Dave Christopher stumbled into the nonprofit world back in 2014 and hasn’t looked back since.

It was then that the self-professed “serial entrepreneur” launched a recording studio business, inspired by the bond with his son over music, to help generate money for a friend’s nonprofit.

That effort soon spun into AMPED, or the Academy of Music Production Education and Development, a nonprofit focused on tapping into youths’ creativity to help them become healthy, productive community members.

What began as a two-week summer camp has turned into a year-round music academy, not to mention a technology workforce training program and a business incubator.  

“We’ve created this thing that we refer to as the ecosystem of building communities from within,” Christopher said. “All of the things that we do are connected.”

The founder and executive director has tried to organically grow and diversify the nonprofit by listening to the needs of the people he’s serving. Working with kids led to helping their families which grew into strengthening the communities in which they all reside.

“If your focus is kids, well guess what, if we get those parents straight, then the kids are straight,” he said. “If it’s business, get the businesses straight, then we got the community straight, which means the kids and the parents are straight.”

Kim Hales, newly hired director of advancement, said she saw the wraparound services in action in her first week on the job at the music academy in the Chickasaw neighborhood.  

“I think people see it as these separate programs still,” Hales said. “But when you see it in action, it makes sense about why all of these things are needed and how that is really a cycle of helping families and the community.”

Take, for example, the Technology Workforce Development Program, which launched in 2018 to address racial disparities data analytics and data science fields.

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Part of the goal was to establish pathways to good careers without a college degree, a path Christopher knows well.

Christopher grew up in poverty in Gary, Indiana, to parents who didn’t finish high school. College was never on the table, and the military became his pathway to a better life. He taught himself technology skills, an asset that helped him launch his own business two decades ago. It wasn’t until 40 that he earned a college degree.  

He recalled a recent email from a young woman who went through AMPED’s IT training program. After a year at Humana as a data analyst, she was promoted to data scientist making more than $75,000 yearly.

“That’s the difference, right?” Christopher said. “None of the stuff we do is about … bragging on what we did and taking pictures and going on our way and the people that we serve are still in the same place.”

Launching the business incubator

AMPED launched a business incubator in 2020, a year-long program focusing on supporting and growing Black- and Latinx-owned businesses. It’s an initiative that, for Christopher, was born of the traumas of that year.

Between the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, Christopher said he wanted to turn his pain into something meaningful for his community.

At the time, he was reading about the state of Black businesses in Louisville. Less than 3% of businesses were owned by Black residents, according to city data, despite making up 23% of the county’s population.

“Economic empowerment, ownership, equals independence,” he said. “You’ve got to own some stuff. And one of the things we thought that was how do we keep money in the community?”

As protestors were pounding the pavement around Jefferson Square Park, Christopher was drafting plans to uplift his community through entrepreneurship, trying to leverage the moment.

“What I was determined to do was not let this moment go to waste,” Christopher said. “My thinking was I want to create as much as I can, as quickly as I can, that you can’t take back, because I know that you’re gonna go back to business as usual.”

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In the following months, millions in donations (which Christopher calls investments) started pouring in from the likes of Humana, Yum Brands, Brown-Forman, U.S. Bank and The Rockefeller Foundation to help support the incubator, which includes access to coaching, stipends, seed capital and development classes.

Three years later, AMPED recently opened applications to the third class of its Russell Technology Business Incubator.

From a waitlist of 600, 120 applicants filed within the first 36 hours, Hales said. Thirty-four businesses will ultimately be selected for the next cohort.

“The growth is big, and it’s fast and it’s innovative,” she said. “But it’s all sort of drawn out of what has the community needed…it’s all grown from within.”

Innovation Center coming to West Broadway

The latest AMPED venture is the Innovation Center, an arts-focused creative hub to be housed at 2500 W. Broadway, which AMPED bought earlier this year for nearly $1.06 million.

Christopher said the building was the city’s first black-owned car dealership, Bob Smith Chevrolet, and he plans on honoring the space’s history by preserving and restoring as much as he can.

The first phase of the project was securing two tenants in the space to keep rental income flowing. JCPS’s Elev8 student learning center and the University of Louisville’s Change Lab occupy roughly a third of the space.  

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A second phase, still in fundraising mode, will be renovating the building for its new role as an innovation center, which will include a business incubator focused on visual and performing arts, an event space and music academy programming to include a recording and podcast studio.

Despite the newest endeavor and the progress in less than a decade, Christopher said he still gets what he calls the “3:30 a.m. wake-up.”

“If anything keeps me up at night, which sometimes it does, it’s that we’re not doing enough, and we can’t do what we need to do faster,” he said.

Christopher is quick to credit his team and supporters throughout Louisville as a key factor to AMPED’s mark on the city. He doesn’t seem too focused on his own legacy; there’s too much to be done right now. But thinking ahead, he does have hope for the future.

“It sounds kind of morbid, but if I am able to erase the Ninth Street Divide and die shortly after…” he said. “I tell people I want to play this Jedi mind trick where you’re driving west and you don’t even realize how far until you hit the water.”

Business reporter Matthew Glowicki can be reached at [email protected], 502-582-4000 or on Twitter @mattglo.