Beating illness set her on a path

COOKED TO ORDER: Beating a life-threatening illness led Lisa J. Raiola to launch a culinary incubator last year that is breathing new life into not only her career but the careers of 30 startup entrepreneurs. / PBN FILE PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
COOKED TO ORDER: Beating a life-threatening illness led Lisa J. Raiola to launch a culinary incubator last year that is breathing new life into not only her career but the careers of 30 startup entrepreneurs. / PBN FILE PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Beating a life-threatening illness led Lisa J. Raiola to launch a culinary incubator on Oct. 3 that is breathing new life into not only her career but the careers of 30 startup entrepreneurs.

At 52, Raiola, who lives in Bristol with her husband, Waterman Brown, is the founder and president of Hope & Main in Warren, as well as vice president for institutional advancement at Roger Williams University.

Between 2006 and 2009, however, she had to leave a busy career at Brown University to battle a disease she declined to name. During that time, the importance of nutrition emerged not only as something that could help her fight the illness, but something she could control.

As she became increasingly grateful to the people who brought her healthy food and cooked for her during that time, she said, she hit upon an idea: delivering food instead of flowers to medically challenged shut-ins.

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Though that business has not yet materialized, it led her to explore a possible site for it in Warren in the fall of 2009. Town Hall officials then pointed her to The Main Street School, a 17,000-square-foot shuttered elementary school that was for sale.

What happened next was an epiphany.

“I stood there thinking, ‘I don’t need such a big place,’ ” she recalled, “but it occurred to me: I bet there are a lot of people like me who want to start small food businesses but don’t have the capital and space to do this. I thought, ‘This could be a place where they could do that and we could all share in the expense.’ ”

The location of the smaller, first property she had looked at was at Hope and Main streets, and the word “hope” held special meaning for her, given her arduous journey back to health.

Today, Hope and Main has 6,000 square feet of shared-use kitchen space, including three commercial kitchens and a demonstration kitchen that is used as a classroom to connect the community to food. What had served as a playground should become space for a farmers market and “meet your maker” market, she said.

Still working at RWU, Raiola has hired five staffers and leads a board of 15 directors with food experience who have steered the project as it materialized, she said.

Since Hope & Main is the first incubator of its kind in the state, federally funded, state regulated and housed on a town property, Raiola encountered her share of obstacles. And there was no manual on how to problem-solve, she said.

“We’re a startup for startups,” she said.

But the ribbon-cutting on Oct. 3, 2014, done with her entrepreneurs on hand, made it all worthwhile.

“When I started this project years ago, I knew it would be for those people like me who have a tremendous passion for what they do, but I didn’t know who they’d be,” she said. “It’s like giving birth to 30 babies. There was no more fulfilling feeling.”•

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