility.
Educators at the University of Texas at
Austin's McCombs School of
Business, one of the nation's most prestigious, led the in-person
training at the AT&T Executive Education & Conference
Center in Austin. They gave the
social entrepreneurs their undivided attention over three
separate multi-day training sessions, covering down-in-the-trenches
topics on financial planning, marketing, and how to pitch
investors, among other things.
In December, the participants brought all of their learning to
bear and pitched their businesses to a panel of judges —
entrepreneurs, UT-Austin McCombs School of Business educators and
BBVA Compass executives — and those considered the most sustainable
and with the highest social impact received cash awards. In
addition to Houser's $50,000 prize,
Margo Baines of Houston-based Chicks With Class was awarded
$25,000 for second place, while
Andy Lovley of Dallas-based Education Opens Doors received
$5,000 for third.
BBVA Compass plans to launch BBVA Momentum for 2018 in the
coming weeks. Interested social entrepreneurs across the bank's
seven-state Sunbelt footprint (Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, New
Mexico and Texas) should
monitor www.momentum.bbva.com for details.
The Café Momentum Community Services Center
Thursday's event also served as the formal announcement of Café
Momentum's fundraising effort for its planned community center.
Margaret Reid Windham, Café
Momentum's Chief Development Officer, said they need to raise
$435,000 to build out the tunnel
space beneath Thanks-Giving Square. Plans for the community
services center include classroom space, therapy space, a wellness
room and access to healthcare, to name a few.
"Our hope is that opening a nearby community services center
will offer an alternative to the negative pressures from the
neighborhoods which led Interns into the juvenile system," Houser
said. "The center will provide space for us to leverage growth
while also dramatically increasing our program offerings,
partnerships, and hours of impact and influence with our
Interns."
To learn more about BBVA Compass, visit: www.bbvacompass.com
For more news visit: www.bbva.com and
newsroom.bbvacompass.com
About BBVA Group
BBVA (NYSE: BBVA) is a customer-centric global financial
services group founded in 1857. The Group has a strong leadership
position in the Spanish market, is the largest financial
institution in Mexico, it has
leading franchises in South
America and the Sunbelt Region of the United States; and it is also the leading
shareholder in Garanti, Turkey's
biggest bank for market capitalization. Its diversified business is
focused on high-growth markets and it relies on technology as a key
sustainable competitive advantage. Corporate responsibility is at
the core of its business model. BBVA fosters financial education
and inclusion, and supports scientific research and culture. It
operates with the highest integrity, a long-term vision and applies
the best practices. More information about BBVA Group can be found
at bbva.com.
About BBVA Compass
BBVA Compass is a Sunbelt-based financial institution that
operates 649 branches, including 336 in Texas, 89 in Alabama, 63 in Arizona, 61 in California, 45 in Florida, 37 in Colorado and 18 in New Mexico. BBVA Compass ranks among the top
25 largest U.S. commercial banks based on deposit market share and
ranks among the largest banks in Alabama (2nd), Texas (4th) and Arizona (6th). BBVA Compass has been
recognized as one of the leading small business lenders by the
Small Business Administration (SBA) and ranked 6th nationally in
the total number of SBA loans originated in fiscal year 2017.
Additional information about BBVA Compass can be at
www.bbvacompass.com. For more BBVA Compass news, follow
@BBVACompassNews on Twitter or visit
newsroom.bbvacompass.com.
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SOURCE BBVA Compass