Get a glimpse into the Des Moines ecosystem through the eyes of our Fall Summit Hosts.
Congratulations to these SCN Membership who were just awarded SBA grants!
Meet the planning team behind #SCNDesMoines
Geoff Wood has been storytelling and ecosystem building in Des Moines for over a decade. He shares his story and invites all ecosystem builders to join him in October for SCN’s Fall Summit.
The work of SCN Board member Jenny Poon.
SCN Member Lauren Conway is providing space for women entreprenuers in Kansas City to connect and grow.
SCN Board Member Mark Lawrence working in the Maryland ecosystem to break down barriers for Black entrepreneurs.
In this two-part series, we explore the system barriers that Black entrepreneurs face and look at how two ecosystem builders are working to break them down on the national and local levels.
Ecosystem Builders come from a variety of roles within the community - including your local university. Meet Sammy Popat, an ecosystem builder working from within the University setting to build a stronger entrepreneurial community for all.
Ecosystem building is the antidote to polarization and extremism. It requires cooperation, a belief in everyone’s inherent worth and dignity, openness to new ideas, and a demonstrated sense of interdependence. Here is how we as ecosystem builders can have an outsized impact on civic engagement.
Longtime member Jake Hamann is following the playbook for supporting entrepreneurs as we navigate the pandemic.
A look at SCN’s first Virtual Summit.
Darlisa Diltz is the founder of the North Texas Entrepreneur Education and Training Center where she supports minority entrepreneurs in the early stage of business development.
Lauren Castine is the Programs and Events Coordinator at NexusLA. Her latest initiative, RESOLVE, is a virtual event series to open dialogue around creating equity in entrepreneurship.
As ecosystem builders who seek to build inclusive ecosystems, we challenge you to support the Black entrepreneurs in your community in more ways than one. Here's a look at what some work being done by SCN members and some practical advice for other ecosystem builders.
The country has been engaged in protests over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. After 3 months of uprisings, what has changed in these ecosystems? Here's a look at Portland.
How Chris Cain approaches access to capital from a community capital perspective.
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.”
#EcosystemsRecover: The Perfect Storm For Innovation
Coworking space owners know all too well the amazing collaborations that can happen when you get entrepreneurs together in one space. In fact, one of the first signs of a budding entrepreneurial ecosystem is when coworking spaces start popping up within a community. Coworking spaces act as an accessible entryway into the community and a place to work and network with others. Many of them run programs to help support the development and growth of entrepreneurs while serving as a place for groups to convene, share big ideas, lend a helping hand, and engage in mentorship. Coworking spaces are essential to the entrepreneurial ecosystem and their founders and generally very active in ecosystem building work.
Unfortunately, coworking spaces are one of the millions of businesses being hit hard right now due to social distancing measures. With many coworking space founders in our network, SCN is paying close attention to how members are pivoting to support their spaces, entrepreneurs, and community.
SCN members Grace Belangia and Eric Parker are the cofounders of The Clubhou.se in Augusta, Georgia, a non-profit coworking space founded 7 years ago. The 7,000 square foot space is situated within the Georgia Cyber Center and is way more than a workspace. The Clubhou.se is also a makerspace, code school, startup accelerator, prototyping lab, mentorship network, think tank, and support resource for organizations in communities across the nation that are working to grow their local innovation economy.
But much of that activity has come to a screeching halt due to COVID-19. Like others, The Clubhou.se has taken their programming and meetups online, their code school students do virtual study halls, and they have a Slack channel for their members.
How they are supporting entrepreneurs now
Grace and Eric have been getting creative with their members to ensure they have the support they need. Outside of offering venting/advice sessions, they offer an e-commerce marketplace on their website as a way to pre-sell their services or products.
They’ve expanded the marketplace beyond members to businesses who have been negatively impacted by COVID-19 and need help getting online. If a business wants to sell products on their e-commerce platform, all they have to do is complete a form.
They’ve also been helping members make connections and find ways to fill gaps in employment or lack of income. They’ve even hired members for other contract positions that need to be filled.
“We’re trying to re-skill some of our members who can do things aside from what they were originally doing because they lost revenue in their business,” explains Grace.
Solving for Community Problems
“When I think of a funnel, that’s the sweet spot of what we do. We connect those kinds of things in our community.” - Grace Belangia
The Clubhou.se has been serving more than entrepreneurs during this crisis. The city of Augusta has a huge population of healthcare workers who work within about a dozen hospitals, the Medical College of Georgia, a plethora of nursing homes, and the Veterans Hospitals that support the military population at Fort Gordon. The Clubhou.se was approached by someone at one of the hospitals about creating a mask from an open-source design and using small-batch manufacturing to support the healthcare community.
“We’ve always worked to support collaboration between entrepreneurs and makers in our community, and were able to move rapidly when we were approached by the Department of Public Health,” says Eric Parker.
This jump-started a collaboration between The Clubhou.se, the maker community, the Georgia Department of Public Health, and Augusta University called InnovationMesh. The team has created an N95 prototype called “The Augusta Mask” that has been tested by a group of doctors and nurses. They’ve even created a filter that is being mass-produced.
“When I think about what we do at The Clubhou.se, InnovationMesh parallels it. It’s kind of like the perfect storm so to speak because it’s what we tell our entrepreneurs to do. Research the market, find your customer, figure out your raw costs, distribution, and marketing… we’re actually going through all of those things right now,” says Grace.
Their initial goal was to make 500 masks but they are learning that this crisis is going to last a lot longer and so the number needs to increase if they want to continue to support the community. As they scale the project, they plan to contract with some of their members who want/need the work.
“If everybody around us isn’t healthy, then we can't even fulfill our mission. So, if we're able to use our expertise as an organization and help use our communities to help solve these problems this is a good way to support innovation," Clubhou.se President, Eric Parker said.
#EcosystemsRecover: How Puerto Rico Has Recovered and Restarted After Multiple Disasters
“We are strong. We are going to survive. I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to restart the economy or how many companies we are going to lose again. We’re going to do it anyhow. In the end, entrepreneurs are strong. We will survive.”
These words were uttered after a long, emotional pause during an interview with Carlos Jiménez, an ecosystem builder in Puerto Rico. Let those words sink in. Because they ring true in every ecosystem across the United States. This is the first story in a series of stories around resiliency we’re calling #EcosystemsRecover.
Carlos Jiménez is the Co-Founder of the Young Entrepreneurship Education System (YEES). YEES has been teaching young people about entrepreneurship since 2001 using tools and methodologies developed in house. YEES helps young entrepreneurs develop their business skills through educational projects, courses, materials and digital tools. They have taught over 40,000 participants in more than 800,000 hours of direct contact.
The co-founders of Yees ready to receive 500 + students from the Robot Makers project from the Department of Economic Development and Trade of Puerto Rico.
Around the same time Carlos was growing the YEES organization, there was a study done by Babson University around the low entrepreneurship rate in Puerto Rico.
“That’s when we started to talk about the entrepreneurial ecosystem here,” says Carlos. “We started getting together to talk about entrepreneurship and doing things together in a collaborative way.”
By we he means his organization along with about six other Entrepreneurship Support Organizations (ESOs) on the island. Because of those conversations, the number of ESOs has grown significantly.
“Today, we have 150 - 200 organizations doing the work,” says Carlos.
Despite the large number of ESOs in Puerto Rico, they still have a very low rate of entrepreneurship. But if you look beyond the rankings and consider the island’s history over the last 20 years, you’ll see that their ecosystem has been through a lot of trauma since those ESOs came together. The story that shines through - that we can all learn from - is one of resilience and survival because of the work of their ecosystem builders.
Puerto Rico’s Long History Stopping and Starting the Economy
We are about to experience what it’s like to restart our economies after a crisis. But Puerto Rico has actually been through this before. The island has been in an economic downturn for the past 13 years and in 2017 they became the first U.S. entity to file for bankruptcy. Between 1990 and 2001, Puerto Rico’s economy was adding jobs at the same pace as the rest of the U.S. But in 2007, U.S. corporations on the island had a mass exodus after the repeal of a controversial tax break law that allowed U.S. manufacturing companies to avoid corporate income taxes on profits made in U.S. territories. This was a huge blow to the local economy in Puerto Rico but they dug in and looked at ways to recover. Programs were developed, and the ecosystem began rebuilding.
In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria came through two weeks apart. The Category 5 hurricanes decimated Puerto Rico and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless and without power, with 95% of the island’s cell networks severed. While 40% of Puerto Ricans reported losing their jobs due to the storm, many small businesses survived. According to NBC, roughly 36,000 out of Puerto Rico's nearly 44,000 small employers were able to resume operations within a year.
On December 31, 2019, Puerto Rico was once again faced with a natural disaster. This time, from hundreds of earthquakes and aftershocks in the southern part of the island that left thousands in shelters and nearly a million without power. Puerto Rico is still waiting on billions in federal funds from the $91 billion promised after the 2017 hurricanes. Now, the island is facing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as every resident on the island has been ordered to shelter in place.
In order to survive, you must collaborate
Despite multiple set-backs, the ecosystem is surviving because of the collaboration that has happened among ecosystem builders on the island. Ecosystem builders have the unique ability to think quickly on their feet, to know the players and strengths in the ecosystem, and to connect them to each other to get things done. The ecosystem builders in Puerto Rico have had so much practice collaborating on crisis response, Carlos says they are now “more organized than ever.”
“We were really fast at helping the companies and entrepreneurs. The first thing we did after the hurricanes was call into our friendly people in the states and ask them for electric generators. We took those electric generators to companies that didn’t have any. We did a lot of that kind of stuff.”
Because Carlos and his fellow ecosystem builders have mapped their ecosystem, they are able to be a source for connections and resources. Carlos specifically has been able to connect businesses who need inventory with those who have inventory to share. He’s also connected seamstress professionals who were out of work with major pharma supply distributors looking to distribute masks to those in need.
He has also connected entrepreneurs with distributors who are in need of supplies and brokered a deal to offer them the money up front for materials so that they can make needed supplies like hand sanitizers that they will then sell to the distributor.
“We’ve been focused on getting the market together. The distributors didn’t have any companies distributing to them from the states or from China and now they are buying from locals. Same thing with agricultural products. We have opened the doors to other food distributors who were so small that supermarkets didn’t buy from them.”
Now, because food is not getting in from other places, they’ve seized the opportunity to push for local to local support.
The ESOs have also had success working with their government. They brought their ideas for how to support entrepreneurs to the economic development department and some of the ideas have already been implemented. Some of the things they have done so far include:
Starting an emergency fund from the local government bank, which was closing.
Virtual workshops to help small and medium businesses digitize their inventories.
Creating an alliance with the Brands of Puerto Rico, a small company fulfillment center, to help other small companies distribute to them so they can distribute elsewhere.
Speeding up the payment process for local suppliers.
Carlos has been particularly focused on helping small business manufacturers on the island. He has a great relationship with Toyota from a previous business he ran and has been teaching businesses on the island “The Toyota Way” - which is based on lean manufacturing principles.
As you can see, despite the multiple setbacks to the economy, the ecosystem continues to grow and get stronger. After each crisis, it has recovered and matured in the process.
“We still don’t have the numbers. I know we will get there somewhere in the future. Right now, we have rethink everything we have done. Nothing is going to be the same. We know that. Everything has to be newly rebuilt. Redone. Reset. We are resetting so often that I think now it’s part of the way,” Carlos says. He adds, “We’ve been so damaged already I don’t know that you can be more damaged than this.”
Advice from a fellow ecosystem builder
As you can see, Carlos is fully experienced in what it’s like to recover. Here is some advice he’d like to share with fellow ecosystem builders doing the work.
1. Don’t lose sight of what you’re doing. Focus on helping other organizations and supporting entrepreneurs.
2. Be a connector and encourage businesses in the ecosystem to work together.
“That’s essential,” Carlos says. “You have to be a connector in these times.”
3. Create a list of the resources available. After the first natural disaster struck, the ESOs in Puerto Rico mapped the ecosystem so that there was one, centralized resource with programs, support organizations, grants, etc. In addition to that, they have also created a list of things that are relevant now.
“We created a list of everything that’s going on from funding to conferences to different things that everyone is doing. [...] If someone calls and asks for resources, this is what we send.”
4. Share stories. Call other ecosystem builders to see what they’re doing and offer to share your successes and struggles.
“This is part of it. [Meaning the very call we were on] This is entrepreneurial ecosystem building. Just calling to see what we’re doing and sharing what others are doing is helpful,” Carlos says.