Greater Impact is a ministry of Transformation Ministries in the northwest region of South Bend (transformation58.com). Greater Impact has a goal of helping local, urban teenagers have a positive employment experience. Through creating jobs, we are helping teenagers learn positive life skills, how to manage money, how to live and work with integrity, how to work hard and be great employees (or employers!) in the future.

Currently Greater Impact has a lawn care business, caring for over 100 grassy areas in South Bend, and employs eight male students. They are very proud to be making our city a better looking place! We would like to expand the opportunities of employment to include students who have other skill sets that include organizational, creative and artistic elements.

We are in the beginning stages of developing a screen printing business! We will start with t-shirt orders and expand product variety as we are able. Being a local business, we would be able to accept smaller orders that are sometimes hard to find reasonably priced and deliver them ourselves. This allows us to build relationships with customers as well as see our work in the community! But we also look forward to connecting with local schools, churches, etc. to obtain larger orders as well. How cool will it be for our teenage employees to be able to say, "I did that!"

Within this structure, we would employ a variety of students to handle taking orders and customer service, developing and creating designs for clients, prep screens and do the actual screen printing, as well as package & ship orders or deliver locally. That means we'll be working on professional phone and conversation skills, computer and office type skills, order taking and processing. We'll be encouraging ideas and design while teaching Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. We'll have hands on experience with production, quality control and meeting deadlines.

We could make a "greater impact" on South Bend one shirt at a time!