A recap of our 2021 Fall Summit in Des Moines, Iowa.
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.