High-impact, high-risk solutions face barriers to receiving capital. The Reconstruct Challenge is a platform that helps organizations who care about systemic issues find innovators that are working to solve them — innovators that might lack the right connections to make it possible.
We unearth innovation and support its growth through a reverse-pitch competition. We help recruit innovators and bring them to Louisville and Southern Indiana to support them using our network and capital. A panel of evaluators, from local stakeholders to national experts, reviews applications and provides feedback and mentorship along the way.
Read the faqWe believe in the power of innovation. Often, solutions to our community’s most significant challenges just need someone to take a risk on them. Traditional grant processes are engineered for those most familiar with the process — not those most familiar with the problem. And the first step to developing a successful solution is a deep understanding of the problem. Through the Reconstruct Challenge’s risk-tolerant approach, we have funded innovation that has unlocked significant impact for our community.
Our reverse-pitch model surfaces ideas from a wide variety of sources — from a seasoned entrepreneur who has been tackling a problem in other cities for years to a local non-profit with an innovative idea but no funds to implement it. We are able to find and fund feasible, enduring, and scalable solutions that produce tangible impacts.
Innovators selected to receive the Reconstruct Challenge grant implement their creative solutions in the Louisville and Southern Indiana region.
Dollar For eliminates medical debt by advocating for patients and enforcing hospital charity care policies.
Facilities Management Services employs 600 custodians in Metro Louisville. The biggest challenge applicants face to work at FMS is lack of accessible, affordable transportation. Working Your Way to Wheels is a multi-stakeholder strategy that aims to assist custodial workers with owning and maintaining their own vehicle.
Haven Connect increases affordable housing access by streamlining the affordable housing application process.
Honest Jobs is the nation’s leading fair-chance employment platform, helping people with criminal records find better jobs faster.
Leap Fund has built benefits cliff coaching program, which includes predicting individualized cliffs, and employers tools, to better understand the scope of a problem, and actually help employees avoid benefits cliffs altogether.
Nesterly is a platform that links empty nesters or retirees that have spare bedrooms and want to age in place with trusted renters looking for affordable housing.
Through thinking creatively about how to use space, Padsplit has created a unique approach to adding more affordable housing units without waiting for new construction.
Urban Institute created a micro-mortgage marketplace for affordable home purchases and renovation, harnessing the existing affordable housing stock in Louisville and Southern Indiana to close the housing gap.
Working Your Way Home helps close the housing gap by increasing the availability of down payment assistance through employer contributions.
finEQUITY advances the financial futures of those impacted by long-term incarceration. It offers no-cost financial tools, such as credit building opportunities, to justice-impacted community members in order to ease access to employment, affordable housing, utilities, phone plans and more.
mRelief is a tool that eases the process of applying for and receiving SNAP benefits for those who are eligible. This female-led company has unlocked over $189 million in benefits and helped over 425,000 families across all 50 states secure food stamps.
Poverty is cyclical. If your earnings fall below a certain level, the cost of living can make rising to stable financial footing next to impossible. To break this cycle there needs to be intervention or systems change, and that starts with gaining empathy and understanding into why and how it is expensive to be poor.
read moreSystemic problems require creative solutions. We are working to build a more inclusive, equitable, and dynamic economy — one challenge at a time.
