HOPE-20 FOUNDER

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Chad Petterson has spent most of his career leading and funding start-up companies, ministries, and socially-focused businesses. After graduating high school as the #1 scholar-athlete in the State of Michigan and from the Michigan Business School as the University of Michigan's #1 scholar-athlete, Chad started his career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in New York City. This eventually led to a specific focus on investing in seed-, early- and growth-stage companies and positions at the venture capital firms of Capital Resource Partners in Boston and NanoHoldings in Connecticut.

During the financial crisis of 2008 however, Chad lost his job. With a wife and 3 young children, he made the bold decision to leave Wall Street behind and help other Wall Street professionals who had similarly lost their jobs and were going through extremely difficult situations as a result. For the next 7 years, he led a project called "Wall Street Exodus" in which unemployed Wall Street professionals re-purposed their business skills to create jobs and businesses for the financially poor in a small village in Honduras as well as closer to home in innercity Bridgeport, CT.

This experience also inspired several charitable initiatives over the next decade, springing from his passion for sports and the spiritual growth of those in need, including:

Receiving Jesus Football Camps - football camps for fatherless boys in under-resourced communities, starting in East Nashville;

Level Field Lacrosse - a lacrosse program focused on "leveling the playing field" by allowing all young children to play the game of lacrosse;

The Nashville Heights Warriors - the first-ever lacrosse teams from the Cayce Place projects in East Nashville;

Lacrosse The Villages - a lacrosse program that introduces lacrosse to children in small villages across the globe, starting in Teupasenti, Honduras;

IMPACT - a limited-contact football league aimed at reducing head trauma in young athletes

In March, Chad started HOPE-20 after seeing the great need being created by COVID-19 and that his unique experiences with the 2008 crisis could be utilized to help others during the current crisis.