What We Do

Building Entrepreneurial Communities

Entrepreneurship Support Organizations

The foundation recognizes the vast number of organizations that drive the infrastructure and culture needed to build entrepreneurial communities. We understand the importance of all of these groups, and have chosen to focus specifically on entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) that are serving second-stage businesses, and are devoted to growing their economies from the "inside out," a philosophy often referred to as economic gardening.

ESOs include organizations, entities and individuals that directly affect entrepreneurs and/or the culture and infrastructure in which they do business. We think it is important for ESOs to work in concert with the public sector to provide the resources, both tangible and intangible, to help second stage businesses grow and succeed.

The Importance of ESOs

We believe that in order to build sustainable regional and state economies, ESOs need to make a fundamental decision to devote significant resources to growing the already established companies that reside within their local areas.

It is our belief that by working together, nonprofit and public ESOs can create a workable and profitable balance between the efforts of economic gardening (growth from within) and economic hunting (growth through outside business recruitment).

Our Goal

The 2007 New State Economy Index recommends empowering the private sector and nonprofit organizations as economic development service-delivery agents. It also states that, "Success in the new economy requires that a whole array of institutions—universities, school boards, firms, local governments, and economic development agencies—work in new and often uncomfortable ways."

Our goal is to turn efforts that might initially be viewed as "working in new and often uncomfortable ways," into natural ways of doing business that translate into both strong business and regional growth. Towards this goal, the foundation will:

• Locate and index as many nonprofit ESOs as possible throughout the United States
• Bring these organizations together, online and offline, to share best practices, as well as the challenges keeping them, and consequently their regions, from growing their second-stage clusters.
• Develop programs and an online community to further assist these organizations in the future, drawing on the power of peer learning.
• Provide relevant data on a region's second-stage cluster growth.
• Act as a convener to bring together public and private ESOs from around the nation with a goal towards helping them find strong avenues for partnerships that will make a realistic and sustainable difference in the communities where entrepreneurs live and work. And if desired, be an initial convener within specific communities for the public and private ESO.

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