Flooding the Ecosystem with Builders
The Summer of 2008 was a rough one for residents in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Heavy rain caused river levels to rise to unprecedented levels. On June 13, the Cedar River crested to its highest level in Cedar Rapids history, 31.12 feet. The floodwaters penetrated 10 square miles (14% percent of the city), impacting 7,198 parcels and dislocating more than 18,000 residents. Essentially, the city was underwater. It was considered the sixth-largest FEMA disaster declaration based on estimated financial public assistance ($848 million).
In 2012, Andy Stoll and Amanda Styron came to town and began economic development work called “ecosystem building,” a term which at that point was not widely used. Andy had just finished a four year exploratory trip around the world to learn what makes communities grow. Amanda was fresh from the Knight Foundation where she worked on projects to develop mid-size cities across the country. They had a vision that ecosystem building work could be a means of recovery and a new model of economic development.
“Andy and Amanda started to lay a lot of the groundwork and created events around the idea of ecosystem development as a strategy. I think it blew the minds of people who didn’t know what to think of it. It took a few years for it to kind of sink in that this is another path to the same thing everybody doing economic development cares about - and in some ways, it’s probably a faster path than traditional strategies,” says Eric Engelmann, who was a downtown business owner at that time.
Once the city bought into the idea of supporting local entrepreneurship and building connections in the community around them, the Cedar Rapids ecosystem started to see entrepreneurial growth. Andy and Amanda were a force in that ecosystem, starting coworking spaces, Startup Weekend events, One Million Cups, and holding events around entrepreneurship.
Eric eventually joined them - leaving the company to found NewBoCo (New Bohemian Innovation Collaborative), a nonprofit with a mission to help build the ecosystem in Eastern Iowa. “We pulled together a small venture fund to invest in startups, we launched an accelerator program, we expanded the coworking space, and a whole bunch of other little pieces came together and ultimately it wound up being operated by this nonprofit,” explains Eric.
All of this meant that the ecosystem was growing and entrepreneurs were being supported after a massive flood had decimated their town. Then, in 2016, there was a big flood scare. The city built a wall that was able to block some of the flooding, but not all of it. NewBoCo, being made up of community organizers, was heavily involved in the city’s response to the flooding.
“There was a spontaneous organization of needs and fulfilling of needs. A lot of the major players who were coordinating were in the startup community or one step adjacent to it. Those people were the ones who knew how to rapidly organize people,” says Eric.
Ecosystem building helped the city rise after a major disaster. Ecosystem builders helped the community organize to rise and respond to a second natural disaster, and now, ecosystem builders are still answering the call to support the community.
Like many of the communities across the world dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, the Cedar Rapids community has a PPE shortage. One of the local hospitals put out a call for face shields and the organizing began. Eric’s company, who sells software services to hospitals, got on the phone to see what the specific needs were and then he took to social media to see who else was talking about it.
“I had a phone call with a bunch of people who were chattering about it on social media and said, ‘What if we all did this together and coordinated things?’”
They turned Eric's building into a manufacturing warehouse for face shields and now other things.
“A lot of the startup ecosystem has supported this. My partner in crime is a SCORE mentor, for example. It’s just all of those people, one way or another, solving those problems. To date, we’ve shipped 25,000 face shields,” says Eric. He adds, “That number for a town this size is bizarrely high. [The population of Cedar Rapids is 133,174] Having this network of interconnected people who are by nature problem solvers or one step away from the problem solvers is a huge asset for any community.”
They have pilots who need hours and investors who own planes flying masks across the state, people driving PPE to the hospitals, people making calls, and getting supplies… It’s clear that the Cedar Rapids ecosystem is a tight-knit group and it’s because they discovered the power of ecosystem building as a means to not only recovering from a natural disaster but for thriving and supporting the local economy.
Eric sums it up perfectly.
“I feel like a startup ecosystem has a natural ability to identify and cultivate leaders who can emerge that might not be traditional leaders. It doesn’t mean they got bestowed some title somewhere in business. It’s more about people who have just stepped up and figured out a solution. It [a startup ecosystem] tends to collect those people. That’s really the value of it. There’s true, emergent leadership coming from a startup community that has some inertia. And that’s where that value comes in - through those emergent leaders who can move quickly to solve things.”
