Heartland Challenge: Meet Kauffman’s 17 grantees (and the projects getting funded)

The only way to regain lost momentum in the Heartland’s cities and rural areas: work together to develop, catalyze, and expand inclusive programs and strengthen regional ecosystems, said Melissa Roberts Chapman.

A new portfolio of 17 grantee organizations is up to the challenge, she added.

Melissa Roberts Chapman, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

“Entrepreneurship represents an opportunity for this region to reverse a decades-long trend of economic decline,” said Roberts Chapman, senior program officer in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “Creating more equitable ecosystems, revitalizing rural communities and accelerating IP-driven business creation are three things we can do to ensure that starting a business in the Heartland isn’t harder than it has to be.”

The Kauffman Foundation’s Heartland Challenge funds grantees who will work to solve specific challenges that entrepreneurs in the region face, and will participate in facilitated, peer-learning communities of practice to share knowledge across the region, according to Kauffman.

Notably among the grantee projects is an effort that would boost The Porter House KC’s plans for a retail incubator for urban entrepreneurs, led by co-founders Dan Smith and Charon Thompson.

Funding amounts for the organizations were not announced, though individual grant awards vary and range up to $100,000.

“The Heartland region – Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas – holds a great deal of entrepreneurial promise,” the Kauffman Foundation said Wednesday in an announcement of the 17-member portfolio. “However, entrepreneurs face significant challenges as they seek to start and grow businesses in these four states.”

Grantees are organized into three challenge categories. Among the funded entities and projects are:

Challenge 1: Co-creating objective, milestone-based entrepreneurship training programs to mitigate the impact of implicit bias faced by entrepreneurs from communities systemically left behind

• BioSTL — Support for the expansion of their entrepreneur education program, Fundamentals, to better engage women, Black, Latinx, or foreign-born entrepreneurs in STEM business creation.
• Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas — Support to develop an education and mentorship program designed to help agriculture-related, refugee and immigrant entrepreneurs participating in the New Roots for Refugee program scale and prepare their businesses for outside investment.
• Center for Rural Affairs — Support to launch a statewide entrepreneurship academy, bias training, and mentorship program for rural entrepreneurs.
• Credit and Homeownership Empowerment Services (CHES) — Support for expanding the Porter House KC’s place-based model for providing retail entrepreneur support in the Troost Corridor neighborhood.
• The Directors Council — Support to increase the operational and marketing capacity of the organization’s entrepreneurship bootcamps in order to strengthen their financial education offerings and serve more counties in Iowa.
• Jane Boyd Community House — Support to enhance and expand the organization’s entrepreneur education program, Empower, to better serve entrepreneurs from communities systemically left behind in Eastern Iowa.
• Lincoln University — Support for new and existing businesses in central Missouri through the Small Business Development Center’s entrepreneur education program, Launch U.
• Seward County Community College — Support for the launch of the SW Kansas Entrepreneurship Center to provide customized entrepreneurship education to rural and immigrant entrepreneurs in the region.
• The State of St. Louis Foundation — Support to expand the St. Louis Regional Chamber’s Diverse Business Accelerator to serve a greater number of small businesses owned by women and people of color.

Challenge 2: Addressing rural business transfer opportunities by providing education on models of shared business ownership, including business cooperatives

• Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska — Support for the University of Nebraska Extension to launch a statewide program to assist rural entrepreneurs in considering cooperative business models and provide education on business transition to existing business owners.
• Kansas State University — Support for the expansion of the KSU Center for Engagement and Community Development in order to offer educational services on cooperative business models and transition planning for independent grocery store owners.
• Missouri Western State University — Support for the launch of the Regional Economic Vitality Consortium to expand their entrepreneurship education programming across a 23-county region in NE Kansas and NW Missouri.
• University of Northern Iowa Foundation — Support to launch the Iowa Business Transition Center to educate rural entrepreneurs on cooperative business models and transition planning.

Challenge 3: Building cross-university programs that increase knowledge related to securing research and development funding, and commercializing available technology in order to start new businesses

• Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska — Support for the creation of a program to provide technical assistance to improve federal research and development grant applications from universities in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa.
• Curators of the University of Missouri — Support for the administration of an inter-university task force that will work to identify best-practices in engaging faculty, researchers and students in the commercialization process, and create a plan to implement those practices.
• Iowa State University Foundation — Support for the creation of a coordinated educational event series across John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Centers in Iowa to better prepare university-affiliated entrepreneurs for launch and investment.
• Wichita State University — Support for the convening and administration of a multi-university task force to improve the leveraging of federal research and development grants across Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa.

The Heartland Challenge signals a shift in outlook as the Kauffman Foundation explores answers to challenges facing the four-state area.

“As we move to more regionally focused work, we have an opportunity to understand how entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) can work more effectively to help more entrepreneurs in the region succeed,” the organization said.