Propeller and Friends

If you’ve lived in New Orleans for any length of time, you know we love to rebuild. We rebuilt the levees. We rebuilt the schools. We rebuilt the Superdome. After every storm, we rebuild thousands of roofs and hundreds of homes. After Hurricane Katrina, a small group of New Orleanians decided that the way they could make a contribution toward saving the city was to help build companies. They revived a small volunteer-run organization called Social Entrepreneurs of New Orleans. Three years later they turned it into a registered non-profit and gave it a new name. They called it, “Propeller.” The idea was - Find people in New Orleans who had identified a problem in their community and were trying to build a business or nonprofit to fix it. Get these folks in a room. Teach them how to read a balance sheet, how to apply for a grant, how to write a marketing plan, how to hire a bookkeeper. Then turn them loose. It worked. Today, Propeller is a business accelerator and co-working space that has seen more than 300 ventures go through its program. Those companies have generated over $290 million in revenue and external financing, and they’ve created more than 485 full and part-time jobs in the city. The CEO of Propeller is Jessica Allen. If you happened to watch HGTV in 2024, you may have caught a series called “Bargain Block: New Orleans.” It was a New Orleans spinoff of HGTV’s Detroit-based home renovation show.  The two hosts had design ambitions. The person on the show who turned those ambitions into actual buildings, walls, and floors was a New Orleans general contractor named Charles Aponza. Charles came to New Orleans in 2012 to teach in the Recovery School District. He bought a fixer-upper, restored it himself, and then friends started asking him to help with their houses. In 2015 he turned his home building skills into a business - Brighter Horizons Construction.  Charles and Brighter Horizons came up through Propeller’s Impact Accelerator. Then there’s the other side of what comes out of Propeller. A nonprofit. In 2014, Kimberly Novod and her husband Aaron were expecting their first child. Their son Saul was born prematurely at 28 weeks. He spent 20 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. He died there. Kimberly has said publicly that the question she was left with was, “What do I do with all the love?” Her answer was Saul’s Light – a New Orleans nonprofit she founded to support NICU families and bereaved families across Louisiana. Today, Saul’s Light serves around 200 Louisiana families a year.Beyond emotional support, they provide financial assistance. And as an advocacy group, Saul’s Light has   produced two Louisiana state laws – a tax credit for stillborn children, and a requirement that health insurance, including Medicaid, cover prescription human milk. There’s a tendency, when we talk about business in New Orleans, to default to conversations about tourism, hospitality, Jazz Fest, Mardi Gras… The fun stuff. We don’t hear so much about the social justice economy: people who are building businesses and organizations to fix things that are broken. At Propeller they put that work at the center of their existence. Charles came up through Propeller and grew a construction business that builds homes New Orleanians can actually afford. Kimberly came up through Propeller and built an organization that helps 200 families a year go through one of the hardest things a person can experience. As in music, sometimes in business the silence is as powerful as the conversation. Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.