The juicer sits on Kayla Hall-Ransom’s shelf like a remnant from an old war.
It was the first machine she used to cold-press fruits and vegetables into fresh drinks—with flavors like “cotton candy beet” and “sunshine”—now bottled and sold at seven locations across Tennessee. And it almost didn’t make it.
Hall-Ransom, 34, was an educator at the time but had been dreaming about turning her juicing hobby into a business. So in 2023, she bought the juicer from Walmart for $32 in cash and rented a small booth at the Nashville Farmers’ Market.
It was the big test for an idea she had incubated inside an entrepreneur training program called Corner to Corner.
“She called us about a month later,” Will Acuff, cofounder of Corner to Corner, told CT in an interview. “She was like, ‘Ya’ll, this juicer is starting to smoke. Like, I’m worried it’s going to melt through the table.’”
Corner to Corner, which began in 2011 and focuses on launching historically underestimated business owners, loaned Hall-Ransom $1,000 to upgrade her setup. She agreed to pay back the money over 12 months. She did it in 6 weeks.
Hall-Ransom, a North Nashville native, says she would never use the underpowered contraption today. “It was not it,” she said, laughing.
That the little juicer lasted even a few weeks, though, was the first of a string of miracles that transformed her life.
Twenty years ago, Will and Tiffany Acuff moved into a low-income neighborhood of Nashville to “get a theology of neighbor,” Will said.
They learned quickly that communities offered plenty of crisis support—like food and clothing banks—but few options to encourage long-term change. Neighbors had passion and skills “but no real opportunity to launch,” Acuff said.
So he and his wife started Corner to Corner to offer something more than Band-Aids. The nonprofit seeks to educate, mentor, and empower its neighbors to become “economic engines” through a multimonth entrepreneurship workshop. It grew from 20 “academy” graduates a year to several hundred.
Now, Will is adapting the program for churches, allowing it to expand nationwide through a new venture called Kingdom Founders.
Acuff has heard plenty of conservative Christians insist the government should get “out of poverty”—that the local church should lead the charge.
“Which I get the impulse for,” he said, “because I haven’t met anybody who went to the DMV and was like, ‘Man, I was really well loved there.’ But most of what’s happening in the church is still relief. … It’s a great place to start, but it’s a terrible place to stop.”
The son of a pastor, Acuff grew up in the church and holds a master’s in biblical studies. He’s thought deeply about his aversion to the status quo in serving the “least of these.”
“We believe in image-bearer theology, but we practice it like a footnote,” he said. “So often we see our neighbors just as objects of pity.”
Acuff sees the church—with its deep commitments to community and forming people—as an ideal space for mentoring entrepreneurs. Only 23 percent of startup businesses survive after five years. Yet at least one study suggests 70 percent will survive if they receive professional mentoring.
Christians are called to be special doers of good works (Eph. 2:10), and ministry for business owners also activates “high-capacity” churchgoers who might be miscast or passive in service, Acuff said.
“So often you’ve got CEOs and CFOs,” he explained, “and pastors are like, ‘I don’t know what to do with you. Can you do parking lot duty?’”
The Kingdom Founders model manifests as a ten-week course on everything business: Who is my target customer? What is my financial model? Should my business be a sole proprietorship or an LLC or something else?
The curriculum is presented at a fifth-grade reading level. Those misfit executive types are pulled from the pews and turned into cofacilitators, speaking and mentoring with firsthand knowledge from their own careers. This, Acuff said, is its own ministry.
“I kind of poke fun at some curriculum out there where it seems like someone just copy-pasted some psalms onto something to call it Christian,” he said. “We instead say we were called to love our neighbor as ourselves. And a great entrepreneur gets close enough to their neighbor and understands their pain point so they can solve it.”
The Point Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, was an eager partner for Kingdom Founders’ pilot program last fall. When the multisite church purchased the former Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church—founded in 1867 as one of Charlottesville’s first Black congregations—The Point was refocusing its efforts to combat poverty in the city, which has a poverty rate almost twice the national average.
Seventy-five percent of the city’s low-income residents live within a 1.5-mile radius of The Point’s newly acquired downtown building, according to executive director Chip Measells. The church felt it didn’t need to offer more services and possibly duplicate the work of more than 850 area nonprofits; it needed to create new livelihoods.
Of the 24 students in The Point’s most recent Kingdom Founders semester, 6 had been in prison within the previous year. Most don’t attend The Point. But “we’ve seen life change and salvation,” Measells said. “We get to have gospel conversations every week.”
Kingdom Founders encourages churches to charge a registration fee—anywhere from $50 to $150 per person—to offset the cost of curriculum and training, effectively making the program free to the host church.
“It costs us time and commitment,” Measells said. “I feel like it’s what the church was intended to do. We have several volunteers who say we ought to be putting $50,000 or $100,000 [toward other causes]—that way we could solve a lot of problems. But it’s just not sustainable.”
The Point is putting money back into the Charlottesville area, though—40 of its 69 graduates so far are operating businesses.
Like Corner to Corner, which offers its graduates small, interest-free business loans, The Point also offers startup capital. Each of its Kingdom Founders cohorts has a pitch contest, where the winner receives $5,000. The church is also partnering with a local business to offer modest grants.
That kind of support goes far in communities where nest eggs are rare. By some estimates, 59 percent of Americans don’t have access to $1,000 in emergency cash. “That’s people who have a day job who we don’t consider poor,” Acuff said. “But if they get a flat tire and a bad doctor’s bill in the same week, they’re back in the cycle.”
Corner to Corner and Kingdom Founders students are urged to try—and maybe even fail—until they find viable business solutions.
“Only if you’re in Silicon Valley can you grow a company with no profit for five years,” Acuff explained. “Our neighbors have to be really moving the needle.”
One woman proposed a new brand of vegan ice cream. Her first flavor was going to be avocado. The Kingdom Founders crew replied, “Okay, cool. Go try to sell that,” according to Acuff. The woman returned three weeks later with an update: “I am not going to do avocado ice cream, because everyone thought it sounded like cold guacamole in a cone.”
“We don’t tell people if their idea is good or not,” Acuff said. “My mom told me not to ride with strangers, but Uber’s doing pretty well. We’re empowering them to learn.”
One of those people who learned was DeAngelo Johnson, a contract delivery driver who dreamed of creating a mobile vending machine service. When that idea proved too costly to get off the ground, Johnson got creative at home instead, turning flash cards for his three kids into a peer-learning game. Kingdom Founders connected Johnson with a patent attorney and a University of Virginia math professor—both mentors from The Point—who helped get Flip N Figures into the hands of families across Charlottesville school districts.
Another Corner to Corner graduate, Adrienne Bowling, was a single mother of two who depended on food assistance and Section 8 housing. She launched A-1 Mobile Notary, an Uber-style notary service in the Nashville area, and within a year of graduating she had more than $85,000 in revenue. She’s now approaching $200,000 per year for a low-overhead business, according to Acuff.
Now Bowling can afford luxuries like a passport for her son to attend a high school trip to Spain.
“So, literally, my son has the world opening up before him,” she told Acuff. “I am breaking generational curses, and God is breaking those through my business.”
Not every graduate follows this path.
“We’ve had people who go, ‘Man, I tried the business thing. It wasn’t for me,’” Acuff explained. “But then they say, ‘I started thinking like an owner. And next thing you know, I got promoted to floor shift manager, and I’ve got health insurance.’”
The true goal, then, is not business ownership but individual—and communal—restoration.
“People are sometimes embarrassed to say they’re from Charlottesville,” Measells said. They can’t help but define the city by its 2017 white supremacist rallies and counterprotests, which turned violent. Yet the fight to squash that stigma is part of the momentum at The Point Church: People want to help. They have energy and resources. Kingdom Founders is activating them.
“Probably two-thirds of the people serving were not serving before,” Measells said. “It’s changed who we are as a church.”
The City JuiceryIn Nashville, Kayla Hall-Ransom proudly feels she is continuing a family legacy with every cup of juice she makes.
Her uncle, the late Ernest “Rip” Patton Jr., was an original Freedom Rider, expelled from Tennessee State University in 1961 for challenging segregated interstate travel. The North Nashville Transit Center bus hub is now named after him, and it sits about ten minutes from the farmers’ market where Hall-Ransom runs The City Juicery.
Graduating from Corner to Corner and squeezing a living out of fruits and vegetables is just continuing to “build the history track” for her family, Hall-Ransom said. Growing up in North Nashville before it began to gentrify, with a father battling drug addiction, she was not always sure she would make something of herself.
“That neighborhood is designed to eat you up and swallow you alive,” she told CT. “A lot of my friends who I grew up playing with are either no longer here with us or caught up in the system or just not in the best mental space.”
That is unless, like her, they come across what she called “visible, tangible angels” like Corner to Corner.
After the $1,000 loan to upgrade her juicer, Hall-Ransom won a $25,000 prize from Vanderbilt University—another miracle orchestrated by her involvement with Corner to Corner. Now she oversees a movable, five-foot-tall commercial machine that mass-produces fresh juice. She feeds it a combination of homegrown ginger, kale, spinach, and turmeric, plus fruits and veggies sourced from local farmers.
“We can put a whole pineapple in there without cutting it,” she said.
Hall-Ransom’s climb has not been linear. She stumbled into juicing when she was looking for help with postpartum depression. Now, as a single mother, she often brings her sixth-grade daughter, Kailee, into the tireless world of a small-business owner. There were late nights, early in the startup, when The City Juicery operated out of a shared space and Kailee slept on a cot in the corner so her mother could press juice and still get her to school the next morning.
“I’ve had six-figure years, and I’ve had years where I’ve had negative,” Hall-Ransom said. Her house has been in foreclosure. “But I would never turn back.”
Hall-Ransom grew up in church, lending her voice to the choir, but she had “a routine with God more than a relationship.” Her journey with The City Juicery changed that.
“It’s reforming my relationship with God, because it requires me to trust him,” she said. Several times she’s considered giving up and going back to education, but the thought depresses her. “People ask me, would I recommend entrepreneurship? And my honest answer is no, because I know that entrepreneurship is not possible without God.”
The juice bottles she sells come labeled with Psalm 34:8—“Taste and see that the Lord is good.” It’s not a sales pitch so much as a testimony.
Not long ago, Hall-Ransom visited Manhattan for a business training led by Goldman Sachs. Days into her visit, this young woman from North Nashville was at the New York Stock Exchange, ringing the daily bell.
“Who does that?” Hall-Ransom said. “Nobody but God!”
The City Juicery recently hired an executive director, allowing Hall-Ransom to reposition herself as a consultant and expand her brand outside of juicing—to “help people really get it, and save some souls in the name of Jesus.”
Kailee is following in her mom’s footsteps: She helps concoct new juices, works stands independently, and told her mother that when she grows up, she wants to “travel around the world to all the City Juiceries” and “get their revenue up.”
In the meantime, Kingdom Founders is also growing. It’s partnering with the Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as with the University of Notre Dame, to conduct a randomized control trial. It’s adding church partners in Dallas and in Franklin, Tennessee.
“Our goal is to reach 1,000 churches,” Acuff said. “Each one would train 40 people per year, which based on Small Business Administration data would mean the church is, on average, putting $1 million back into the neighborhood economy every year.”
The post In Jesus’ Name, Market Test That Avocado Ice Cream appeared first on Christianity Today.