Lupe Fiasco Does Good in Brownsville, BK.

I have always loved Lupe Fiasco. It looks like now, the Chicago-born lyricist is giving us more than super-solid lyrical genius.Lupe recently announced that he’s co-founded a new non-profit endeavor with the goal of helping young inner-city entrepreneurs “turn ideas into start-ups.”The project,  is called the Neighborhood Start Fund and according to the website its mission is to create “a neighborhood-specific fund to support entrepreneurs and start-ups from underserved areas and of course so the best new ideas won’t go wasted. We provide access, network, workshops, mentoring and of course funding.”Fiasco and project co-founder Di-Ann Esinor will kick off the inaugural neighborhood fund for entrepreneurs and start-ups with a live pitch event in Brooklyn next month.“Our first neighborhood is Brownsville Brooklyn,” says Esinor. “We’ve just opened the idea competition and the first live pitch event will be Nov. 13, 2015. We will be housed at the Dream Big Foundation’s new entrepreneurship center and cafe opening in Jan. 2016.”Learn more here.This makes me happy to hear as I'm originally from Brownsville. The neighborhood could use some healing. This week a disturbing report was released by NYC's Health Department which pointed out that in the neighborhood, the average person can expect to live to 74, just over 3 out of 10 adults are obese and 8 of every 1,000 newborns don't make it to their first birthday.

Things are different in the borough's upscale Park Slope and Carroll Gardens neighborhoods: life expectancy tops 80, just over 1 out of 10 adults is obese and about 2 of every 1,000 infants die.

Brownsville has about twice the teen birth rate, three times the poverty rate, nearly four times the rate of adult psychiatric hospitalizations, and over five times the rates of new HIV infections and assault-related hospitalizations that Park Slope has. But Brownsville also has more supermarket space, on a per-capita basis.