Newsletter

August 2014

In This Issue

Rural Entrepreneurship Initiative

Other Center News

Quick Links

Visit our Training Page to find out about our upcoming Webinars!

Want to learn about entrepreneurial work going on in Kansas? Read our latest case study HERE.

Learn more about building your own entrepreneurial community in

our new book,

Energizing Entrepreneurial Communities!

The Center played an active role in the startup of the American Farm Bureau Federation's Rural Entrepreneurship Initiative. Learn about how this initiative is working to celebrate rural entrepreneurs and connect them to resources in our feature story below. Also learn how to unlock your creative potential with a book written by one of the Center's founding supporters.

American Farm Bureau Federation Launches Rural Entrepreneurship Initiative

For the past several months, the Center, along with our good partners Leslie Scott, Entrepreneurial Places LLC and Erik Pages, EntreWorks Consulting, have been part of a team working on the American Farm Bureau Federation's (AFBF) Rural Entrepreneurship Initiative (REI). As a joint initiative between the Farm Bureau and the Global Social Enterprise Initiative and Startup Hoyas at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, REI provides an opportunity to highlight the importance of entrepreneurs in rural America and to provide budding and existing entrepreneurs with connections to important resources.

One of the most exciting components is the Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge, the "first national business competition focused exclusively on rural entrepreneurs." If you are working with rural entrepreneurs with creative new business ideas, please encourage them to participate in the challenge. AFBF will be holding a series of webinars to introduce the challenge and to provide entrepreneurs with more information on starting and growing a business. We're excited about this new resource and hope you'll check it out. Let Deb Markley know what you think at deb@e2mail.org.

Other Center News

Don Macke will be in...

Indianapolis,IN Aug. 14 for a keynote presentation at the third annual IMPA downtown workshop.
Lubbock, TX the week of Aug. 25 for work with the Lubbock Area Foundation.
Kansas City, MO Sept. 22-23 for a presentation at the Shift Innovation: Community Development Conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Deb Markley will be in...

Lincoln, NE Aug. 5-8 for Center staff retreat and planning time.
Greensboro, NC Sept. 3-5 for the Cross Currents: Arts + Agriculture Powering Rural Economies Conference.
Birmingham, AL Oct. 1-3 for the WealthWorks Peer Learning gathering.

Craig Schroeder will be in...

Columbus, OH Aug. 13 presenting a workshop on "Strategies for Attracting and Retaining Young Families to your Community" at the Ohio Rural Community Assistance Program (RCAP) Conference.

Ahmet Binerer will be in...

Evanston, WY Aug. 11-13 for a presentation at the Partners for Rural America conference.

Imagine It ebook by Jay Kayne. Kayne, a founding supporter of the Center when he was at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a founding board member when he served as director of the Miami University Institute for Entrepreneurship, has a thing for creativity and imagination. He sees those two attributes as core entrepreneurial assets. He is now the CEO of the ImagineIt Project, an initiative focused on helping individuals rediscover and exploit their innate creative potential. He has captured the evolution of their thinking about becoming a more creative individual in the just-released ebook titled, Imagine It!: Rediscovering Your Creative Inner-Child, which is available in Kindle, Nook, iPad and PDF formats. Through a partnership with the ImagineIt Project, we are able to offer Jay's new book to our readers at a discounted price, using this link. We encourage you to check it out and let us know what you think! Please share your thoughts with deb@e2mail.org, and we'll be sure to share them with Jay.

Chapter 5, "The Right Moment for Community Development Philanthropy," from our book, Transfer of Wealth in Rural America is available for download here.

We've just released our fourth e2 University resource package, Assessment Overview. For more information on our e2 University resources, contact Dana Williams at dana@e2mail.org.

Learn more about the power of youth entrepreneurship summer camps as part of a youth engagement strategy here.

Field News

REAL Entrepreneurship is taking its training online, including group work with other participants and individualized support from a REAL trainer. Inaugural class starts Aug. 11. Click here to learn more.
Check out the great results NetWork Kansas is getting by facilitating engagements between the Kansas Economic Gardening Network and high-growth potential businesses, including previously underserved businesses and communities.
The latest issue of EntreWorks Insights has a great summary of the value of regional data and benchmarking, and provides links to some good examples--useful if you are looking for ways to tell your economic development story.
FedCommunities.org is a web portal to community development resources from all 12 Federal Reserve Banks and the Fed's Board of Governors, including research, data analyses, multimedia tools and news of events and programs.
SBA offers this Special Edition bulletin full of resources to support underserved entrepreneurs (women, minorities, Native Americans, veterans, 50+ and disabled individuals).
A thought-provoking perspective on Rural and Urban: Across the False Divide.
Learn how the Colorado Impact Fund plans to invest in Colorado businesses with the potential both for profits and for impact on the state.
Cross-Currents: Art + Agriculture Powering Rural Economies will be held in North Carolina Sept. 3-5. Learn more here.
Check out these Useful Stats on business survival rates, 2003-2013, by state, brought to you by SSTI.

For more information about anything you've read in this newsletter, please contact

Deb Markley, deb@e2mail.org.